Suspect Language

Ex-Marine Apologizes For Killing Robbery Suspect
ATLANTA -- A former Marine cook was acting in fear of his life and will not face charges for fatally stabbing one teenager and wounding a second while fending off a robbery in Midtown Atlanta by a group of youths armed with two guns and a pair of brass knuckles.


Once again, the people who attacked this guy aren't suspects, especially the dead one. She was an attacker. She never was, and never will be--since she's dead--be accused or charged with this attack.

It's All Relative. Isn't It?

Family Members Join Journalist Wounded in Iraq
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Kimberly Dozier was aware that they were there and was able to respond to their presence, CBS reported.

I don't want to pick on The New York Times, since it is far from the only publication using this term. But what ever happened to "relative"?

Nieman News

Glad to see that a copy editor, Gina Acosta, is one of the new Nieman fellows.

CX Marks the Spot

About a week ago, Byron Calame, public editor of The New York Times, wrote a column about how a faulty Page One story went unchallenged. He notes that despite a questionable premise, the story was published and, though challenged by the company involved, went uncorrected for a week. The original erroneous report even provoked a piece of art on the Times' op-ed page before Times editors decided how to go about correcting the story. Calame's piece gives us a tiny bit of insight into editorial mistakes and correction policies in the news business, especially when the challenge comes from outside the publication.
A few years ago, the Times collected some of its more ridiculous errors in its book Kill Duck Before Serving. (My personal favorite was the transcriber error that led the Times to refer to an ultra-Orthodox Jew as a "Bedouin of Israeli politics" when it meant to say, "veteran of Israeli politics.")

But less amusing is what University of North Carolina law professor Eric Muller found when he scrutinized a statement on Fox News. In early May, he heard Judge Andrew Napolitano telling a story meant to support his view that federal government's commerce-governing powers are out of control. Though Muller searched the archives for supposed case Napolitano had reported, found nothing and then asked Napolitano for more details, the judge has yet to respond.

The Fox News issue, aside from not being a surprise, raises some other questions. At what point does a newspaper owe a correction?
When it has simply been wrong over a period of time? When it is being sued?" Or been fed a leak about someone that turns out to be wrong? When it has bought into the
administration's view of the world?

Keeping Our Heads Up

BAGnewsNotes has cited an interesting effort during World War II to measure the effect of headlines on civilian morale.

Read about the study by Gordon Allport. The page doesn't allow any copying of text, so you'll have to go to the link to read it.

Not surprisingly, TV headlines about the NOAA's predictions about the hurricane season were scarier than those carried by others, at the same time.

NOAA itself, despite one of the worst graphics of all time (It looks as if it were put together with Microsoft Word Art), took a calmer, down the middle approach.
NOAA PREDICTS VERY ACTIVE 2006 NORTH ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON
Residents in Hurricane Prone Areas Urged to Make Preparations

The Associated Press took a decidedly cautious approach, with the headline even more careful than the story.
Experts: Hurricane Season Won't Match '05
By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ, Associated Press Writer
MIAMI - The next Atlantic hurricane season could produce up to 16 named storms, six of them major hurricanes, suggesting another active year but not the record pounding of 2005, scientists said Monday.

But good old CNN went full tilt, no doubt hoping for more thrilling pictures of hapless news talkers being knocked over by the wind and rain.
Busy Atlantic season could bring up to 10 hurricanes
(CNN) -- The 2006 Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be an active one, with up to 10 of the big storms, the National Hurricane Center announced Monday.

Then there are these two very different headlines, which appeared exactly this way on Yahoo's little news summary on its e-mail service.

