Early in the graphic novel Superman: Earth One (by J. Michael Straczynski; DC Comics, 2010), as Clark Kent interviews at the Daily Planet, the editor, Perry White, makes a remarkable statement (thanks to David Errington for noticing it). I’ve collected dozens of weird perversions of the grammatical term “passive,” but this one surprised even me. Perry reads aloud from Clark’s résumé and comments:
PERRY: “Freelance reporter/stringer for the Smallville Daily Express.” I didn’t know Smallville had a daily.
CLARK: They don’t. Ten years ago, due to falling sales, the Express went weekly, but they didn’t want to change the name, the masthead or the contracts, so…
PERRY: So it’s the weekly Daily.
CLARK: That’s right. Or the Daily, weekly.
PERRY: No, it’s the former. The weekly Daily. Active sentence structure versus passive structure. A good reporter always goes for the former, never the latter. It’s “A dog was killed last night,” not “Last night, a dog was killed.”
What Perry corrects (the Daily, weekly) isn’t a clause; it’s just a noun phrase with a postposed adjunct, so there’s no possibility of a grammatically passive construction there. And in the example Perry constructs, both versions are passive clauses: The putatively bad one differs only in having its temporal adjunct (last night) preposed.
