Who's your daddy?

Say it three times: Correlation does not equal causation.

A headline at ABC.com read, “No More ‘I dos’? Unwed births spike.”

The second half of the headline is what the article appears to be mainly about, an increase in births to unmarried women, especially to women beyond their teens.

The first half of the headline tries to get in a second angle from the article, that unspecified sociologists see “a lackadaisical attitude toward the tradition of marriage in Europe and the U.S.” Unfortunately, as the article also points out, the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “didn't look at cohabitation rates, so it's impossible to tell how many of these unwed mothers in 2007 were actually living with the fathers of their children.”

This is the kind of journalism that ought to be driving people nuts. It is a superficial attempt to address two complex issues that are intertwined, and the headline, as is often the case, reflects the confusion of the article.

If fewer and fewer people are getting married but are still procreating, then the number of births to unmarried women will increase. At that level, the headline is simple-minded and obvious. No news here, folks. Move along.

If the story were trying to tell us something about marriage, that more and more people are living together without getting married, that’s not much of a shocker, either.

The correlation would be more useful if the article could supply the cohabitation statistics that the study did not gather. If more and more people are engaging in long-term cohabitation — what we used to call common-law marriage — and are raising children together, then the impact on children of unwed mothers is quite different and the decline in marriages less significant.

This article and its headline would have been stronger if they had stuck to the subject about which they have information rather than mere theorizing.

(I was tempted to use as my headline Edmund’s Line from Lear, “Now gods, stand up for bastards,” but discretion prevailed. You might not like the substitute any better.)

A small gap in the language

Jeff McMahon’s Scorched Earth blog, in a link forwarded by one of my readers, is looking for a single word to identify the opposite of environmentalist.

We can identify people who call themselves environmentalists by a cluster of values and positions on public policy. And we can identify pejorative terms — tree-hugger, for example — used by people who do not share their values and oppose their positions.

But Mr. McMahon is right: We do not have a single, neutral term to describe people with an opposing point of view. He comments: “A colleague of mine in the education/slash/journalism field, Monica Westin, suggested “depletist” or “depletionist,” which might function as an opposite to conservationist, but doesn’t work as well when opposed to environmentalist. The problem with depletist, it seems to me, is that it should have its own opposite that means something like filler-upper.”

If you have any suggestions — keeping in mind that we’re looking for a term as neutral as environmentalist, not a pejorative — I’d be happy to forward them to Mr. McMahon.

Sons, take heed

The Library of America, may it go from strength to strength, has released editions of the short stories and novels of John Cheever; and if you don’t have them in your possession, you should be lusting after them.

Much on my mind this week, as my son prepares to graduate from St. John’s College in Annapolis, is the glorious passage of advice to sons that rounds out The Wapshot Chronicle. It is a sheet of maxims from old New Englander Leander Wapshot discovered after his death:

Never put whiskey into hot water bottle crossing borders of dry states or countries. Rubber will spoil taste. Never make love with pants on. Beer on whiskey, very risky. Whiskey on beer, never fear. Never eat apples, peaches, pears, etc. while drinking whiskey except long French-style dinners, terminating with fruit. Other viands have mollifying effect. Never sleep in moonlight. Known by scientists to induce madness. Should bed stand beside window on clear night draw shades before retiring. Never hold cigar at right-angles to fingers. Hayseed. Hold cigar at diagonal. Remove band or not as you prefer. Never wear red necktie. Provide light snorts for ladies if entertaining. Effects of harder stuff on frail sex sometimes disastrous. Bathe in cold water every morning. Painful but exhilarating. Also reduces horniness. Have haircut once a week. Wear dark clothes after 6 p.m. Eat fresh fish for breakfast when available. Avoid kneeling in unheated stone churches. Ecclesiastical dampness causes premature gray hair. Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord.

An unbearable scene

It was one of the editors I hired who, a while back, made sure that you did not read a description of a homicide as a grizzly scene.

A grizzly is North American brown bear (Ursa arctos) so called because its brown fur has white tips. The word derives from grizzle — gray hair. Thus you would describe the author of this blog as a grizzled editor, among other terms. The etymology of grizzle is uncertain, the Oxford English Dictionary says.

The word the writer was reaching for is grisly — terrifying, horrible, ghastly. It derives from the Old English grislic, allied to agrisan, to terrify.

The world didn't end in 1970

Many of you will have recognized the title of yesterday’s post, “Teach your children well,” as an allusion to the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song of that name. That song is about the most recent piece of popular music to which I can refer.

You see, in the spring of 1970, my freshman year at Michigan State, one of my roommates, Michael Hyatte, suggested that the end of the world was imminent (Kent State, Nixon, etc.), that human beings were about to be divided between the freaks and the straights, and that I had better get my act together if I didn’t want to spend eternity with Lawrence Welk and Arthur Godfrey.

So I did due diligence. I acquired and listened to some albums. I sat for much of a day in a muddy field outside Lansing listening to Jefferson Airplane and a series of other bands. It was stupefyingly dull, perhaps because I was the only person in the audience not stoned. And then the world did not come to an end, which I understood to amount to a divine mandate to be as stuffy as I liked. I have not consciously attended to popular music since.

