On zipping THROUGH booths

The Associated Press wrote (11/26/00) that a motorist in Orlando was being charged with “zipping through” toll booths. Zipping BY the toll booths or PAST the toll booth, we can imagine, but THROUGH? There isn’t much left of a toll booth if a motorist goes THROUGH it. All smashed to smithereens! And presumably the toll violation would pale into insignificance beside malicious damages and manslaughter charges.

Don’t the AP pay well enough to employ people with an elementary knowledge of prepositions?

Maybe the reporter meant to write that the violator just zipped through the toll LANES rather than booths. And was confusing a lane with a booth.

A reporter doesn’t know what a toll booth is?

A booth has always been a small roofed one-person enclosure. Hence a telephone booth. Or a hot dog booth. Toll booth seems to follow logically as that little building that houses the collector.

And the AP doesn’t know about roadway lanes?

People commonly talk of “changing lanes” or “keeping in your lane” so a “toll lane” seems to follow rather logically in normal language to describe the piece of roadway assigned to a vehicle going past a tolling point.

Guess the reporter just wasn’t thinking. And the AP probably don’t run to editors anymore – the guys who are supposed to catch such nonsense.