Language Matters

Via the Romenesko media blog, New York Magazine has caught wind of a memo from the Associated Press reminding its staffers to only use the words “husband” and “wife” in reference to heterosexual marriages. “Generally AP uses couples or partners to describe people in civil unions or same-sex marriages,” the memo reads, noting that exceptions can be made for direct quotations of “if those involved have regularly used those terms (‘Smith is survived by his husband, John Jones’).” New York blogger Joe Coscarelli gets an AP spokesperson on record as explaining that “”This was, as far as we intended, a restatement of our style via a staff memo. The focus was on letting people call themselves what they feel is right.” Uh, so if someone feels it’s right to call his wife “fork” and himself “spoon,” that’s the standard the AP should go by?

Coscarelli’s reaction pretty much mirrors my own:

 It’s unclear what confusion, if any, such differentiation is meant to avoid, or what purpose it would serve otherwise, considering acceptance for gay marriage (both legal and cultural) is only moving in one direction. Rather, it just seems like another outdated — and inexact — distinction that will have to be rectified at some point in the not-so-distant future. Whether or not members of a couple refer to one another as such in words, a man legally married to another man is his “husband.”

Coming on the heels of the AP’s recent decision to retire the term “homophobia,” which was applauded by conservatives for semantic accuracy (disapproval of homosexuality, they claim, is not an irrational fear but a reasoned moral stance) and criticized by liberals for whitewashing bigotry, this is an interesting development. In my mind, the AP was on firmer ground with that decision, as it’s true that, as the standards editor said at the time, “It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don’t have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case.” But refusing to respect a state’s decision to bestow the term “marriage” on a union – any union, whether between a man and a woman or two men – seems like, to coin a phrase, semantic activism. Once married, a man becomes a husband. Should it really matter whom he’s married to? If a state grants all the privileges of marriage, from tax status to parental rights, on a gay couple, the AP should respect that. And unilaterally deciding not to permit some of those privileges – the right, in this case, to be called a husband – simply because of the spouses’ sex smacks of discrimination.

Part of me understands the AP’s reluctance to rock the boat. After all, its stories are carried by papers across nation, in blue states where no one would bat an eye at two wives or two husbands, and in red ones where presumably some readers would take offense at the terminology. But seeking to mollify those who might be offended by a fact of life – in some states, “marriage” can now be between two men, whether or not conservatives consider that marriage “real” – subjugates language to a political agenda. “Couples” and “partners” are euphemisms designed to please people who won’t accept that, in places like Massachusetts and New York, a husband can now be married to a husband. This is not an Orwellian rabbit hole the AP should jump down.

Though I don’t agree with it, I suppose I can also intellectually understand the case conservatives might make against the word “husband” or “wife.” They would argue, I imagine, that using the term redefines marriage, because a marriage is by definition a union between a husband and wife. You can’t, they would say, have one without the other, as each is defined by its counterpart. You cannot have a husband without a wife; we even have a different word for a man whose wife has died: widower. When he no longer has a wife, his status shifts, and can no longer be accurately described as a husband. But a husband in a gay marriage, though without a wife, doesn’t lack a counterpart. He still has a complement, even if it’s not a complement that meets with conservative approval.

Those who argue that using the word “husband” would redefine marriage have already lost the argument. In states where more than civil unions are permitted, the legal bond between two men or two women is now defined as a marriage, not a “coupleship” or a “partnership.” Those words are actually two of the worst the AP could pick, as they each refer to other things. Coscarelli’s characterization of the language as “inexact” is spot-on. A couple could be a boyfriend and girlfriend (or boyfriend and boyfriend, as the case may be), a fiancé and fiancée, or even just two people who’ve been on a handful of casual dates. Legally, a partnership is also something different, as there are states that permit domestic partnerships or civil unions that have emphatically rejected the expansion of the term “marriage.” Ironically, it’s generally conservatives who seek to differentiate between partnerships and marriages, yet the AP seeks to please this constituency by conflating the two terms. (Republicans often argue that, while states can recognize domestic partnerships, they should stay out of what is traditionally called marriage. Language matters, they say. In theory, this should make them uncomfortable with the idea of confusing partnerships with marriages, though I would wager that they’d take a practical stance and declare any other word to be better than the sacred “husband” and “wife.”)

