A 10-year-old boy who was swept into a storm drain while helping his family clean up storm debris is being kept on life support so that his organs can be donated, according to his father.
The boy, Asher Sullivan, “officially passed away” on May 18, but remains on life support to facilitate the organ donation process, his dad, Jimmy Sullivan, wrote in a Facebook post.
“It’s 100% an ‘Asher’ type thing to do in continuing to be selfless,” Sullivan shared on Facebook. “He will have an honor walk at the hospital in the next few days and be celebrated as he is, a hero!”
What’s awful about it? Unless you mean that it’s a ten year old passing away, that is sad.
The unambiguous title should be,
“10-year-old swept into storm drain will become an organ donor, dad says”
The title used kinda sounds like the boy willingly swept into the drain “to” become an organ donor.
“is”. They literally just needed to add the word “is” to make it clear.
The frequency with which people have trouble with newspaper-headline grammar makes me feel old…
When English isn’t your first language, this is a really confusing title.
It’s weird when English is your first language, too. No one speaks or writes like this except in Newspaper headlines.
Feeling this myself right now.
I’m only 33 and the title makes perfect sense to me.
I can see how if English isn’t your first language it can sound weird.
That’s not really how that works though, so that misunderstanding is on the readers’ part. One doesn’t “swept” themself.
The other commentor has mentioned the correct phrase in the newspaper speak,
Without the “is”, the ambiguity exists.
Why not? “Swept” is also the simple past tense of “sweep”, in addition to the past participle used in passive voice.
Will simply have to disagree. This is perfectly normal for a newspaper headline and not ambiguous, to me.
The title makes it sound like the storm drain is some sort of organ harvesting machine and he was purposefully placed in there so his organs could be donated.