Here’s one my copy editor buddies should enjoy. The Taipei Times on Thursday reported that the Presidential Office here removed a statue of “nation founder” Sun Yat-sen from its grand hall and replaced it with … a “pot plant.”
Not marijuana, but, according to the story, a Taiwan cypress tree. Though depending on your perspective, an actual pot plant might explain some of the president’s finer pronouncements.
Looks like the paper has a British copy editor on its payroll. Though they seem to stick to an augmented version of the Associated Press’ style (meaning American English), they went Brit on this headline – according to Wikipedia, “pot plant” in the U.K. means the same thing “potted plant” does in the U.S. For all the emphasis on learning meiyu (“American English”) here, the Taipei Times chose a pretty questionable – if funny – story to go Queen’s English on us.
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