Tuesday, January 19, 2010

How To Say It

I came across this on a site from New Zealand:

"When Sir Edmund Hillary sadly passed away in January of this year, we at The Knowledge Gym got to thinking about how we could help to keep his memory alive and honour his remarkable life."

and thought well of course he was sad about dying....

Now, I know what they meant. They didn't mean he was sad about dying, or that he was in the process of being sad when he died, they meant that they were sad that he died, and that his death brought them to start thinking about how to memorialize him.

But how do you say that sad?

When Sir Edmund Hillary sadly passed away in January of this year.... implies he was sad.

When Sir Edmund Hillary passed away in January of this year,sadly.... - still implies he was sad.

Sadly, when Sir Edmund Hillary passed away in January of this year,.... implies they're sad about the thinking they're about to mention

How DO you say it? Only thing I can think of is breaking into two sentences -- Sadly, Sir Edmund Hillary passed away in January of this year. We at the Knowledge Gym..... And even that technically implies he was sad, but it's the common way to put it. Without that trailing clause, I don't think 'wait, what?'

Is there no 'one-sentence' way?

6 comments:

STAG said...

The news that Sir Edmund Hillary passed away last January, made us at the Knowledge Gym sad, and got us thinking about how we could help to keep his memory alive and honour his remarkable life.

Sir Edmund Hillary's passing last January made us at the Knowledge Gym sad, and we got to thinking about how we could keep his memory alive and honour his remarkable life.

When Sir Edmund Hilary passed away last January, we at the Knowledge Gym were saddened, and resolved among us to honour and keep his memory alive by some sort of memorial.

When Sir Edmund Hilary passed away last January, we at the Knowledge Gym sadly decided to create a memorial to keep his memory alive, and honour his remarkable life.


When Sir Edmund Hilary passed away last January, we at the Knowledge Gym were saddened, yet were galvanized to create a memorial to keep his memory alive, and honour his remarkable life.

(hmmm. five re-writes before I am reasonably happy; thats not bad.)

Cerulean Bill said...

Well, I could be picky, but- not bad, not bad at all. I like the third the best, I think.

It'd be the fifth, but galvanized should only apply to GSR and nails.

Nancy said...

Leave the qualifier out completely. After all, has anybody ever happily died?

Cerulean Bill said...

It's the qualifier that was the sticking point. I was looking for a way to say it both elegantly and concisely --- ie, without needing two or three subordinate clauses (which I understand is another way of referring to 'the elves who work for Santa') --- but one didn't appear to exist. After a while, I started to lose the ability for regular speech.

As for happily -- well, I've been in meetings....

STAG said...

We here at Knowledge Gym were so saddened by Sir Edmund Hillary's passing last January that we were moved to create a memorial to honour his achievements, and to keep his memory alive.

Cerulean Bill said...

So they're both going to create a memorial, and to keep his memory alive? I thought the memorial would have done that.

Which is, of course, a nit; pulling out the comma and changing "and to" to "that would" takes care of that.