A more precise word, if the AP were determined to find one, would be “spouse,” as members of any marriage can be referred to as spouses. Still, even “spouse,” in its refusal to put gay marriages on the same level as heterosexual marriages, denigrates a relationship that the state has deemed equal under the law. The law, not social mores, should be the first resource when the AP decides which words to use in its articles. It mirrors the debate over the use of the term “illegal immigrant” (versus the supposedly less offensive “undocumented immigrant”), but in this case the argument seems even more clean-cut. There is no law about what to call someone who sneaked over the border, but there are laws in some states about what to call the union of two men: a marriage. (For what it’s worth, I would defer to the law on the immigration issue as well: If someone broken the law, if he has done something illegal, then “illegal” is indeed the correct word.)

The AP isn’t in the business of second-guessing voters and legislatures; it already accepts the law of the land and calls a marriage a marriage in the states that permit it. The wire service should go all the way, bestowing all the rights that the relationship confers. “Husband” may not be a privilege written explicitly into the law, but it is one of the rights we have come to associate with marital status, a privilege which is explicitly spelled out. There are states in which gay couples can only be domestic partners or unwed couples; in those cases, the AP’s words of choice are accurate. But for a Massachusetts couple celebrating the hard-won right to call their relationship a marriage, shouldn’t that couple also be able to enjoy the right to be referred to in the language used for any other married couple? After all, isn’t it also a “redefinition” to take the official definition of marriage and refuse to acknowledge all its implications? In many states, a gay marriage is officially something different from a partnership, just as a heterosexual marriage is something different from a long-term relationship. Once married, a man and a woman are no longer boyfriend and girlfriend; they become husband and wife. Likewise, two men in a marriage – not a partnership – are husband and husband, not partners.

The AP doesn’t bow to so-called traditionalists by inserting scare quotes to indicate a gay marriage (as in “homosexual ‘marriage’”), so it shouldn’t kowtow on the husband/wife issue either. It almost seems more radical to me to refuse the label, as it strips the individual of a right the state has conferred: the right to be someone else’s husband. Who is the AP to decide that those marriages, which voters have decided to place on the same level as heterosexual marriage, should be treated any differently? Once the AP declares itself – or the cultural critics it seeks to pacify – to be the arbiter, what’s to prevent it from deciding “partner” is now the term for members of every marriage? Or, to return to a ridiculous scenario, to decide that marriages now comprise a “spoon” and “fork”? If the state recognizes two things as equal, the AP’s language should reflect that. To do otherwise is to make the unilateral judgment that how it discusses facts – the existence of a marriage between two men or two women – should be dictated not by the laws as they are but the laws as conservatives wish them to be. The right is notorious for disdaining the “reality based community,” but that’s the one the rest of us happen to live in. The reality is that in some places two men make up a marriage, not a partnership. The AP’s language should reflect that.

Rats, Thugs . . . and Me

Via the blog Crooked Timber and an old New Yorker item by Hendrik Hertzberg, I now have an explanation for the irritation provoked by the term “Democrat party.” It’s a name used exclusively by conservatives as a way to marginalize the opposition, but I’ve always wondered exactly what about the slur gets under my skin. Do Republicans deliberately mangle the party’s name in order to avoid associating “Democratic” with broader “democratic” patriotism? Rick Yeselson of Crooked Timber, in summarizing Mitt Romney’s swing from moderate Massachusetts governor to base-appealing presidential hopeful, points out a switch in the candidate’s rhetoric. By 2012, what Romney had once referred to as the “Democratic party” had been replaced by the truncated version. Yeselson explains the appeal of the subtle insult:

It’s awkward and ugly to say (try it), and it removes from Democrats the right to have their party called by the name they have designated for it—like when white commentators used to insist on calling Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay . . . . It would suddenly sound very jarring and disrespectful if Democrats and liberals regularly referenced something called the “Republic Party”, but contemptuous conservatives have been doing the equivalent for decades.

