Once more unto the breach

I regret having to point out to you this sentence from an article in The New York Times about the recent Republican gathering in Louisiana:

At a cocktail reception on the banks of the Mississippi River, people in yellow Tea Party shirts barely mingled with Republican stalwarts, many of whom wore neckties or broaches decorated with elephants, the proud symbol of the party.

Broach, of course, is not a noun but a verb meaning “to break open.” Its earliest sense in English was to pierce something with a sharp object, but, the English always having been great drinkers, was more commonly used to mean opening a cask or barrel to draw out the liquor. It also means to open up in a figurative sense; to broach a painful subject is to introduce it for discussion.

The word the writer was groping for is the homophone brooch, an ornament pinned to clothing. It is an etymological variant of broach, which as a noun meant “skewer” or “bodkin” in Middle English, thus suggesting the pin that fastens the ornament.

Broach the verb is sometimes confused with breach, which means to break through a barrier – as when the Turks breached the mighty walls of Constantinople in 1453 and brought down what little remained of the Byzantine Empire. Figuratively, it means to break an agreement. As a noun, breach is the gap that has been broken in a wall or the violation of the agreement, as in “breach of contract.”  

Breach in turn is confused with breech, which used to mean the buttocks. That is what breeches or britches are meant to cover. It survives in modern English as the name for the back part of a rifle or gun barrel.

Sweetheart, get me Ettlin

I wrote briefly yesterday (“Editors? We don’t need no stinking editors”) about an inept little news article from the Charlotte Observer that is sadly representative of the shoddy work proliferating in print and online. Thinking about it yesterday, I realized the problem: It had not been Ettlinized.

David Michael Ettlin was The Baltimore Sun’s veteran rewrite man, and by veteran I mean that it sometimes felt as if he had revised A.S. Abell’s copy. The rewrite man’s job – now largely vanished – existed to deal with certain realities of which the public may be unaware and which many journalists are reluctant to acknowledge:

1. Many journalists are not very good writers. The skill of reporting, of ferreting out information, is very different from the skill of composition, and few reporters are equally good at both. The rewrite man took raw copy and Englished it.

2. Journalism is done in haste, which makes for mistakes. The rewrite man was a first line of defense, cleaning up a multitude of errors before shipping stories to the copy desk. (When you read corporatespeak about reducing “layers” of editing, you are to understand that every layer that is eliminated to save money increases the likelihood that what you read with be less and less reliable.)

3. Journalism is a craft, learned by apprenticeship. It was glorious to watch the incomparable Ettlin take a crew of tyros with journalism degrees and patiently instruct them how to construct an obituary, how to write a police story without convicting a suspect in advance of trial, how to get to the point in the first paragraph instead of the tenth.

4. They don’t know the territory. Tyros come in from out of town, along with other reporters migrating for (they think) better jobs. They didn’t grow up here; they don’t know the local geography, history, folkways, and people. So, over time, Ettlin would patiently point out when they made parallel streets intersect or got people’s names wrong (if R Adams Cowley of Shock Trauma saw his name in the paper with a period after the R, the newsroom would hear about it). He would also, in the palmy days, get the keys to the publisher’s Cadillac and drive the newcomers around town for the day for an instructed tour of echt Baltimore.

It would not shock me to hear a reporter say that he or she learned more from Ettlin about the practicalities of reporting and writing than from a major in journalism.

David Michael Ettlin retired from The Sun after four decades on the job and still posts occasionally on a blog, The Real Muck. The qualities he brought to the work – skepticism, irreverence about Important People, humor, an unerring news judgment, and, above all, a determination to make every text factually accurate and clear for the reader – still exist among the attenuated staffs of our newspapers and online publications. How much these qualities are valued, or even recognized, by the people making decisions is a question yet to be answered.

Editors? We don't need no stinking editors

Now that everything is all immediate and direct between writer and reader, since all those superfluous editors and copy editors were dismissed like barnacles scraped off the hull, journalism has entered an era of smooth sailing, right?

