Paper of Record

In reading my New York Times digest this morning (one of the benefits of being a Sunday subscriber is to get an emailed 9-page digest of the paper every morning- mark my words, they'll be bankrupt any day), I was puzzled by Something. The following sentence appeared in an article referring to the Jets' dying play-off prospects and their apparently ill-advised acquisition of Brett Favre (formatting preserved):

Acquiring him was a win-
now move for a team that was not
ready to win now.

Maybe you can already see it but I was flummoxed- I know the NYT likes highfalutin prose even in its sports pages, but what exactly did they mean by a "winnow move?" Webster's defines "winnow" as

" (1) to remove (as chaff) by a current of air (2): to get rid of (something undesirable or unwanted)"

which didn't seem to make sense since the move was an acquisition not a disposal. Maybe it was some kind of reference to the Jets' dumping of Chad Pennington, the QB replaced by Favre. However, that doesn't really fit with the rest of the sentence and Pennington is having a great season with the Dolphins so it would be odd to say that without more. Then I thought -well it's a digest, maybe they edited out the supporting commentary .

Of course I was fooled by the typesetter. The hyphenated word at the line break was supposed to hyphenated- "win-now" not "winnow," which while still disputable, makes more sense.

Once again we are mislead by the mainstream media.