Yeselson also steers us to Hertzberg’s 2006 analysis, which was prompted by a fundraising e-mail from George W. Bush that warned, “Nothing threatens our hard-won reforms and economic prosperity more than a Democrat victory this November.” Hertzberg has the dictionary — in which “Democrat” is listed as a noun but not an adjective — on his side, as well as Google, which at the time produced 20 times more hits for the “Democratic Party” than “Democrat Party.” Six years later, the gap has narrowed, perhaps reflecting the fact that name-calling on the Internet only increases. “Democratic” garners some 46 million hits, while “Democrat” gets around 17 million. Interestingly, however, the top three results — various pages of the official democrats.org site — are identical for both searches. With the “ic” or without, the party obviously understands SEO.

Hertzberg’s most on-point observation about this “handy way to express contempt” is that it is “jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” Fairly may be an understatement; wade into the weeds of the comment threads on any political website and you’ll find caps-lock rants about DemoRATS and ReTHUGlicans (or RePUGlicans, which I can only assume is a play on “repugnant”). Subtle these folks are not; they display the same level of maturity that produces oh-so-clever monickers like “Obummer” or “Obambi.” And that doesn’t even include the technically accurate yet passive-agressively hostile “Barack Hussein Obama.”

Hertzberg also relates two particularly telling anecdotes. Whereas conservative intellectuals once eschewed the term, with William F. Buckley, Jr., declaring that “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” the proliferation of the “ic”-less version has tracked the rightward lurch of the Republican party itself. Still, Hertzberg writes:

In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.)

That NewsMax, always classy.

It comes as no surprise that two of the drivers of “Democrat Party” were Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, who famously circulated a memo in the 1990s urging fellow Republicans to describe the opposition with loaded words like “sick” and “pathetic.” Luntz now makes self-parodying appearances on The Colbert Report, holding focus groups to hone Colbert’s “corporations are people” message, but in 2006 he told Hertzberg that “those two letters actually do matter.” Hertzberg adds that Luntz had “recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled ‘Words That Work’—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of ‘ic’s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.”

Ultimately, getting under liberal skin is exactly what “Democrat Party” is designed to do — and complaining about semantics only makes Democrats look petty. I realize that letting it bother me only plays into the hands of the GOP, but I can’t help wanting, whenever I see Mitch McConnell on TV droning on about the evils of the Democrat agenda, to reach out and give his nose a good, strong tweak.

Banned in 2012!

The end of the year reliably inspires “Top Ten” and “Best of 2011” lists in every conceivable category, ranging from the normal (movies) to the inane (stupid celebrity quotations) to the obscure (YouTube videos about dachshunds). For those interested in the continued mangling of the English language, there’s the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion’s list of most annoying — albeit not very creative — words (whatever, for the third year running, followed by like). Michigan’s little-known Lake Superior State University puts out a “List of Banished Words” that includes viral and epic. At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum compiles “the year’s crop of stupid and annoying catchphrases” that “identify the user as a loser.” Topping the list is junk (as in, “don’t touch my junk”) and fail (particularly “epic fail”).  The folks at Merriam-Webster even break it down by month, pointing out spikes in their look-up stats for “chutzpah” on July 15 (when Michele Bachmann pronounced it choots-puh in a Fox News interview) and “zany” on December 14 (when Mitt Romney used it to describe Newt Gingrich).

The last thing the world needs is another list, so I’ve narrowed mine down to two: the Lamest Political Words of 2011. In the holiday spirit of bipartisanship, there’s one for Democrats and one for Republicans. These two words made my list not because of their lack of truthfulness but because they don’t function well as language. They are cliches that aim not to communicate meaning but to incite the party’s base or dig at an opponent. Both have been so overused as to be worthless. There are plenty of blatant lies in politics, like “Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an Entitlement Society” (yeah, after paying taxes for my whole life, I do think I’m entitled not to eat cat food when I’m 85) or “Obama is a food-stamp president” (what would Gingrich be, the “let-them-starve president”?). But there are also plenty of people and organizations, from FactCheck to Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, to handle those lies. Here, then, is my two cents.

