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Tuesday, April 6, 2010

I'm Not Sure How You ALLUDE a Police Officer

A young shoplifting suspect ran a red light yesterday in Birmingham and caused a crash that killed one person and left another seriously injured. The police had stopped chasing him, but he was still racing away. What a sad situation.

The article in The Birmingham News stated that the suspect was charged with the following:

...felony attempting to allude a police officer, theft, reckless driving and several traffic violations...

I HOPE that the police manual refers to this first charge as "felony attempting to ELUDE a police officer." Just a reminder for all of my Grammar Glitch readers: ALLUDE means to make an indirect reference to something, as in:

The professor often alluded to his own poetry.

The judge would not allow the attorney to allude to the defendant's former crime.

The word ELUDE is needed here. It means to evade or escape from, especially by a daring move. The suspect reference should read as follows:

...felony attempting to elude a police officer, theft, reckless driving and several traffic violations.....

BONUS POINT: I did not add a comma between "driving" and "and" in this series because it was part of a journalism article in a newspaper. Although the comma after "and" in a series is highly recommended in business and literary prose, it is usually omitted by journalists.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Also ran into this on Hulu.com as a caption for a clip of the "Alaska State Troopers" show, entitled "Alluding a Police Officer".