Back when I used to be somebody, spreading fear and terror while winning glory and wealth as the head of a newspaper copy desk, I harangued people about the importance of editing. They didn’t listen then, either.
But if you need persuasion, consider this example.
Today the Web site Inside Higher Ed reports the embarrassing developments with the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, which is used by professionals and students as the guidebook for their papers. The corrections that have come out since the first printing include “four pages of ‘nonsignificant typographical errors’ and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers” (emphasis added).
The APA is bringing out a corrected second printing of the manual but is making buyers of the defective first printing pay for the corrected version, which looks churlish.
Addressing the error-riddled edition, Mary Lynn Skutley, editorial director for APA books, explained that the manual was “very complicated to put together.” Indeed. So are newspapers, and magazines, and Web sites, and other books. Complicated, and liable to contain errors.
That is why you might want to engage a competent copy editor for your project before publication, and allow him or her the time and resources to get the job done right the first time.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
A sweet moment
On Friday evening, I was driving my son home for the weekend from his cooking job. As we listened to the radio, a sports commentary came on the air. After a minute or two of this palaver, J.P. muttered:
“I hate sports.”
A warm glow suffusing my body, I realized that my duty as a parent had been discharged.
“I hate sports.”
A warm glow suffusing my body, I realized that my duty as a parent had been discharged.
More ready, fire, aim
Paul Carr posts at TechCrunch about the hazards of rushing to publication with unverified information. A key passage:
I offered some lessons that professional blogs might want to carry over from old media. Stop allowing bloggers to post their own stories without passing them first through an editor. Don’t publish a story accusing a company of malpractice without first giving them a chance to deny it. That kind of thing.
The entire post, “WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism,” is worth your time and attention.
Thank you, @GregMitch and @yelvington, for the alerting tweet.
I offered some lessons that professional blogs might want to carry over from old media. Stop allowing bloggers to post their own stories without passing them first through an editor. Don’t publish a story accusing a company of malpractice without first giving them a chance to deny it. That kind of thing.
The entire post, “WITN?: Yahoo didn’t sentence 200,000 Iranians to death, and other misadventures in online journalism,” is worth your time and attention.
Thank you, @GregMitch and @yelvington, for the alerting tweet.
Any grownups out there?
One of the cannier readers of the post “Papers, please” noticed that I took no position on measures to deal with illegal immigration. That is because — this is not a political blog, remember? — my point was that the complexity of the issue deserves serious journalistic attention. Now that illegal immigrants, like the “guest workers” who do the dirty jobs for Western Europe, are established in the economy, disentangling them will be neither simple nor easy.
Similarly, the post quoting the Socialist Party platform of 1912 was not a proposal to turn America socialist, but rather a reminder that (a) the United States has been operating as a mixed economy for more than seventy years* and (b) brandishing labels is not discourse. Shouting “Socialist!” (like the shouts of “Fascist!” by my fellow undergraduates forty years ago) is the adult version of playground name-calling.
Naturally, I have been labeled a sappy liberal by readers who weren’t paying attention.
As it happens, I am a Democrat — it’s a matter of public record. But Alexander Ackley, who was in my expository writing class at Syracuse and who is now an editor of The Reactionary, has kept in touch for thirty years, even though we deplore each other’s politics. When I worked for Lowell and Jean Denton at The Flemingsburg Gazette, Jean was a fervent — some would have said rabid — supporter of Richard Nixon, and I wore an “Impeach with honor” button. We not only respected each other; we held each other in affection.
It should be a mark of a civil society that people can disagree without demeaning one another. We should be able to disagree with argument, with humor, with passion, and we should be able to do so without insult. We should be able to give complex and difficult issues the serious attention they deserve.
I started this blog to write about language in a particular way: to explore how a reasonable and informed prescriptivism could show people how to write clearly, precisely, and even elegantly for publication without resorting to peeves and prejudices. As it expanded, I included subjects to which I thought my fellow journalists could bring a similar clarity and precision.
It has been disturbing this year to see so many of my fellow editors drummed out of the business, to the detriment of the factual accuracy and clarity of the publications that sacked us. It has been discouraging to witness the resort to empty sloganeering and name-calling on both the right and the left. It has been dispiriting to see journalistic coverage of serious issues zero in unerringly on the trivial, and to see so little evidence of public willingness to give close attention to any issue more serious than the breakup of the Jon and Kate Gosselin marriage.