1. Job-killing

Technically, I suppose “job-killing” is not a single word, but my objection to it still stands. It’s an emotionally charged term churned out by the same Republican propaganda machine that gave us “Obamacare.” I wouldn’t be surprised if it were among the words focus-grouped by conservative strategy guru Frank Luntz, who appears regularly on Comedy Central to advise Stephen Colbert on promoting corporate personhood. (Among his gems: Corporations are people . . . People are corporations. Really, the GOP pays good money for this?) “Job-killing” applies to any policy Republicans don’t like; it’s the flip side of the same logic that turns anyone earning more than $1 million into a “job creator.” Environmental regulations, higher taxes on hedge fund managers, new rules on light-bulb efficiency — they’re all proven job destroyers in GOP-ville. Yet despite all the “job-killing” overkill (pun very much intended), there aren’t a lot of facts to back up the accusations. Repeating something often enough doesn’t make it true; it just makes it irritating – or at the very least, a drinking game on par with taking a shot every time Herman Cain says “9-9-9,” Mitt Romney says “private sector experience,” or any Republican candidate invokes Ronald Reagan.

Listen to conservatives and you’d think Democrats are out to assassinate the American workforce. Liberals are obviously on a mission to destroy jobs because . . . a lousy economy will help Obama get reelected? Dubious logic notwithstanding, the phrase proliferates. During the recent payroll tax cut imbroglio, John Boehner boasted of passing a measure “without job-killing tax hikes.” Boehner apparently doesn’t have access to a thesaurus, as he used the same words – “job-killing tax hikes” – to characterize the debt-reduction proposal offered by the Democratic members of the supercommittee. In September, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing with the subtle title “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs.” And Boehner’s leadership team issued a study that described health care reform as “a budget-busting, job-killing health care law.”

The EPA is by far the favorite target of the GOP’s murder mysteries. Bachmann believes “it should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America.” Rick Perry pairs his fundraising pitch with rants about the agency’s “job-killing zealots.” (The EPA apparently does to jobs what Perry would like to do to Ben Bernanke.) James Inhofe, the Senate’s leading climate change denier, lambastes the environmental regulations as a “job-killing train wreck” that would wreak havoc on the economy. Which would Republicans prefer – regulations that “kill” jobs or regulations so lax that they kill people? Of course, there is a middle ground; namely, regulations that aren’t strict enough to cost jobs but aren’t loose enough to, say, cause everyone within a five-mile radius of a power plant to drop dead from mercury poisoning. But finding that balance is next to impossible when negotiating with a party that believes any regulation affecting the economy should be off the table. The regulations (or lack thereof) promoted by the GOP will still kill people. They’ll just kill fewer people, or fewer brain cells. That’s better than decimating entire towns, but do we really want to set the bar so low? Are we really arguing that the current rules on fine-particle pollution are sufficient because “only” three or four children die from asthma attacks? That we don’t need to regulate dioxin because it “only” causes cancer and heart disease? America can do better than that. Even the most coldly calculating actuary has to admit, nothing kills a job quicker than killing the person who works at it. I realize I’m engaging in some hyperbole here, but the point is worth making. In his latest column, Paul Krugman points out that the EPA’s new mercury and particulate standards offer “up to $90 billion a year in benefits compared with around $10 billion a year of costs in the form of slightly higher electricity prices.” Those benefits include “the reduced loss in future wages for children whose I.Q.’s are damaged by eating fish caught by freshwater anglers.” The last thing environmental regulations are doing for these children is killing jobs.

2. “Fair Share”

I’m not quibbling with the logic behind President Obama’s constant exhortation of the rich to “pay their fair share” in taxes. The phrase is simply overused and worn out. Any term used so often as to become a catchphrase for the left – see “occupy” – automatically becomes a code word for the right as well. Just as Republicans hear “socialism” when Obama says “health care,” they hear “anti-wealth redistribution” when the president says “fair share.” Obama’s message is correct, but once a word starts setting off alarm bells in half his audience, it ought to be retired. Party leaders like John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi can get away with using language that appeals to their base, but the president is held to a higher standard: he must, to some degree, speak to the entire nation, not just the blue half of it. Yes, holding Obama to a higher standard limits his ability to respond to partisan attacks and distortions of his record, but that’s what his proxies — David Axlerod, the pugnacious Joe Biden — are for. Spider Man would say, With great power comes great responsibility.