FTC: Some Gas Price Gouging After Katrina (AP)
FTC gasoline price probe finds nothing illegal (Reuters)

This would seem to be more than just a difference in tone. While both could be true, which fact is more important, that there was some gouging or that it isn't illegal?
The New York Times went with the not-illegal angle and a little beyond: Gas Prices Legitimate, Study Says.
Here are some others:
Chicago Tribune: Industry absolved in rise of gas price; Report by FTC finds the markets worked after '05 hurricanes

Ft. Worth Star-Telegram: FTC: Price gouging wasn't widespread

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: FTC: Little gas price gouging

Los Angeles Times: Drivers See Slip in Gas Prices; It is the first substantial decline since February. An FTC study finds some gouging but no market manipulation after the hurricanes

St. Paul Pioneer Press: FTC finds little Katrina gas price gouging

Washington Post: Gas Prices Not Manipulated After Katrina, FTC Says; Market Conditions, Not 'Gouging,' Led to Higher Costs

USAToday: FTC finds little gouging on gas prices after Katrina

Grounded and Sunk, Again

From Yahoo again:

You sunk my battleship
Explosive charges turn aircraft carrier USS Oriskany into a massive artificial reef....

SANK. It's SANK.

----
Hugging the floor?
William Triplett in Daily Variety
Unlike his predecessor, Scott McClellan, who developed a rep as a brusque stonewaller, Snow, his hands casually holding the podium sides, generally engaged questioners with eye contact and a seeming desire to answer.

Though podium/lectern aren't included, Weber State University has a quick list of commonly misused words, as does Washington State University with a much more comprehensive list. See the ACES reference page for more useful tips.

And here's the annual list of banished words.

Sensitive Words

It didn't take long for Tony Snow to make the news. Although his understandably emotional remarks related to his cancer got a lot of attention yesterday, his "tar baby" comment got less. But it didn't go unnoticed by the MSM.

Snow was clearly using the word to mean trying to avoid a sticky, no-win situation, a kind of quagmire. But "tar baby" is also a slur used by racists to refer to African-Americans and thus should be avoided.

The fight over the use of the word "niggardly" was an entirely different matter. People not familiar with the meaning of the word added their own interpretation and used it to cudgel a colleague. Over at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Dick Prince quotes Tony Marcano: ""The n-word, which has been flung in my direction from some of our less evolved fellow citizens, cuts right to the bone. I still get a twinge in the pit of my stomach before I hear the 'dly' at the end of 'niggardly,' so I can understand the sensitivity to the word.
But there's a vast difference between sensitivity and hypersensitivity, just as there's a vast difference between niggardly and the slur..."

We have no shortage of words or phrases that are either intended or interpreted as slurs. But the interpretation ought to belong to the person most likely to be offended by the phrase, not by the majority who want to say, "But I didn't mean anything" or, as in the case of team mascots such as Chief , "It's meant as a compliment".
That said, we don't need to invent a definition and label a word a slur when the history of the word or phrase shows otherwise.


Some other phrases:
Paddywagon

Dutch Treat

Indian giver/summer

None of these sites explain why street people are referred to as "balkies" in Connecticut.

Phil Milano has been working for several years at getting people to understand each other by asking and answering questions that are usually not considered acceptable topics in "polite" conversation. That doesn't mean the topics aren't discussed; they just tend to come up in more homogeneous circles.

Random House has developed "OQ," an "offensiveness quotient" designed as a guide to avoiding offense, and a short list of terms.

And then there's the classic SNL word association skit.

Watch Out for Subjunctivitis

Ruth Walker writes about whether the subjunctive mood is disappearing from English. We are treated to an excellent explanation of the subjunctive in Ray Charles' lyrics over at Language Log. Professor Shetter gets in the mood.

And finally, at About, we read about the need for the subjunctive in Spanish.

Let the Floccinaucinihilipilification Begin!

A random package of pieces about the importance of vocabulary:
On the Job

The Job of Language

The Language of Smileys

And, of interest to all:
The longest word, according to the BBC, has 1,913 letters and is the term for the formula C1289H2051N343O375S8.

Meta Ideas

Suppose you're the editor of a smallish newspaper, looking for fresh ideas not generated by your newsroom. Try Metafilter While trying not to name names it's seems rather clear that a few reporters, from a few papers (cough, a certain major newspaper located on West 43rd Street) are reading the site and then writing about topics that pop up there.

And darn, Nicole Stockdale beat me to the posting of this amusing link where you can produce a snippet of a newspaper using your own text, also seen first (by me, anyway) on Metafilter. It's similar to the church sign generator site, but the first site lists or links to a lot of other fun tools. Personally, all mine went to praising the kid and her soccer team...