But we soldier on. And you, dear readers, civil, sophisticated, and discerning audience that you are, make good company. Keep in touch.
*I wonder if it occurred to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, when he said earlier this year that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies were a failure, that running against the New Deal has never been sound strategy for Republicans.
Similarly, the post quoting the Socialist Party platform of 1912 was not a proposal to turn America socialist, but rather a reminder that (a) the United States has been operating as a mixed economy for more than seventy years* and (b) brandishing labels is not discourse. Shouting “Socialist!” (like the shouts of “Fascist!” by my fellow undergraduates forty years ago) is the adult version of playground name-calling.
Naturally, I have been labeled a sappy liberal by readers who weren’t paying attention.
As it happens, I am a Democrat — it’s a matter of public record. But Alexander Ackley, who was in my expository writing class at Syracuse and who is now an editor of The Reactionary, has kept in touch for thirty years, even though we deplore each other’s politics. When I worked for Lowell and Jean Denton at The Flemingsburg Gazette, Jean was a fervent — some would have said rabid — supporter of Richard Nixon, and I wore an “Impeach with honor” button. We not only respected each other; we held each other in affection.
It should be a mark of a civil society that people can disagree without demeaning one another. We should be able to disagree with argument, with humor, with passion, and we should be able to do so without insult. We should be able to give complex and difficult issues the serious attention they deserve.
I started this blog to write about language in a particular way: to explore how a reasonable and informed prescriptivism could show people how to write clearly, precisely, and even elegantly for publication without resorting to peeves and prejudices. As it expanded, I included subjects to which I thought my fellow journalists could bring a similar clarity and precision.
It has been disturbing this year to see so many of my fellow editors drummed out of the business, to the detriment of the factual accuracy and clarity of the publications that sacked us. It has been discouraging to witness the resort to empty sloganeering and name-calling on both the right and the left. It has been dispiriting to see journalistic coverage of serious issues zero in unerringly on the trivial, and to see so little evidence of public willingness to give close attention to any issue more serious than the breakup of the Jon and Kate Gosselin marriage.
But we soldier on. And you, dear readers, civil, sophisticated, and discerning audience that you are, make good company. Keep in touch.
*I wonder if it occurred to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, when he said earlier this year that Franklin Roosevelt’s policies were a failure, that running against the New Deal has never been sound strategy for Republicans.
Friday, October 9, 2009
The rusty iron core
Alex S. Jones, bless his heart, is a newspaperman through and through,* and it is from the perspective of a newspaperman that he views the recent disturbing developments in journalism and explores where it is headed in Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy (Oxford University Press, 234 pages, $24.95).
Mr. Jones offers seven chapters on how we got here, two on where we appear to be headed. If you are not familiar with the development of American journalism (and you would join some journalists in that unfamiliarity), the chapters on the development of First Amendment law and media ethics will be instructive.
But his main concern is the fate of what he calls (with mildly irritating repetition) the “iron core” of journalism: the information that is crucial in a democratic society if the citizenry is to make informed decisions. It is what he calls “accountability news,” because it holds “government and those with power” accountable for their actions. It is not opinion or advocacy, but factual, reported, verified information, journalism subject to “the discipline of verification.”
It is also objective journalism, in this sense: “a genuine effort to be an honest broker ... playing it straight without favoring one side when the facts are in dispute.” It also means “not trying to create the illusion of fairness by letting advocates pretend in your journalism that there is a debate about the facts when the weight of truth is clear.”
This kind of ethical accountability journalism, which developed over the past century and a half, is, he sees, imperiled: “In the old model of near media monopolies, the American population was privy to what was essentially the same news. In the future, high-quality news will be mostly consumed by elites, with headlines and articles tailored to the short attention spans of people who get their news on the Web.” Or, again, “a well-informed class at the top and a broad populace awash in opinion, spin and propaganda.” (I told you he was an old-line newspaperman.)
(Actually, in a telling remark, he speculates that hard news, accountability news, serious journalism never attracted more than about fifteen percent of newspapers’ readership. Most people, it seems, have always been more interested in celebrities, comics, crosswords, and coupons.)
The past is gone and will not be recovered. Unfortunately, the future is blurry. Mr. Jones looks at some of the possibilities for the survival of serious, accountability journalism, and he finds it chancy.
Citizen journalism, he thinks, will be too scattered and spotty, without the resources to conduct sustained reporting and to resist pressure from the powerful through threats of withholding advertising or filing expensive lawsuits.