In addition, speaking of the obligation of the wealthy to “pay their fair share” injects an unnecessary moral element into the conversation. Democrats may rightly think that all citizens have a moral responsibility to contribute to the general welfare, but once an argument is made in the language of morality, it is possible for the other side to argue a conflicting moral scenario. Obama’s language opens the door for conservatives to make the case for alternative morals and an alternative definition of fairness. In a recent campaign advertisement, Mitt Romney gravely tells us that “it is a moral imperative for America to stop spending more money than we take in.” The problem with morals is that everyone has his own set. A lot of liberal economists feel America has a moral imperative to keep spending more than it takes in, especially with interest rates at record lows, until unemployment drops and the economy is strong enough to perform without stimulus. Fairness is simply a quality with too many interpretations. To Republicans, a fair world is one in which individuals rise or fall based on hard work and luck; if some people have less, those who have more are under no obligation to offer assistance. My vision of a fair system is one in which the rich contribute more because they have more to give; conservatives would point to the 47% of “lucky duckies” who pay no income tax to argue that this is unfair, that the wealthy already pay more than their “fair share.”

Obama should speak not about process – paying a fair amount of taxes – but outcomes: The rich should pay what is needed to maintain a society in which all Americans have equal opportunity. This also implicitly addresses Mitt Romney’s specious characterization of Obama’s America as an “entitlement society.” He bemoans the fact that “Once we thought ‘entitlement’ meant that Americans were entitled to the privilege of trying to succeed in the greatest country in the world.” Fine. Take Romney at his word. Today, all Americans are not entitled to the privilege of trying to succeed. The deck has been stacked so heavily against those who grow up in abject poverty, with little opportunity for education or advancement, that we are in danger of losing our grasp on the title of “greatest country in the world.” If Romney really wants a society in which his version of entitlement is a real possibility, the wealthy will have to shoulder more responsibility. America is the greatest country in the world precisely because of the programs Romney believes “foster passivity and sloth.” In one of his strongest speeches, Obama plainly laid out his view of the world, classifying Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance not as money drains but as achievements: “We are a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further – we would not be a great country without those commitments.” Romney calls for a “merit-based society,” but that society is only possible if all citizens are entitled to a level playing field – the exact playing field created by such poverty-alleviating programs as food stamps and Social Security. It’s hard for people to succeed based on merit or “pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams” if they have to work three jobs to pay for cereal and milk. I don’t care how much is “fair” for rich people to pay in taxes. I care that they pay enough to – and again I quote Romney – “keep America America.”

The rest of Romney’s ad neatly ties together the worst political words of 2011. The national debt, he says, is “killing jobs.” Sigh. Some things never change.

Yeah, so I was saying . . . .

I recently stumbled across a 2010 piece by Anand Giridharadas, who writes the “Currents” column for the Times, on the rise of a new verbal tic: the word “so.” Appended to the front of nearly any spoken sentence, “so” joins the ranks of “um” and “like” as a meaningless place-filler that public speaking gurus will try valiantly to eliminate. Giridharadas believes that “so” is not as meaningless as it may seem, however. He quotes Michael Lewis, the popular author of Moneyball and The Big Short, as writing in 1999 that “When a computer programmer answers a question, he often begins with the word ‘so.'” With the ascendancy of the technology sector, “so” spread to the general population, creating what Giridharadas characterizes as “a kind of thinking that appealed to problem-solving types: conversation as a logical, unidirectional process, proceeding much in the way of software code — if this, then that.”

Attributing broader cultural trends to a specific cause is always risky, and Giridharadas is on firmer ground when he notes that “so” ties what follows it to what has come before. It forges a connection, a cause-and-effect relationship, between one person’s statement and the other person’s response. Conservations are all too often one-sided: I pretend to listen to what you say, but instead of reflecting on your words, my mind is already formulating a rebuttal, just waiting for the chance to express my own opinion. “So” implies that I have heard what you are saying, that your words have influenced mine, when in reality my point was honed and formulated before our exchange even began. “So” eliminates the awkwardness of the non-sequitur. It is a “signal that one’s coming words are chosen for relevance to the listener.” According to one scholar interviewed by Giridharadas, it demonstrates “that we are concerned with displaying interest for others and downplaying our interest in our own affairs.”

