Today on the train, I noticed something weird about one of the advertisements. It was one of the New York Lottery ads with the tagline "What will you think about when you don't have to think about money?" It showed a person sitting alone on a ski lift, thinking: "If you run fully clothed across a nude beach, is it still considered streaking?"
This immediately struck me as one of the most poorly written sentences I'd ever seen. It would be a perfectly fine sentence, except for the word 'still.' If it were "If you run fully clothed across a nude beach, is it considered streaking?", the sentence would be correct. If it were "If you run naked across a nude beach, is it still considered streaking?", the sentence would be correct. The problem with the word 'still' is that it implies that whatever is happening usually happens. In this case, it would imply that streaking is usually done fully clothed.
When I pointed this out to my mother, she laughed at me.
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