https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/10/trump-trade-tariffs-china-software.html
He teased this announcement earlier in the day and the stock markets dropped by around 3%. Trump waited until the markets closed to make the full announcement. He also made the announcement on a Friday, the markets won’t reopen until Monday.
Am I unwell or is this just bad English?
It’s valid, and called “passive voice phrasing.” Most of the time, it’s not recommended, but in a few cases it works better, like when you want to abstract or obscure the subject of a sentence.
This is why they say “Shots were fired in an officer-involved incident.” Somebody shot a gun and they don’t want to say it’s the cops.
Often though, people just use it without thinking about it
posts were made
Many people are saying this
it has been said by many people
You’re conflating two separate things. The passive voice is just any “be verbed by actor” construct and is used to make the object of a sentence into the subject either to emphasize it above the actor or because the actor of the verb is abstract or unknown. It’s only bad if it’s used evasively, and is also a way that rhetoric can focus on and humanize victims in cases where there is often more focus and agency given to abusers/killers/enslavers/etc.
Passive phrasing/language is the evasive way journalists weasel away from ascribing agency to anyone, and ironically often doesn’t use the passive voice because “nooo don’t use the passive voice, center the actors, the actions, make it snappy!” is stuff they’re taught in school and you can often be even more evasive using active intransitive verbs, which leads to absurd active voice passive phrasings like “bullet from sheriff’s department armory caused death of bystander in shootout at CVS” (paraphrasing an actual headline from a real event from memory here) or “suspect dies following routine traffic stop, ‘he was armed and dangerous’ says police chief”.
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Aww, I thought ir was a good post
i wasn’t confident enough with my grammar knowledge to call out whether the ‘recommended’ participle use classifies it as passive voice
We have ample evidence that Donald Trump is not a particularly eloquent writer or speaker. If you think he’s spewing gibberish, he probably is
I think this is an example of textbook correct but totally unnatural
What is he supposed to write “some guy just told me”? That would entirely take the focus from the main topic, which is him.
I have just been informed?
that’s still passive voice though
Thread was talking about if it was correct/natural:
I have just been informed keeps the subject as him while being much more natural. I have been told would be more casual. I don’t think there’s anything inherently unnatural about passive voice.
Like @jack@hexbear.net said, it’s formally correct but very inappropriate and a weird phrasing (I’d still call that shit English even if it’s technically valid syntax). They’ve used a passive, third-person way of talking, instead of saying “I’ve just learned” or “We’ve just learned”, it’s stated like an objective scientific report: The fact has just been learned! In fact the whole tweet sounds like an attempt to be professional and serious, but with occasional out-of-place lapses into emotional language.