Thursday, April 13, 2017

Who's Alex?

A few months ago, I was writing business articles for my workplace. This involves reading lots of other people's business articles.

During this process, I read this article about storytelling.

Towards the beginning of the article, this sentiment was shared:


...Alex?

Alex?

ALEX?

WHO'S ALEX?

I AM SO CONFUSED.

Because look, first of all, this isn't just any old movie. This is Back to the Future. It's written into the DNA of our culture. Not as much as, say, Harry Potter, but still quite a bit.

Say that the person who wrote this article (it looks like that person was named Paul White) had never seen Back to the Future. That photo of Paul in the article looks kind of old, so it's plausible. Maybe he likes the Lone Ranger and the Hardy Boys and never cared about 1980s time-travel movies. Okay. Whatever. In any case, he obviously knew enough about it to reference the movie specifically. If you've heard of Back to the Future enough to make that specific of a reference, you must know the main character's name is Marty McFly, right? Marty McFly is a fairly iconic character from American cinematic history. But if Paul didn't know that, or if he just forgot, couldn't he have looked it up online? Since Paul apparently submitted an article to this website, he must know how the Internet works.

But if somehow all of that escaped Paul and he still called Michael J. Fox's character "Alex," what about the copy editor? Someone must have proofread this article! Why didn't that person catch it? HOW DID THIS GLARING MISTAKE MAKE IT INTO PRINT? AND WHY HASN'T IT BEEN CORRECTED IN THE ENSUING YEAR AND FIVE MONTHS? Because there are people on the Internet telling everyone else how to live literally every aspect of their lives and correcting their grammar and obscure Harry Potter trivia, so how did this particular error escape notice?!

Someone please explain. K thnx bye.

2 comments:

  1. The most charitable explanation is that Michael J. Fox's second most famous character is Alex P. Keaton, from Family Ties.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hmm. Okay. That does make a little more sense. Good job for knowing stuff.

      Delete

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