Seriously, Metafilter is a great example of the value of blogs to journalists. So many sites allow ordinary people to raise some great topics and alert us to things we'd otherwise not know about. And, rather than waste our time tearing the blogs down, we ought to be using the information these sites develop. Doesn't mean all of it; doesn't mean we shouldn't credit them (!). Above all, it doesn't mean people should or will stop reading newspapers. It's just common sense to take information and do something with it: re-report, verify, debunk, develop.

Words Matter, Some More Than Others

CJR has a good piece on the White House's effort to fight stories it doesn't like by issuing "set the record straight" press releases. The problem, CJR says, is that the releases themselves play loose with the facts.

It seems that now, perhaps more than ever, we need to guard against sloppy and loose language because there's a huge echo chamber on the blogs on on cable networks who play word games, never quite answering questions, armed with their talking points and all trying to persuade readers or viewers through their highly selective choice of language. By no means is this seemingly sloppy choice of language truly an accident. And the unbelievably careless way words are thrown around by many cable newscasters is enough to make anyone who thinks about language despair.

While we're at it, we're continuing to see poor language choices or carelessness creep into normal, day to day coverage. For example, here's part of a newspaper sentence about the domestic spying program revealed a few months ago:
"... challenge the warrantless surveillance program against al-Qaida revealed in December." Designed to, maybe. But who knows? The question hanging over this program since the revelation has been, why no FISA court approval? And if we know someone is a suspect, why no warrant, no other legal crackdown? In other words, how did they become suspects and what is the government doing about them?

What's the problem? Well, who says it was a program "against al-Qaida"? Yes, the government said that only terror suspects were being tracked through this program. But others vehemently disagree, and, given the USA Today revelations this week, it would seem that the tracking involved millions of people, most of whom are not likely to be al-Qaida members. But the choice of wording affects the perception of readers, many of whom aren't paying a lot of attention. Copy editors, beware.

Co-Signs

From Sharon Baldwin

If the Future of the News Biz Looks a Little Scary...

Students and career changers, over at the Speculative Grammarian, you can play a game and choose your career.

The P.U. on Puns, Part 2

Back to the "pun ban" just once more: Nicole Stockdale did yeoman work, going directly to the source of the ban. And Language Log chimes in with a careful explication of what constitutes a pun and what does not.

At the Chicago Tribune, Eric Zorn's blog, topped by a punny headline, examines the issue, too, and provokes these comments:

Such a ban would have prohibited the Sunday Tribune headline "Carpe Diem on the Illinois River," a terrific way into James Janega's engaging story about commercial fishermen making the most of the river's Asian carp explosion.

I'm all for banning bad headlines, with or without puns. But word play well done is a treat for the reader, and editor.

Ann Marie Lipinski

--
Reminds me of a small town newspaper on the Western Slope of Colorado in the 70s. We were all hippies and ran a loose ship.

One day a car went over a mountainside, and a tow truck was summoned to pull it out. Ooops, the tow truck went down the same mountainside. Big mess!

Call out one of the big wreckers. Take picture of big wrecker pulling up two battered vehicles. Place picture on page one.

The headline (written by someone far more talented that I): "Oh what a tangled wreck we weave, when we consipire to retrieve."

Paul Borzo


The key with using puns as headlines is whether they are clever or groaners, and I think too many times, editors can't tell the difference, or to put it more chartiably, don't share the same taste in them as I do. A recent example of one that was actually neither clever nor a groaner, but a head-scratcher until you got several paragraphs into the story and then misused the key term in question was "Garland a groupie." This was one that made absolutely no sense headlining a story on a White Sox game that Jon Garland pitched until you got to a quote well into it where someone said words to the effect of "Garland had been pitching badly lately while the rest of the starters had been pitching well, so he was anxious to pitch well like them, so he could feel more like part of the group." Get it--he wanted to feel like a part of the group? Let's call him a groupie. Even though a groupie generally refers to a fan who pursues a star athlete or musician for the purpose of having sex with that star. That had to be one of the worst headlines I'd seen in a long time.

Dave Juhl

Yahoo's Headlines

• Dark-skinned foreigners in Russia blighted
• Amsterdam airport pilots high-tech screening

Ah, the wire services are at it again. Has anyone seen "blighted" used this way? The closest definitions that would allow this use are these, and they are both a major stretch:

An extremely adverse environmental condition, such as air pollution.

