To "Am," or Not to "Am"?

I get what the editor was aiming for with the headline on this op-ed piece by Warren Buffett in today's New York Times:

Buy American. I Am.

Short, simple, confident, imperative. Trouble is, the two halves of the headline don't match up. "Buy" is a verb of activity; to be parallel, the declaration that follows should contain a similar verb such as "do." ("I am" would work if  it were an answer to a question: "Buying American?")

My first thought on scanning the headline was that Buffett was asserting his American citizenship, not his stock-buying philosophy. Then I thought of I Am America (and So Can You!), Stephen Colbert's spoof of the patriotic-inspirational book genre--not, I suspect, an association Buffett or his editor wanted me to make. With Colbert, the nonparallel structure is part of the joke; with the Buffett piece, it 's just an error.

By the way, editors, not writers or reporters, are responsible for writing newspaper headlines. Warren Buffett's own writing is better than the op-ed headline suggests.  

P.S. In caps-and-lower-case headline style, all forms of the verb "to be," no matter how short, are always capitalized.

Comments

[Glen Turpin]

I suspect that the editor chose "I Am" rather than "I Do" to avoid suggesting that Buffet habitually buys American stocks. "I Am" places the action in the present, during the economic crisis.

It's still awkward, but I don't think the thought could be accurately placed in time without sacrificing succinctness.

(I can't believe I'm defending this. It's obviously been a long week.)

[Nancy Friedman]

@Glen: I agree with you about the headline's intent. A clever (or less deadline-pressured) editor would have found a way to express that intent grammatically within the space limits. "Why I'm Buying U.S. Stocks." "Buy American. Here's Why." Or something.

[mike]

This is a case -- for me only, obviously -- where I have to work a bit to see the problem. I suspect that if one were able to search for this as a kind of snoclone (not sure how one could do that), you'd find a fair number of instances of the pattern:

; I am.

I might be wrong (as in, it's not usual to have an imperative in this construct, but anyway, it would not have tripped me up. At least, I don't think. Now, of course, I'll be hypersensitive to it. :-)

[mike]

Oops. Stupid HTML-eating Typepad. The intent was:

[imperative verb] [object]; I am.

Sorry about that.

[The Ideophone]

Interesting. I think trackback may not be working, so here's a link to my take on Buffett's "Am":

http://ideophone.org/confuse-two-aspects-i-am/

[Nancy Friedman]

@The Ideophone: I left a comment on your blog, but wanted to thank you here as well. The linguistic meaning of "aspect" is new to me, but I'm committing it to memory.