Somewhat ripped off

So the Times shrunk today and that’s OK; good for trees and budgets and such. We’ll get used to it. They say that each page will have “somewhat fewer words,” which is really bad editing; there are either fewer words or there aren’t; “somewhat” is meaningless and a grammatical waste of one of those precious words left behind.

I pick up the business section — which, on Mondays, covers what interests me most: media — and there are five — not one, not two but five — house ads adding up to more than a page and a half of an eight-page section (of which another one and a quarter pages were paid ads). There’s another page of house ads in the metro section. And this is the Monday paper, which is thin anyway.

Jeesh. You’d think on the day you shrink the paper, you could at least fill up the pages with those somewhat fewer words — especially after you’ve raised the price 25 percent to $1.25. I feel ripped off.