It is far from clear that local electronic news startups can make enough money from advertising to replace newspapers.
Ownership by a nonprofit (Hey, we’ve got the nonprofit thing down, one wag at Overheard in the Newsroom said) is similarly chancy: “Founders can change their minds, lose their money, get mad, get bored, or simply want to do something different.”
Breaking up corporate chains of journalism and restoring local ownership sounds attractive to him, but, as we saw from the Binghams and others, local ownership can be at the mercy of changing local personalities.
Mr. Jones’s “nightmare scenario”: “bankrupt newspapers, news by press release that is thinly disguised advocacy, scattered an ineffective bands of former journalists and sincere amateurs whose work is left in obscurity, and a small cadre of high-priced newsletters that serve as an intelligence service for the rich and powerful.”
We are already more than halfway there.
*Mr. Jones got the inside story of the tensions and misunderstandings within the Bingham family that led to the sale of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times to Gannett in 1986. Writing with Susan E. Tifft, he produced a notable book on the subject, The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. The couple also wrote The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. Both books merit your attention.
An irrelevant personal note: In 1986, restless at the badly managed Cincinnati Enquirer, I was casting about for employment elsewhere. The Courier-Journal expressed interest, and I went down to Louisville for interviews and a tryout on the copy desk. It happened that the morning of that tryout was also the morning that Barry Bingham handed over the keys to Al Neuharth. On to Baltimore.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Losing the News from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Mr. Jones offers seven chapters on how we got here, two on where we appear to be headed. If you are not familiar with the development of American journalism (and you would join some journalists in that unfamiliarity), the chapters on the development of First Amendment law and media ethics will be instructive.
But his main concern is the fate of what he calls (with mildly irritating repetition) the “iron core” of journalism: the information that is crucial in a democratic society if the citizenry is to make informed decisions. It is what he calls “accountability news,” because it holds “government and those with power” accountable for their actions. It is not opinion or advocacy, but factual, reported, verified information, journalism subject to “the discipline of verification.”
It is also objective journalism, in this sense: “a genuine effort to be an honest broker ... playing it straight without favoring one side when the facts are in dispute.” It also means “not trying to create the illusion of fairness by letting advocates pretend in your journalism that there is a debate about the facts when the weight of truth is clear.”
This kind of ethical accountability journalism, which developed over the past century and a half, is, he sees, imperiled: “In the old model of near media monopolies, the American population was privy to what was essentially the same news. In the future, high-quality news will be mostly consumed by elites, with headlines and articles tailored to the short attention spans of people who get their news on the Web.” Or, again, “a well-informed class at the top and a broad populace awash in opinion, spin and propaganda.” (I told you he was an old-line newspaperman.)
(Actually, in a telling remark, he speculates that hard news, accountability news, serious journalism never attracted more than about fifteen percent of newspapers’ readership. Most people, it seems, have always been more interested in celebrities, comics, crosswords, and coupons.)
The past is gone and will not be recovered. Unfortunately, the future is blurry. Mr. Jones looks at some of the possibilities for the survival of serious, accountability journalism, and he finds it chancy.
Citizen journalism, he thinks, will be too scattered and spotty, without the resources to conduct sustained reporting and to resist pressure from the powerful through threats of withholding advertising or filing expensive lawsuits.
It is far from clear that local electronic news startups can make enough money from advertising to replace newspapers.
Ownership by a nonprofit (Hey, we’ve got the nonprofit thing down, one wag at Overheard in the Newsroom said) is similarly chancy: “Founders can change their minds, lose their money, get mad, get bored, or simply want to do something different.”
Breaking up corporate chains of journalism and restoring local ownership sounds attractive to him, but, as we saw from the Binghams and others, local ownership can be at the mercy of changing local personalities.
Mr. Jones’s “nightmare scenario”: “bankrupt newspapers, news by press release that is thinly disguised advocacy, scattered an ineffective bands of former journalists and sincere amateurs whose work is left in obscurity, and a small cadre of high-priced newsletters that serve as an intelligence service for the rich and powerful.”
We are already more than halfway there.
*Mr. Jones got the inside story of the tensions and misunderstandings within the Bingham family that led to the sale of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times to Gannett in 1986. Writing with Susan E. Tifft, he produced a notable book on the subject, The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. The couple also wrote The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times. Both books merit your attention.