Take a look at what HeadsUp: The Blog has to say about a minor masterpiece of modern journalism out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We are treated to the work of a journalist who cannot write a twelve-paragraph article about a tree falling on a house without making a hash of it.

Adding to the overall sense of incompetence unencumbered by editorial expertise, there is the crash blossom headline:

Home crushed by tree with dog inside

 An isolated example, I grant you, but an increasingly typical one.

From over the pond

The estimable Jan Freeman, writing in The Boston Globe about British-American linguistic cross-pollination, endorses my previous suggestion that there are a number of Britishisms that we could profit from adopting:

Surely, among all these offerings, everyone can find a Britishism to cherish. How about Thursday week, meaning “a week from Thursday,” which would instantly cure our chronic confusion about whether a meeting or dinner is scheduled for “this Thursday” or “next Thursday”? I’ve always been fond of fortnight, too — I suppose it doesn’t catch on here because our vacations (their holidays) are rarely two weeks at a stretch. And surely sell-by date is sleeker and more precise than expiration date.

I’d add snog for “to make out,” top up (a drink) for “refill,” gormless for “clueless” or “stupid,” and dodgy for “unsound,” “questionable,” or “suspicious.” (Your suggestions have not exactly been arriving in a torrent; am I supposed to do all the work here?)

Ms. Freeman also drew attention to Separated by a Common Language, a blog by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist living in Britain, who has written extensively about these transatlantic exchanges. (She is also on Twitter, @lynneguist, a pun I reluctantly endorse). I was particularly happy to discover her post from last December in which she provides some details on the increasing popularity of go missing on these shores, despite the unaccountably vehement and irrational resistance to it. As she explains, along lines that I too have suggested:

Go missing is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

These exchanges often prompt spasms of crankiness. The British tend to bridle at Americanisms, even when they turn out to have a long history in British English as well, and Americans are liable to see the adoption of any British turn of phrase as a laughable affectation. (And I have encountered enough Episcopal clergy with synthetic British accents to understand the latter reaction.)

But I suggest that we can leave the peeving aside. If a word or expression offers a nuance that we did not previously enjoy, or simply adds to our variety of expression, go for it. That last phrase is an Americanism; I offer it to the British in a spirit of linguistic cousinhood.

Friday farrago

Before I head off to Memorial Episcopal to help erect the set for Annie – you are planning to see the show, aren’t you? – I am assembling some odds and ends to amuse and instruct. (Farrago, “a confused mixture,” comes from a Latin word meaning “mixed fodder.”)

Item: If you were both instructed and amused by yesterday’s post linking to John McWhorter’s analysis of Sarah Palin’s speech patterns, you should have a look at Mark Liberman’s follow-up on Ms. Palin’s distal demonstratives at Language Log.

Item: The estimable and apparently indefatigable Professor Liberman also tackled Louann Brizendine’s The Male Brain and painstakingly examined sources identified in the endnotes. What he discovered, and demonstrates, is that citation after citation refers to a study that not only does not support the author’s assertions, but has at best the most tenuous relationship to her subject.

His conclusion: “… Dr. Brizendine's new book is more of the same sort of ‘psychoneuroindoctrinology’ found in her first book, in which the pages and pages of endnotes and references are a sort of Potemkin Village of scientific pretense laid out in support of banal gender stereotypes.”  

Item: The War on Editing claims another set of casualties as Media General “consolidates” (read: “eliminates staff while homogenizing content”) copy editing and page design at the Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Winston-Salem Journal.

The typical robotic justification has been offered:

“Our consolidated editing and design operations allow our newsrooms to focus on strong local news reporting. Stories will be edited once rather than multiple times, and we can take advantage of economies of scale and centralization of top talent,” said Donna Reed, Media General’s Vice President of Content. “Our customers will be unaffected by this internal process change and all news decisions will continue to be made by our local editors,” said Ms. Reed.

I will not be taking any bets on the customers’ satisfaction.