It is not difficult to see the popularity of “so” as an attempt to make up for our increasingly perfunctory communication style. E-mail and text messages don’t allow us to couch our words in body language or facial expressions; all that is left is the word on the page, stripped of any information that might clarify intentions or soften a seemingly caustic remark. “So” seems to be a good-faith offering, an acknowledgment that “I know what you’re saying” or “I follow your reasoning.”

In my own speech, I notice fewer instances of “so” than of that similar transition, “yeah.” Both work as a bridge between your last remark and whatever response has since percolated in my brain. Conversations are not linear exchanges; they rarely amount to the focused give and take of movie dialogue, in which Person A picks up the thread left by Person B and runs with it. Instead, during the silence between our words, my mind operates tangentially, leaping from your lousy day at work to my coworker’s irritating YouTube habit to my own distaste for barking cats and dancing grizzly bears. When I finally get the chance to speak, what I have to say seems be bear little relevance to what came directly before it. The “yeah” habit infects even sui generis comments: it is the preface to everything, even sentences that break the silence. “Yeah, I really need to find some new shoes,” implies an agreement that does not exist, an excuse for broaching an otherwise irrelevant or self-centered topic.

So. Yeah. Neither takes responsibility for the opinions or proclamations to come. Both serve as place holders, updated “likes” or “uhs” for the twenty-first century. The good news may be that, one the trend subsides and technology may make such words more extraneous than ever. After all, when every letter counts, there is not room among 140 characters for filler. Or perhaps we’ll just adapt: Yh, so I’ll c u l8r.

Word[s]count – 7/31/11

I’m sensing a double negative here . . .

“America can no longer afford neither new Marshall Plans nor new wars.”

(From a NYTimes article, 7/31/11)

Either eliminate the “no” (America can afford neither new Marshall Plans nor new wars”) or replace neither/nor with either/or.

What Makes a Recession Great?

"Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs)," 1936 Photograph by Walker Evans via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

UPDATE – 7/21/11: In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman provides a convenient definition of “Great Recession” (which he limits to a two-year period) and coins a new term, the “Lesser Depression.” If “Great Recession” smacks of hyperbole, this one really takes the cake.

“In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.”

When did the recession become the Great Recession? At some point, the current downturn in the economy morphed from a mere bad patch into a capital-letter event, a prolonged slump whose title carries more than the country are suffering from drought, but there is no Dust Bowl. The social safety net, itself partly a product of the Depression, has reduced the number of hungry and destitute people. Walker Evans’ sobering black and white portraits of poverty have given way to “ruin porn,” a genre of photography in which the camera feasts its eyes on overgrown lots and condemned Detroit properties. What’s notable is that these pictures are of things, not people; the recession has pushed families out of their foreclosed homes, but it has not led — in most cases, anyway — to starving children. New York Times columnist David Leonhardt agrees that there is no real comparison between today’s recession and the depression of the 1930s: “It is no coincidence that this downturn has been far less severe than the Great Depression,” he wrote in a June 14 column. Yet just over a month later, Leonhardt is using the new label, observing recently that “There is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs.” When even The New York Times signs on to a neologism, you can be sure of its place in the vernacular. Indeed, the term appears in straight news articles as well as in more casually-written opinion pieces. The same day that Leonhardt made the reference in his column, an article in the National section discussed the impact of federal budget cuts, which “many governors fear will hurt their states as they are still recovering slowly from the Great Recession.”

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when and where the “Great Recession” phrase was coined. Google’s Books Ngram Viewer, which mines a database of more than 5.2 million books to chart the frequency of usage of a word (or words) over 200 years, isn’t much help: Its most current year is 2000, which means that the graph spikes dramatically during the stagflation crisis of the 1980s and then trends downward as time goes on. After all, in 2000, the U.S. was running budget surpluses, the dot-com bubble was still expanding, and banks hadn’t begun throwing mortgages at anyone with a pulse. I would imagine, however, that “Great Recession” is a fairly recent term. It seems to be popping up everywhere lately, and beyond anecdotal evidence, it seems logical to assume that economy has to be lousy for quite awhile before people start prefacing anything with the word “Great.” The financial crisis hit in 2008; three years of high unemployment rates and stagnating wages are apparently enough for writers and politicians to begin drawing parallels to the largest economic downturn in modern history.

