Is That Legal?

Eric, your criticism should have been aimed at the print edition only. The online edition was corrected. The print edition is very challenging to interpret, because somebody forgot the semicolon, and besides that, the line break is awkward.

City schools will post
fliers county's won't

The semicolon does fix the problem, though: City schools will post fliers; the schools of the county will not. It even makes a strained kind of sense without the semicolon: City schools wil post fliers [that the] county's [schools] won't. No? OK, it was an error. But they fixed it online.

Theirs one bad headline!

Its like they don't even see there own mistakes'!!!

Uh, no. Schools and fliers are plural, not possessive.

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the error in the headline? An apostrophe properly belongs in the word "county's," since this is evidently shorthand for "county's schools." The city schools will allow fliers, and the county's schools won't. Right?

Gee wilikers, you're picky! While I suppose it would be preferable for the editor to have insisted on parallel possessive constructions ("City's schools will allow fliers, county's won't"), his error is surely one of style rather than grammar. There's nothing gramatically incorrect about using a possessive to parallel a mere adjective (consider: "Good blogs will allow comments; mine won't").

Or is the error so bold I've missed it?

hehe

And who said that lawyers couldn't be funny?

How ya figure? But just in case I'm wrong, let's run through it:

In the headline, "City schools will allow fliers; county's won't," only "county's" is possessive. "Schools" is plural and "fliers" is plural.

Looks good to me. Of course, I'm just an idealistic pro bono lawyer who can barely keep the lights on (and who's ending sentences with prepositions). Am I missing something?

Eric- I read the article to refer to the schools of Orange County-- Orange County's schools. Not sure what you mean here. Maybe you're making a joke that I don't get.

Surely you jest, Professor. Or have you been taking spelling lessons from Peter Irons? (See Irons/Malkin e-mail exchange).

You're all wrong, as are the headline editors. "Schools" is a verb, and "Will"--I'm assuming Will Smith--its direct object. The headline is supposed to read as follows:
City schools Will and allows fliers, as counties are wont to do.

I mean, who makes grammatical mistakes' in titles of that sort? Outrageous.