Item: Gene Roberts of the University of Maryland, formerly of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, co-author of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, coincidentally talked yesterday about the effects for the public of these economies of scale and centralizations. “It is past time for America to become alarmed about its shrinking news coverage, but it is showing few signs of concern,” he said. A fuller account is at Poynter.org.

Item: And finally, an endorsement. I regularly encounter in my editing class at Loyola University Maryland students who immediately grasp what is essential in the craft of editing. One of the most promising in the thirty semesters I have taught was Elizabeth Morrison. She would have been a magnificent editor, had there been any future in editing. But, after military service and marriage, she has settled with her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina, and made a career as a photographer.

 Any of you in Charlotte or environs who might be in the market for photography would do well to have a look at her Web site, Elizabeth Morrison Photography. It’s also on Facebook.  

Why Sarah Palin talks like that

If you have marveled, as many have, about Sarah Palin’s distinctive speech patterns, John McWhorter has an explanation: She speaks like a child.

Please, please, good people, before you rush to Plymouth Road with your pitchforks and torches, this is not a Palin-bashing exercise. Dr. McWhorter is a linguist, and he presents at The New Republic a linguistic analysis of Ms. Palin’s speech patterns, along with an explanation of its appeal to the public.

As he explains, it was once the case that public figures practiced oratory. They thought out carefully what they intended to say, they wrote it down, in formal English, and they delivered it. One surviving exemplar of this practice is Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia:

Byrd is old enough to have minted in the days when making a speech meant clearing your throat and reading a prepared statement bedecked with ten-dollar words, and it qualifies today as an eccentricity. The practice will die with him.

Public address, even in Congress, has become much more casual, more conversational, more informal, more colloquial. And Ms. Palin, Dr. McWhorter argues, has carried this development further. Though you owe it to yourself to read his entire article, what his examination of a set of Palin utterances shows is that she does not link words and phrases so much syntactically or logically, but associatively.

The people who like that form of speech are those who are uncomfortable with the formalities and structures of written English. And that, though Dr. McWhorter does not address the point, is a potential source of difficulty for President Obama. The American people, taken as a whole, admire educational credentials more than they admire education, and Mr. Obama’s careful, structured, lawyerly sentences are likely to pall over time.

Mr. Obama’s supporters like to think that he is a model American, but I suspect that Dr. McWhorter is closer to the mark in his conclusion:

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” – while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.  

Remember the Confederacy

The Hon. Bob McDonnell, governor of Virginia, reminds us in an official proclamation that we are in the middle of Confederate History Month. In three days we can commemorate the 145th anniversary of those events at Appomattox Court House that determined that the Confederacy was, for all practical purposes, over.

I wish that we could mark the Confederacy to honor figures like Robert E. Lee, who fought bravely and determinedly for his cause and, when defeated, acknowledged the loss and contributed no further to resistance – who would not allow a word to be said against General Grant in his presence.

I wish that we could mark it in the manner of those aging veterans in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary who, after shambling though a re-enactment of Pickett’s futile charge at Gettysburg, fell into one another’s arms in recognition that, much as they had once tried to kill one another, there was something in their common heritage that bound them together forever.

But I grew up in a border state, a great-great grandson of slaveowners, a fact of which I cannot be proud, and I live in another border state, whose official song* calls the federal government a bloody tyrant. I have seen the degree to which identification with the Confederacy became solidarity for racist yahoos over the past six decades.

I have also read William W. Freehling’s books (both excellent) on the secession movement from the Colonial and Federal eras to the Civil War, and I know that, despite the feeble apologetics for the Lost Cause today, you know, that it was more about states’ rights and cultural and economic differences than about slavery, that slavery was the states’ right at issue.

You need only read what the secessionists themselves wrote, and it is not a cause you would want to take pride in today.

So commemorate away, but get your facts straight. The Stars and Bars was the official flag, not­ the battle flag you and Dukes of Hazzard fans display. And General Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Joseph Johnston and all the others whose memory we honor were good men, even noble men, who battled heroically in a bad cause.