An irrelevant personal note: In 1986, restless at the badly managed Cincinnati Enquirer, I was casting about for employment elsewhere. The Courier-Journal expressed interest, and I went down to Louisville for interviews and a tryout on the copy desk. It happened that the morning of that tryout was also the morning that Barry Bingham handed over the keys to Al Neuharth. On to Baltimore.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:
I received a review copy of Losing the News from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy from Amazon.com by clicking on the link below, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
No Nazis need apply
A gentleman in London named James Nicholls has given a backhanded endorsement to You Don’t Say at his blog:
For those of you who feel the need to express your superior knowledge of English grammar, this is the place for you to stroke your ego and the ego of the similarly anal. As for me I read trangressive fiction and can’t be bothered with the whole affair, safe in the knowledge that message is more important than presentation.
A couple of things seem apparent.
One is that Mr. Nicholls appears to have been so engrossed in his self-described pursuit of “sex, drugs and, if at all possible, an early night” that he may not yet have encountered the critical commonplace that content and form cannot be so easily separated. Another likelihood is that he has not read enough posts here to understand that I am not of the tribe of grammar Nazis — rigid, unthinking, nagging prescriptivists — but am rather a moderate, indulgent, reasonable prescriptivist and all-around fine fellow.
(Perhaps, too, it is time to stop flinging about that word Nazi in a casual manner that trivializes what it represents.)
Adam Pagnucco, writing at Maryland Politics Watch, does not call me a Nazi, merely suggesting that I am a whore.
He dismisses the bloggers participating in The Sun’s Mobbies competition as saps and suckers, abjectly begging for an empty distinction. Among the “trollops, street-walkers, flesh-flashers or tramps” in this competition he spies — well — me. He quotes this passage from my blog post about the competition: “Embarrassing as it is to engage in self-promotion, I am soliciting your support… Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.”
Someday, I hope, Mr. Pagnucco will allow me to stand him to a pint and endeavor to describe to him what irony is.
In the meantime, those of you who wish to endorse You Don’t Say in this largely meaningless competition can make use of the link at the upper-right corner of this page. Voting continues today and ends tomorrow. You can vote once each day for this blog in the Misfits category and in the overall best-blog category.
On a somewhat more positive note, the Online Schools Web site has included You Don’t Say among the “100 Best Blogs for Your Liberal Arts Education.”* You’ll also find our friends Pam Robinson and Andy Bechtel listed there. I commend those hundred blogs to your attention.
*That’s not liberal in the wicked people-who-look-at-dirty-pictures, government-death-panel, gays-are-human-too, you-have-to-pay-taxes-if-you-want-services sense, but in the largely archaic favoring-the-increase-of-knowledge sense, which, to some people, is nearly as wicked.
For those of you who feel the need to express your superior knowledge of English grammar, this is the place for you to stroke your ego and the ego of the similarly anal. As for me I read trangressive fiction and can’t be bothered with the whole affair, safe in the knowledge that message is more important than presentation.
A couple of things seem apparent.
One is that Mr. Nicholls appears to have been so engrossed in his self-described pursuit of “sex, drugs and, if at all possible, an early night” that he may not yet have encountered the critical commonplace that content and form cannot be so easily separated. Another likelihood is that he has not read enough posts here to understand that I am not of the tribe of grammar Nazis — rigid, unthinking, nagging prescriptivists — but am rather a moderate, indulgent, reasonable prescriptivist and all-around fine fellow.
(Perhaps, too, it is time to stop flinging about that word Nazi in a casual manner that trivializes what it represents.)
Adam Pagnucco, writing at Maryland Politics Watch, does not call me a Nazi, merely suggesting that I am a whore.
He dismisses the bloggers participating in The Sun’s Mobbies competition as saps and suckers, abjectly begging for an empty distinction. Among the “trollops, street-walkers, flesh-flashers or tramps” in this competition he spies — well — me. He quotes this passage from my blog post about the competition: “Embarrassing as it is to engage in self-promotion, I am soliciting your support… Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.”
Someday, I hope, Mr. Pagnucco will allow me to stand him to a pint and endeavor to describe to him what irony is.
In the meantime, those of you who wish to endorse You Don’t Say in this largely meaningless competition can make use of the link at the upper-right corner of this page. Voting continues today and ends tomorrow. You can vote once each day for this blog in the Misfits category and in the overall best-blog category.
On a somewhat more positive note, the Online Schools Web site has included You Don’t Say among the “100 Best Blogs for Your Liberal Arts Education.”* You’ll also find our friends Pam Robinson and Andy Bechtel listed there. I commend those hundred blogs to your attention.