This attitude was reinforced a year later when Patricia Nedeau, whose advice was not to be disregarded, told me, “John, you are not a denim person; you are a tweeds and woolens person.” I have been faithful to her counsel.

Dr. Johnson said, “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures,” and I have been listening contentedly to Bach and Handel and Haydn and Mozart ever since. (With occasional indulgence in 1920s jazz recorded by Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks Orchestra.) You may prefer Jimmy Buffett or Madonna or Nine Inch Nails or New Kids on the Block or any of those other performers of whose existence I am dimly aware; I don’t begrudge you your innocent pleasures, unfathomable as they are.

For my part, a wee dram and a Haydn string quartet make life as sweet as it gets.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a journalist, not a Trekkie

Regret the Error is, for a journalist, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I site. Craig Silverman collects corrections from print and Web sources, and today’s harvest of corrections on articles about the new Star Trek movie reminds us that journalism is full of traps.

The Star Trek franchise has, over more than forty years, attracted legions of fans, many of whom apparently have encyclopedic recall of details from the television shows and movies. Once you have identified a Romulan as a Klingon, scorn will be heaped on you up to the eyebrows.

The journalist who approaches any specialized topic strides into a minefield, and the details are triggers. Religion is treacherous because of the distinctive language in different denominations or branches of faith. (I used to have to remind Sun copy editors that orthodox has to be capitalized in writing about Judaism or the Eastern branches of Christianity. Never mind the occasional references to “massive Christian burial.”) Science and medicine abound in technical detail — remember the column that said you could stop hiccups with carbon monoxide?

Popular culture is just the same sort of specialized area: Star Trek, the Harry Potter books and films, Doonesbury. No matter how much you may think you know, the chances are excellent that there are readers who know the subject better than you do, and they are waiting for you to stumble.

Not that you should transform yourself into a Trekkie or Potterite, but you should make sure that you know people who are in appropriate fan groups. Show them what you’re working on, and allow their robust interest to spare you the horselaughs.

Teach your children well

Mem Fox, teacher and writer of children’s books, says this about her twin vocations in Radical Reflections:

Those who write well have more power and therefore have more control over their lives. ... [T]he granting of this power to our children is politically and socially essential. In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they’re powerless without these skills. Their power won’t come about without practice, and the practice can’t come about without purpose.

Talk retro to me

This one is for the Young People, if any such lurk among my readers. Are you mystified by the peculiar turns of speech when Baby Boomers talk? Do you feel ashamed that at your unfamiliarity with the TV series of the late 1950s and early 1960s? Are you disinclined to watch hours of TV Land to catch up?

Help is available.

Ralph Keyes has published a book, I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech (St. Martin’s Press, 310 pages, $25.95), that will help you caulk the gaps in your cultural education.

I was particularly touched to find his entries on newspaper lingo, particularly piquant now in the twilight of print journalism.

Deadline, for example, the appointed time by which copy is due or an edition is to be completed, derives from the line in a prison that an inmate could not cross without being shot. (I would very much have liked to recover the original penalty in the newsroom, but I could never persuade my betters even to issue sidearms to the copy editors.)

The spindle on which stories written on copy paper were impaled when editors decided not to run them was called a spike, and to this day a story that is killed is said to have been spiked.

Theodore Roosevelt, alluding in 1906 to “The Man with the Muck Rake” in Pilgrim’s Progress, said that journalists exposing scandals were “raking the muck,” and muckraking has been a badge of honor in investigative journalism ever since.

Let Mr. Keyes help you. With a perusal of his book and a little practice, you could contrive to sound almost as antique as I do.

The other place and this one

Now that You Don’t Say is no longer a working blog at Baltimoresun.com, it is not listed at that site’s main page. But it will continue to reside there for an indeterminate time. Feel free to rummage around in it while you still can. The Grammarnoir serial, for example, remains.

A couple of readers have inquired about videos, such as the bow tie, the martini, and the first and second pronunciation videos, as well as the weekly video jokes.*

The appearance of video at this site will have to wait until (a) I acquire a video camera, (b) learn how to operate it or coerce someone into operating, (c) learn how to edit the resulting video, and (d) figure out how to post it here. Although I have acquired an unanticipated fund of free time, this may take a while.



*The titles of the video jokes all begin with “Surely you jest,” which makes them easily searchable.

Watch where you sit

A recent Baltimore Sun article contained a sentence saying that federal proceedings supercede local judgments. So they do, but the word is supersede.

Supersede derives from the Latin supersedere: super (above) sedere (to sit). To supersede is, from the literal roots of the word, to be superior to, to sit above.

Merriam-Webster says that the spelling supercede has turned up regularly since the 17th century (so much for any expectation that it would have been rare when everyone studied Latin) but is widely considered an error. It is probably a matter of time until it is widely listed in dictionaries as an acceptable variant.

While we are thinking about Latin, a reminder that this is graduation season. You who cross the platform to receive the diploma and the handshake will be an alumnus or an alumna, collectively alumni or, in some cases, alumnae. Arnold Zwicky, having come across a Web site in which a man describes himself as “a Distinguished Alumnae,” will sort out the terms for you.

If you want to appear edumacated, you will not say, “I am an alumni,” and you will not spell supersede with a c.