We are better off that they lost.

 *Sung to “O Tannenbaum.” Dear Lord, the embarrassment.

     

Just thinkin' about tomorrow

Last night, after the conclusion of the final Easter Day service at Memorial Episcopal Church, seventy people swarmed over the premises. Furniture was removed from the chancel; doors were opened in odd corners of the church, the parish house, and the rectory; gangs of adults and children hauled heavy and ungainly-shaped wooden objects into the nave. An ant colony would have looked leisurely by comparison.

When the Memorial Players present their annual production, they do so on a cunningly designed modular stage, assembled to fit over the chancel to provide an elevated platform for the performers.  With this year’s production of Annie a mere two weeks off, all those hundred of pieces have to be assembled, bolted, and fitted together to permit the cast to carry out the last feverish set of rehearsals in the actual performing space.

The six performances of Annie have a novel aspect this year: a double cast. Though the adult actors (including a relentless blogger cast as Franklin Roosevelt) will appear in all performances, the lead role and the roles of the named orphans will be performed by separate casts. The two Annies, Holly Hornbeck and Clare Peyton, have been troupers in rehearsal, mastering their lines early and singing ably. You will be impressed by them.

To be impressed, of course, you will have to show up. The performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, April 24, 25, 30, and May 1, and 3:00 p.m. on Sundays, April 26 and May 2.

The performances are free, with the doors opening half an hour in advance, but there are also opportunities to pay for a combined reserved seating/reception package, with details here.

Now that the title of this post has put that insistent earworm in your head – oh, tomorrow, tomorrow, I love yah, tomorrow – you might as well give in and plan to attend.

        

Three things the Vatican could learn from Richard Nixon

1. Yes, some people dislike you and take glee in your misfortune. Do not give them ammunition; they will use it.

2. Not everyone, however, who reports on what you did – or failed to do – is an enemy, and, anyhow, facts are facts.

3. Cover-ups magnify and spread the initial crime. 

Gee, I used to think I was a journalist

A good, strong burst of cleansing anger gets the day off to a running start.

Steve Yelvington quotes on Twitter a remarkably stupid remark by someone named Chris Pirillo, a self-described “media-friendly geek who produces content and catalyzes communities” (whatever that means). Here is what catalyzed me: 

If you didn't get a degree in Journalism, you're not a journalist - not even a “citizen journalist.”*

It is no secret – I disclose it to my students at Loyola every semester – that I have no degree in journalism, that, in fact, I never took a course in journalism in college. At Michigan State in the 1970s you had to take the three-term introduction to communications sequence as a prerequisite, and the one term I spent in that sequence was the single dumbest waste of time in my undergraduate career.

As much as journalists like to think of themselves as members of a profession, like physicians and lawyers, they –after thirty years in newspapering, is it permissible for me to say “we”? – are engaged instead in a craft. It is a craft that can be learned in journalism school, but it is also one that can be learned, as I learned it, by apprenticeship.

There is no board certification in journalism, no qualifying examination, no licensing. Edmund Wilson – Edmund Wilson! – described himself as a “literary journalist,” and the people who compile announcements of church suppers and school lunch menus for publication also call themselves journalists. Just about anyone who writes anything that is published – and putting things up on the Internet counts as publication – has a reasonable claim to that elastic term journalist, whatever some bumptious content producer and community catalyzer may say.

This bedevils legislators trying to figure out who should be covered by a shield law and journalism school deans struggling to divine where, if anywhere, their programs are headed, but that is their problem, the reality to be dealt with.

The current status of the craft is this: If someone writing for publication calls himself a journalist, anyone who challenges the assertion has to prove otherwise. Insisting on a degree in journalism? Well, the abundance of published journalists who have not studied journalism – and in some cases lack an undergraduate degree – makes that a shaky argument to stand on.

*Copy-editing note for Mr. Pirillo: Because journalism is not a proper noun, it is not capitalized.