Major newspapers tend to shun the use of puns in headlines, as cutesy titles are more apt to provoke eye-rolling than telegraph cleverness. But there’s no rule against a well-placed word in the lede. From an article in the Times, “Private Prisons Found to Offer Little in Savings” (5/18/11):
“The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates.”
I may be a media snob, but it got a laugh out of me.
From the NYTimes (“Britain Set to Announce Ambitious Environmental Steps“):
“But Mr. Burke said that over time, natural gas would probably be a better optiwon than investing in reactors with their long history of delays, cost overruns and waste disposal problems.”
Just another typo, but I like the potential of “optiwon.” Maybe it’s a positive choice . . . option + won. Or something to do with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or perhaps a new sort of remote control — all those wonderful options! I’m picturing one of those “smart houses” from sci-fi TV shows, where the thermostat talks to you in a bedroom GPS-type voice.
From an article in today’s WSJ about the damage to the reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant:
The pressure vessel a cylindrical steel container that holds nuclear fuel, “is likely to be damaged and leaking water at units Nos. 2 and 3,” said Junichi Matsumoto, Tepco spokesman on nuclear issues, in a news briefing Sunday.
Commas, kids. They’re a beautiful thing.
Everybody makes mistakes. But it’s so much more satisfying when someone you really, really dislike makes a mistake. I hunt down grammatical and typographical errors in the NYTimes because it irks me to see such a good paper make such stupid mistakes out of a (misplaced?) desire to be the first in print. Well, “in print” is more accurate, I guess, considering what they’re actually rushing to do is post breaking news to a blog or upload an article onto the website. I not only worship the Times but have persistent fantasies about one day working at its copy desk, so every error stands out like a misspelled neon sign.
Then there’s the Wall Street Journal. I hate its parent company — Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, erstwhile home of such rational thinkers Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity — and I hate its editorial page, which uses the derogatory, GOP-coined term “ObamaCare” as if the real name, the Affordable Care Act, is too many syllables for its writers to remember. I hate the people it invites to pen op-ed pieces, who love to preach to the choir about overtaxed millionaires and “job-killing” environmental regulations. (Who cares if coal plants foul the air when the “free market” of pre-existing condition exclusions lets insurance companies off the hook for lung cancer treatments?) Most of all, I hate the racist, misogynist, homophobic screeds that fill the “Comments” threads of every article. The Times may be liberal, but there’s a lot of good business sense behind refusing to associate one’s product with remarks about how gay people deserve AIDS (seriously, I am not making this up).
There you have it: my overlong explanation for the delight I take in finding mistakes on the WSJ website. So the right-wing intellectual elite can’t proofread? Ha. Picture me laughing evilly. “Schadenfreude” became my favorite word the day I cracked open my old-school Merriam Webster.
In an interview with Aimee Bender, creative writing teacher, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and someone who* I’m slightly disappointed to see talking to the WSJ:
AB: We’re not there to help them get best sellers. That shouldn’t be the goal ever.
WSJ: I’d image that writing without regard to salability probably would encourage more interesting work.
Yeah, I’d “image” that too.
* It’s possible that ought to be “whom.” I may be a persnickety grammarian, but I definitely don’t have all the answers. I’m going with “who” on the grounds that it’s the subject of “talking,” not the object of “I’m slightly disappointed . . . .” Of course, this is coming from someone who had to Google “persnickety” to find out it only has one t.
In eighth grade, at the last assembly of middle school, I won the School Grammarian award. This was not much of an honor; it was, like most of the “awards” passed out that day, made up by the school’s algebra teacher. I seem to remember a few kids getting real prizes, or at least real in the sense that they were printed on some gold-border certificate paper from Staples and handed out in front of the rest of the student body, which was sprawled over half the gym floor in half-sitting, half-sleeping slouches. We didn’t have chairs at Oak Hill, ostensibly because we were an “independent” private school, but actually because no one had bothered to budget for 100 folding chairs.