Is it "ruin porn"? "Algernon, Detroit" Photograph by Andrew Moore via andrewmoore.com

The term isn’t universal by any means. Its slightly kitschy air makes it more suited to Associated Press stories, which already take a conversational tone (“So what can you do to reduce your risk of heart disease?”) and employ colloquial language (children are always “kids,” and two words are verboten when a contraction is possible). Indeed, the AP has been a great populizer of the phrase; hardly a day goes by that a story referencing the Great Recession can’t be found on its home page. AP writers regularly use the term multiple times in one story. On July 9, under the headline “Black economic gains reversed in Great Recession,” the reporter notes that “economists say the Great Recession lasted from 2007 to 2009,” and that a woman interviewed for the article “pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life – until the Great Recession.” That the recession technically ended in 2009 but is only now coming into use as a title fits with the idea that we are always looking backward. The economy is officially growing, albeit slowly, but the economic slump only became Great when its effects seemed to last much longer than two years. In another AP story, the reporter notes that, while “the country may be pulling out of the Great Recession,” states still face tight budgets.

“Great Recession” turns up in a variety of magazines, and is used not just by members of the chattering class but by politicians-cum-authors like Al Gore, who excoriates the media’s coverage of global warming in Rolling Stone. He writes that “anyone who honestly examines the incredible challenges confronting President Obama when he took office has to feel enormous empathy for him: the Great Recession with the high unemployment and the enormous public and private indebtedness it produced; two seemingly interminable wars . . . .” The term isn’t evident (at least by my count) in The Atlantic Monthly until the July/August issue, when two of the authors of its “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year” make the reference in their one-page blurbs. It’s used first in a piece about government bonds — “For more than a decade before the Great Recession began, a surge of global saving increased the demand for Treasury bonds and raised their prices, delivering handsome capital gains” — and again in a discussion of multi-generational households, which notes that, “during the Great Recession, 2.6 million more Americans found themselves living with relatives.”

Just as notable, however, are the publications that decline to use the phrase, which has a hyperbolic, populist edge that one can imagine the Times copy editor shaking his head at. For every mention in the Times, there are, at the least, four of five sentences in which the economic downturn is referred to simply as “the recession” — lowercase, no qualifier. A June 20 article on an uptick in charitable donations observes that “the increase was the first since 2007, when the recession started and led to the biggest decline in giving in more than 40 years.” Likewise, a July 3 piece on executive pay talks about “the 2008-9 recession.” In many cases, well-written papers like the Times seem to be reaching for a more specific designation than the nebulous “Great Recession,” which raises as many questions as it answers. How long does a recession have to be to be considered Great? Does the term refer only to the official recession, defined by economists as two successive quarters of decline in GDP, or does it encompass the three or four years of general malaise in which the country still feels trapped? The Japanese speak of a “Lost Decade,” which is actually more precise than “Great Recession,” as it at least denotes a specific time period. Also up for grabs is whether “Great Recession” refers to the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, or whether it includes the post-bailout years as well.

As long as unemployment tops nine percent and home prices continue to flatline, usage of “Great Recession” will only grow in frequency. People like to think that they are facing the worst hard times, that no one has had it as bad as they, and the connection to the Great Depression fills that desire. Newspapers and other media outlets strive to speak to the greater, less-educated segment of the population that turns to the Internet for news and regards the “media elite” with suspicion. “Great Recession” is not a particularly precise or even accurate term, but unfortunately, it seems it is here to stay.

Word[s]count – Mix-Meat Pie, Anyone?

Is it petty to complain about little mistakes, the sort that are more than typos but less that egregious errors? I like to think I harp on the Gray Lady because I respect it so much; I hate to see casual mistakes in the Times because I know it’s a better paper than that. Still, the cavalier attitude toward quality in Web-edition articles is pernicious. Publications that would be embarrassed to find errors in their print editions seem to shrug it off when a mangled sentence turns up online. The latest example:

About five hours after I captured the screen shot, the first sentence was altered: “Mr. Miliband minced no words in demanding that Mr. Cameron reverse course on the British Sky Broadcasting takeover and instruct the cabinet minister responsible . . . .” It’s interesting that corrections are appended (and therefore acknowledged) when a name is misspelled or a title misstated, but run-of-the-mill spelling and usage errors are wiped away with an eraser, not circled with a red pen.