*That’s not liberal in the wicked people-who-look-at-dirty-pictures, government-death-panel, gays-are-human-too, you-have-to-pay-taxes-if-you-want-services sense, but in the largely archaic favoring-the-increase-of-knowledge sense, which, to some people, is nearly as wicked.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
You may fire when ready
From an advertisement for an opening for an editor at a Christian publishing concern:
Knowledge of cannon law, Church history, & world history req'd.
Knowledge of cannon law, Church history, & world history req'd.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Why newspapers fail
I was well along in Alex S. Jones’s Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,* nodding at what have become commonplaces in describing the plight of traditional journalism, when a short passage about “citizen journalism” and “reader-generated content” brought me up short:
To my dismay, such material often has more credibility and is of greater interest to readers than what is produced by professionals. My frustration is not based on scorn for nonprofessionals but on the unhappy fact that the professionals often can’t find a way to produce something as interesting, readable, and credible.
My entire career as a newspaper copy editor flashed before my eyes in column after column of gray stodge. And I realized that while the major problem with newspapers has been the collapse of the advertising-supported business model, newspapers have sacrificed their audience by the uncritical production of low-grade prose.
The vanishing generation of newspaper readers formed the habit when you had to read a newspaper when you wanted something more than the thin gruel of information offered by the radio or television. But the rising generations had more choices and did not form the newspaper habit. My children and my undergraduate students do not do much more than occasionally glance at a newspaper, if that. Why do you think? Perhaps because so much newspaper writing is appallingly, relentlessly, unapologetically DULL.
And journalists are trained to write that way.
Look at the standard, straight-news summary lead paragraph. The writer has been told to cram all the essential information into a single sentence, leading prose such as this, of a type that could be called The Clot:
Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.
[It doesn’t help, either, that an error of grammar makes this fifty-four-word monstrosity even more difficult to follow.]
The alternative to the summary lead paragraph is the stock anecdotal lead, in which utterly banal details about some person or persons with whom the reader is expected to identify are piled up until the writer finally gets around to telling what the story is about. I think of this device as the Day Like Any Other opening:
It was a day like any other for Wendy Whitebread.
Shutting off the alarm clock as the sun was beginning to rise, she pulled on her jogging clothes and shoes and took the dog for a quick walk around the neighborhood.
Returning home, she woke her children, Axel and Amy, fed them breakfast, signed the permission slips for a field trip and sent them off to school.
Heading down to the basement, she started a load of laundry and then returned to the kitchen to sit down with the morning paper and a second cup of coffee.
It was just then that the booster stage from a failed NASA satellite launch fell from the sky and demolished her house.
Or perhaps the writer will produce a snappier opening by rubbing the moss off some hoary cliché and attempting to pass it off as something fresh: the If You Write It, They Will Read device:
’Tis the season, spirits weren’t dampened by bad weather, the dream that turned into a nightmare.
It is when you are intrepid (or foolish) enough to continue past the lead that you discover more clichés, more slapdash syntax, and a dialect called journalese which is not like any English ever spoken. You will recognize it in the opening of a famous exercise by Paula LaRocque:
Hack: How were things in your vacation facility?
Frack: We had wide-ranging weather all season. One storm dumped more than seven inches of rain on our densely wooded lot, spawning hurricane-force winds and golfball-sized hail. Plus an unprecedented number of visitors arrived amid the facility restoration. …
I doubt that newspapers could have driven readers away more effectively with cattle prods.
*Of which more in a subsequent post.
To my dismay, such material often has more credibility and is of greater interest to readers than what is produced by professionals. My frustration is not based on scorn for nonprofessionals but on the unhappy fact that the professionals often can’t find a way to produce something as interesting, readable, and credible.
My entire career as a newspaper copy editor flashed before my eyes in column after column of gray stodge. And I realized that while the major problem with newspapers has been the collapse of the advertising-supported business model, newspapers have sacrificed their audience by the uncritical production of low-grade prose.
The vanishing generation of newspaper readers formed the habit when you had to read a newspaper when you wanted something more than the thin gruel of information offered by the radio or television. But the rising generations had more choices and did not form the newspaper habit. My children and my undergraduate students do not do much more than occasionally glance at a newspaper, if that. Why do you think? Perhaps because so much newspaper writing is appallingly, relentlessly, unapologetically DULL.
And journalists are trained to write that way.