The place was a strange combination of bare-bones accounting — an old ranch building was co-opted for the schoolhouse, and the bedroom they converted into my grade four classroom was so small that the inside door blew open every time the outside door was pulled shut — and top-of-the-line furnishings. For Oak Hill’s debut year, every student sat in his own cushy, fabric-covered rolling office chair, until the teachers convinced the school’s wealthy, wine-magnate founder that such chairs were more appropriate for board members and CEOs than a bunch of third-graders predisposed to spinning wildly in their seats and holding chair races across the classroom.
But I digress. The awards assembly was, as it turned out, a similar combination of off-the-cuff theatrics and prep-school (or wannabe prep-school, considering the delinquents and socially odd students the school tended to attract) ceremony. The graduating eighth grade class comprised only nine students, and I assume one or two of those kids received actual commendations, most likely for their math skills or acting talent. The School Grammarian award was a joke, but I took it seriously, and made it up to the front of the gym before realizing that there was no certificate for me to collect or microphone at which to give an acceptance speech. I did an awkward hand-shake dance with my math teacher and returned to my “seat” — backpack as headrest, legs crossed at the ankles in an “I’m not sleeping” position — with my face burning.
I’d like to think that I’ve grown less awkward since that eighth-grade assembly, but I know the grammarian in me has not disappeared. In an ideal world, I would get my act together and find a job copy-editing. It’s not the most glamorous profession, but it has the advantage of feeling a lot more obtainable than a job in the ad industry or at a publishing house. I get massive, procrastination-aided anxiety whenever I try to write. You know what they say: Those who can’t do, teach. That’s not quite true — I’ve had plenty of teachers who could out-“do” the smartest Jeopardy contestant — but it is perhaps accurate that those who can’t write are destined to edit. With that in mind, here are two of the sharpest bits I’ve read lately on the importance of the right word in the right place:
From the March 2011 issue of Oprah Magazine, a piece called “Before I Forget,” by Beth Macy:
Lynn Forbish. The sight of that name in your e-mail in-box could turn your palms sweaty and your face red. No matter how many years you’ve logged as a journalist or how many awards you’ve won, a note from the Queen of the Copy Desk could bring you to your knees: “Never use five words when one will suffice — just don’t make it one of your usual cliches.”
Frankly, were I the copy editor at Oprah, I would’ve deep-sixed that hyphen: “Inbox,” not “in-box.” But who knows. I suppose I should find out what the AP Stylebook has to say on the subject. But whatever the answer, I’d still love to be Queen of the Copy Desk. Someday, when I finally get around to “getting my act together,” maybe I’ll have that engraved on a nameplate.
Christopher Hitchens, in the June 2011 edition of Vanity Fair, remembers receiving this advice from a writing teacher, possibly William Safire. (Aside: Safire, like Hitchens himself, was a great writer with dubious political beliefs.) In “Unspoken Truths,” Hitchens writes:
The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.
Again, the copy editor in me longs to make a change. As I typed, my fingers automatically inserted a comma after “boy.” Should there be a comma there? No. It could probably go either way, but I’m not about to say Christopher Hitchens made an error. I may not agree with a lot of Hitchens’ libertarian dogma, but there are elements of his politics that I do subscribe to, and like Safire, his talent with words is undeniable.
As for me? Check back in a few years. Maybe I’ll have that nameplate after all.
From the NYT, 5/11/11: “Republicans Decry Tactics the Party Used Last Year.” (Jennifer Steinhauer)
“I’m not going to defend anything in the past,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, a freshman from Illinois, who led the news conference calling on Democrats to stop their public critique of the plan. “Let’s get passed the past.”
Though I wouldn’t put it “past” the GOP to fumble on the English language, I have a feeling this is more the result of Ms. Steinhauer writing too fast and too carelessly. It may be “just” a blog post, but that doesn’t mean it’s exempt from proofreading. Even the online sections of the Times should be held to higher standards than the local paper.
. . . So Well Read. . . 