The Butterfield Fox Award

Why yes, this is a sentence in the New York Times magazine, in an article that looks back at Reader’s Digest:

Maybe it doesn’t feel quite biblical to revisit the almost forgotten magazine that was the publishing success story of the past century and still has the largest paid circulation in the world.

As Kathy Shaidle asks, “Dear NYT: how can an ‘almost forgotten magazine’ also have ‘the largest paid circulation in the world’??”

It’s actually a not at all surprising inversion of Timesman Fox Butterfield’s infamous malapropism regarding crime and punishment.

And while that mangled sentence is a relatively minor gaffe in the scope of things, this isn’t: Jason Mattera responds to his character assassination at the hands of the Gray Lady’s Kate Zernike.