Crimes of Illiteracy

The best sentence I ever had the pleasure of editing

While I was working as a professional copy editor, I happened upon this puzzler, written in 2000:

"As we have seen during the 1990's, the 21^st Century will continue to be a decade of unprecedented change."

After the shock wore off and my intestines started to return to their normal position, I tried to figure out what, if anything, this unfortunate combination of words said.

So, let's see. It must be something about the 21st century - oh, sorry, the 21^st Century, which I guess must be the official name of the century. And we'll forgive the roller-coaster position of the suffix - a nauseating style choice, but not technically condemnable. I'm less forgiving for the apostrophe in "1990's."

Now, what does this sentence say about the 21st century? Oh, it's a decade. And we saw part of it in the 1990s. In other words, it's a period of time that's not equivalent to itself, and it's part of the (then) future that is in the past. It's also a period of time that was set to "continue," even though it hadn't started yet.

Finally, let's discuss this "unprecedented change." It's a given that any change that took place in the 1990s was unprecedented (when else could change that happened in the 1990s have happened?). But there's more! This unprecedented change won't happen until the 21st century! In other words, we know it's unprecedented, but it hasn't happened yet!

So what did this sentence become after I was done with it? I made it this: "The past few years have been a period of significant change - a trend that is likely to continue." Which still says nothing (during what period of time, at least since people started keeping track of events, hasn't there been significant change?), but at least it doesn't turn your stomach inside-out.