In other Times news, we have a new entry in the “Links Run Amok” contest. The latest eye-roller:

Laura, the young mother, lives with a lot of fear — of what would happen to her children if she were deported, of whether they will be able to thrive in school, of how they will grow up to be strong and healthy living in such conditions.

The link pairs “healthy” with “living” when the emphasis is on being “strong and healthy” while “living in such conditions” and completely garbles the sentence. It’s worth noting that the article, which details the myriad health problems that afflict residents of colonias along the Texas-Mexico border, is already chock-full of automatic links to everything from salmonella to hysterectomies to Hansen’s disease (leprosy). The story has been online since yesterday, but it hasn’t yet received the mixed/minced treatment. Apparently nobody’s double-checking the linking software with a red pen either.

Homing in on Inaccuracy

The AP Stylebook doesn’t have an entry for either hone or home, which may explain this headline:

Granted, the difference between “honing in” and “homing in” has slipped in recent years, just as the line between “stanch” and “staunch” has blurred. I disagree with the elision of either, though; a soldier is a staunch patriot, but no one should be “staunching” a wound. The gantlet/gauntlet distinction is more often upheld. You throw down a gauntlet (a glove), but you run a gantlet. Politicians and other talking heads regularly use “gauntlet” for both, but that sloppiness doesn’t usually extend to the written word. Some people may regard the honing/homing and stanch/staunch debate as a stuffy relic — after all, the dictionary allows that “stanch” may be a synonym for “staunch” and vice versa — but I think it’s a distinction worth preserving. I’m not a rigid traditionalist; you won’t see me pushing for “boy friend” instead of “boyfriend” (frankly, the two seem quite different — a boy who’s a friend vs. a boy you date) or sticking an apostrophe before “Net” to indicate the shortening from “Internet” (really, who the heck calls it the Net anyway?).

The grammar police at About.com has this to say:

Traditionally, a missile homes in (not hones in) on a target. Hone means “to sharpen.” The verb home means “to move toward a goal” or “to be guided to a target.” But some usage guides (see notes below) now recognize hone in on as an acceptable alternative to home in on.

Some usage guides — not all. Naturally, a member of the Bush family was one of the first to mangle the distinction. Merriam-Webster explains, and ultimately comes down on the side of the “homers”:

An issue looming on the usage horizon is the propriety of the phrase hone in on. George Bush’s use of this phrase in the 1980 presidential campaign (he talked of ‘honing in on the issues’) caught the critical eye of political columnist Mary McCrory, and her comments on it were noted, approved, and expanded by William Safire. Safire observed that hone in on is a confused variant of home in on, and there seems to be little doubt that he was right. . . . Our first example of home in on is from 1951, in a context having to do with aviation. Our earliest record of its figurative use is from 1956. We did not encounter hone in on until George Bush used it in 1980. . . .

Recent evidence suggests that hone in on is becoming increasingly common. We have found it twice in the past few years in the pages of a popular magazine. . . .

It may be that eventually hone in on will become so common that dictionaries will begin to enter it as a standard phrase; and usage commentators

will then routinely rail against it as an ignorant corruption of the language. That is a development we can all look forward to, but it’s time is not yet. In the meantime, we recommend that you use home in on instead.

Garner’s Modern American Usage, also cited on About.com, is more succinct:

home in, not hone in, is the correct phrase. In the 19th century, the metaphor referred to what homing pigeons do; by the early 20th century, it referred also to what aircraft and missiles do.

The takeaway? The copy editors at the AP have egg on their faces again. Further evidence? The headline has since disappeared. The updated article, “William gets trophy, kisses after Calif. polo game,” only confirms that, yes, royals are extremely boring. A wife kisses her husband, and this is news? The usage error may have been the most exciting thing about this story.

Word[s]count 5/11/11

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.