I took a break from work and sat outside, drinking water and reading the Metro section of today’s New York Times. I read an article about the search for Amelia Earhart. More specifically, it’s about one female pilot that has paid for and repaired a 1935 Lockheed Electra L-10E, identical to the one that Earheart was flying when she vanished. She plans to fly this plane over the exact same route that Earheart flew when she disappeared.
Now, I tell you this to prep you for the following brief grammatical exercise. I am going to quote, verbatim, the entire third paragraph, which consists of two sentences. Sentence the first:

“One woman’s desire to solve that mystery is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey.”

and the second:

“Grace McGuire, 54, a pilot, is hoping to recreate and successfully complete Earheart’s final voyage.”

Let’s visit the construction of that first sentence, shall we? I am going to make typographical notations when I reprint it.

“One woman’s desire [to solve that mystery] is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey.“

The italicized text refers to the subject of our sentence, that is, what the sentence is about. The underlined text is the predicate, as in, what is being done to or by our subject. In brackets is a prepositional phrase and as such, can be happily removed from the sentence without losing any meaning. So now we have:

“One woman’s desire…is being refueled at Allaire Airport in Belmar, New Jersey.“

Desire? Being refueled? Perhaps metaphorically? No, it can’t be a metaphor, or figurative at all, can it? After all, the writer mentions a specific location, the writer is implying that the desire actually exists in some sort of desire-dispensing container at a very specific airport in Belmar, New Jersey. What an airport, right?
I included the second sentence not because it had an equally profoundly stupid grammatical faux pas, but to prove that the author of our article, in an attempt to provide a badly-placed image linking desire (an intangible subject) with an airplane (which runs on actual fuel), needed that second sentence to get across the actual point of the paragraph. He needed the straight man to say, “yes, actually, we’re talking about a person, her plane, and her desire to do something with that plane.”
I found this sentence both offensive and alarmingly badly constructed. I don’t think I’ve ever been so offended by a sentence, actually, because it’s such a horrific mishmash of correctly-used grammatical elements – the subject, the predicate, the darling prepositional clause so near to my heart – and uselessly confusing metaphor. I had to read it three times to understand that he didn’t actually mention the plane being refueled at all, but one woman’s desire to solve a mystery. Which involved a plane. But not in that sentence.
See?
Similarly, on the opposing page, there was a headline about Oprah Winfrey and a public apology from Hermes. The headline ran, “Oprah, No Diva She, Accepts Hermes Apology on the Air”. Oprah, no diva she? Who talks like that? Why is there all this unnecessary flowerization of the standard, trustworthy English language? Did all the staff-writers and copy editors die, only to be replaced by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Edith Wharton? No diva, she?
Between the Oprah headline and the fuel of desire, permit this normally eloquent reader a small moment of WTF?
New York Times, while you’re going through this difficult and challenging transition to NYTIMES PREMIUM SELECT ELITE DOT COM, consider shifting some much-needed energy from fleecing your customers to de-flowerizing your copy edit staff.