difference

Arguments with my father #1 Disclaimer: these are not arguments, just differences of opinion Dad was reading the paper the other day and something annoyed him. It was this: There's a common device used today by journalists, when quoting a person. If the person being quoted doesn't mention the subject of a sentence, instead using (presumably) a pronoun, the journalist will replace the pronoun with the noun in question but will put it in brackets. eg. The police inspector said "(The murder weapon) was found in the suspect's car," Now we're taking it on the journalist's word that although the inspector didn't actually use the words 'the murder weapon,' that's what he meant, and probably would have said had he not just been asked "Where was the murder weapon found?" Dad doesn't like this. He says that when there are brackets in a sentence, that the sentence should be grammatically correct even when the brackets and their contents are removed. Clearly, this is not the case in the above example. It tried to explain the logic behind why it's done and I'm sure he understood my explanation perfectly but it's not the way he was taught to do things, so he doesn't like it. It's kind of frustrating when a dad gets like this, because I know it's just a different way of doing it; it's an evolution of phraseology which makes things simpler. But a father thinks that the newfangled modern world is telling him that his way is wrong. Which it isn't. It's just different. I mean, people don't need some kind of ruling authority telling people how they can and can't use language; this is clearly the domain of the French. That said, I still reserve the right to insert or remove apostrophes from street-side chalk boards as required