Look at the standard, straight-news summary lead paragraph. The writer has been told to cram all the essential information into a single sentence, leading prose such as this, of a type that could be called The Clot:
Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.
[It doesn’t help, either, that an error of grammar makes this fifty-four-word monstrosity even more difficult to follow.]
The alternative to the summary lead paragraph is the stock anecdotal lead, in which utterly banal details about some person or persons with whom the reader is expected to identify are piled up until the writer finally gets around to telling what the story is about. I think of this device as the Day Like Any Other opening:
It was a day like any other for Wendy Whitebread.
Shutting off the alarm clock as the sun was beginning to rise, she pulled on her jogging clothes and shoes and took the dog for a quick walk around the neighborhood.
Returning home, she woke her children, Axel and Amy, fed them breakfast, signed the permission slips for a field trip and sent them off to school.
Heading down to the basement, she started a load of laundry and then returned to the kitchen to sit down with the morning paper and a second cup of coffee.
It was just then that the booster stage from a failed NASA satellite launch fell from the sky and demolished her house.
Or perhaps the writer will produce a snappier opening by rubbing the moss off some hoary cliché and attempting to pass it off as something fresh: the If You Write It, They Will Read device:
’Tis the season, spirits weren’t dampened by bad weather, the dream that turned into a nightmare.
It is when you are intrepid (or foolish) enough to continue past the lead that you discover more clichés, more slapdash syntax, and a dialect called journalese which is not like any English ever spoken. You will recognize it in the opening of a famous exercise by Paula LaRocque:
Hack: How were things in your vacation facility?
Frack: We had wide-ranging weather all season. One storm dumped more than seven inches of rain on our densely wooded lot, spawning hurricane-force winds and golfball-sized hail. Plus an unprecedented number of visitors arrived amid the facility restoration. …
I doubt that newspapers could have driven readers away more effectively with cattle prods.
*Of which more in a subsequent post.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Other stuff you ought to read
Item: The estimable Jesse Sheidlower, whose The F Word deserves your close attention, has an essay at Slate.com about the difficulties of including and properly defining sexual terms in the dictionary.
If you like vulgar words — and who among us is afraid to admit it? — he offers plenty. (Though nothing quite as graphic as the bovine flatulence that Language Log is celebrating.)
Item: It is probably even more difficult to determine what should go into a book of quotations. The Oxford University Press blog (Caution, reader: this is a promotional article) recently commented on the inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations of a remark by Paris Hilton: “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”
I have not solicited her views on the bow tie.
Item: Jag Bhalla, an amateur idiomologist and author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms from ten languages, writes at the National Post of Canada about his addiction to language and his search for exotic idioms.
The title of his book is a translation of a Russian expression equivalent to the English idiom I’m not pulling your leg. Presumably the English would sound comically exotic to a Russian.
Item: Adrienne Carlson has sent me a link to “75 Awesome Games, Tools, and Links for Word Lovers” at the Accredited Online Degrees site. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of all 75 entries, but several of them look as if they might assist you in wasting time at work.
Item: There is still time to for you to put a handful of votes in the ballot box for this blog at The Sun’s Mobbies competition. (See link at upper right corner.)
If you like vulgar words — and who among us is afraid to admit it? — he offers plenty. (Though nothing quite as graphic as the bovine flatulence that Language Log is celebrating.)
Item: It is probably even more difficult to determine what should go into a book of quotations. The Oxford University Press blog (Caution, reader: this is a promotional article) recently commented on the inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations of a remark by Paris Hilton: “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”
I have not solicited her views on the bow tie.
Item: Jag Bhalla, an amateur idiomologist and author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms from ten languages, writes at the National Post of Canada about his addiction to language and his search for exotic idioms.
The title of his book is a translation of a Russian expression equivalent to the English idiom I’m not pulling your leg. Presumably the English would sound comically exotic to a Russian.
Item: Adrienne Carlson has sent me a link to “75 Awesome Games, Tools, and Links for Word Lovers” at the Accredited Online Degrees site. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of all 75 entries, but several of them look as if they might assist you in wasting time at work.
Item: There is still time to for you to put a handful of votes in the ballot box for this blog at The Sun’s Mobbies competition. (See link at upper right corner.)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Here comes the judge
Sharon Eliza Nichols boasts that she has more than 300,000 members on her Facebook group, I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar, and these valiant battlers against the forces of darkness have submitted more than 7,000 photos in judgment.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
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