You were complaining about bad art writing a month or two ago, and lo and behold Pittsburgh adds its own to the doghouse.

To write that the painting was "damaged beyond repair with a gouge ripped through the middle" is not artspeak, it's just damaged writing, though not beyond repair.

As your train of thought rounds the bend, you see the word 'gouge' ahead and think you're getting the name of the tool the damage was done with.

But as you pass the word by you hit a boulder in the discovery that the gouge IS the damage but that it has been 'ripped.'

Okay, I got up on the wrong side of bed this morning, probably because I'm at home recuperating from a sizable bump on the noggin. But that's another story.

So back to being a grouch who should get a life. (Actually, mine is set to resume at 8 pm tonight, when I will be at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center to hear the NY Philharmonic play Wagner. Gosh, I really am insufferable this morning.)

Anyway, as a wound or a form of damage, a gouge is like a puncture, not like a rip.

You might be able to rip a mounted canvas with a tool such as a gouge or an awl or a chisel or even a hardened hand delivering an angled karate chop.

But the careless imprecision of "damaged...with a gouge ripped through the middle" still gets my goat.

That's all I have time for.

I have to relieve a fellow troll who has been up all night annoying people under a bridge down the street.