Something that impairs growth, withers hopes and ambitions, or impedes progress and prosperity.

To cause (a plant, for example) to undergo blight.
To have a deleterious effect on; ruin.


It is most likely a European usage on this AP story that we're not familiar with, appearing on the Yahoo site. That brings up some questions about the wisdom of using stories edited by people in other parts of the world for American readers.

And,"Amsterdam airport pilots high-tech screening" also on Yahoo, one of those heds confused by the attempt to play with the word "pilots" but complicated by the fact that the word can be either a noun or a verb, and the reader has to guess which. Note that the "pilots" headline ran on the main Yahoo page but read differently on top of the story.

Heckle and Jeckle

From the Orlando Sentinel: Ex-CIA analyst, others heckle Rumsfeld during Atlanta speech
Was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld heckled by a former CIA agent who stood in line and pressed Rumsfeld to answer several questions? Or simply challenged?

According to dictionary.com, heckling means:
To try to embarrass and annoy (someone speaking or performing in public) by questions, gibes, or objections; badger.
That would seem to suggest that the word might not be quite right, unless you think that the questions were meant ONLY to embarrass and annoy Rumsfeld.

And Oxford English dictionary:
To catechize severely, with a view to discover the weak points of the person interrogated. Long applied in Scotland to the public questioning of parliamentary candidates.

Under the OED definition, in particular, Ray McGovern's questioning might qualify as heckling, though that word seems to be more regularly applied to people who shout out questions or insults at someone on stage. Think Jerry Seinfeld.

Given the nature of McGovern's questions, "heckling" seems a bit strong for the circumstances, a rather loaded word assuming deliberate intent to show up the secretary rather than get answers.

And is "heckled" related to "hectoring"? They would seem to have a common root. Surprise, apparently not.

"Hectoring" (To intimidate or dominate in a blustering way) has a very interesting history. Drawn from the name of the prince of Troy slain by Achilles, the word was originally used positively, as a synonym for hero. But The Mavens at Random Dictionary say this: Indeed, in late Middle and early Modern English the word hector was used generically to mean 'a valiant hero'.

But in the mid-seventeenth century, London was plagued by a violent street gang who called themselves "the Hectors," fancying themselves gallant warriors. The other residents, less thrilled with the Hectors' hooliganism, started using the name as a noun referring to a swaggering bully. At around the same time the word developed the familiar verb sense 'to bully or harass'.

In Greek the name Hector literally means 'holding fast', after a verb 'to have; hold'.


"Heckling" on the other hand, comes from the Middle English hekelen, to comb with a hatchel, a comb for separating flax fibers.

Ya learn something new every day.

Bashing the Blogs

One of the more disturbing things showing up at Poynter, The New York Times and many other places is the relentless knocking of blogs as unprofessional, unreliable, unworthy of anyone serious about news gathering and reporting.

One of the central problems with these attacks is defining the enemy--which blogs deserve such antipathy?
Jay Rosen's?
Dana Milbank's at The Washington Post?
Patriotboy's?

We are hearing pretty regularly that the blogs can't measure up to the reporting flowing out of the regular press and, to a lesser extent, the networks and cable news shows. There's a great deal of defensiveness of what constitutes reporting and editing.

We can certainly agree that there's a lot of drivel passing for political commentary. Some of it fills the blogs. Some of it fills newspaper columns. Blogs allow for a great outpouring of opinion, much of it unfiltered, unedited. Much of it is worth ignoring. But there is also a great deal of reporting, fact checking, researching, assessing, analysis going on on the better blogs and we ought to stop bashing them. And figure out a way to put local, community bloggers to use at our own newspapers, not to replace or supplant professional reporters but simply to add to the news available to readers.

John Robinson at the Greensboro News & Record certainly has made a big start on using blogs well. We should all pay attention and drop the knee-jerk attacks and, if need be, take control of them as a force for information, instead of pointing fingers and screaming mean things about them.

P U to Puns

The San Antonio Express-News has banned puns in headlines, after editor Robert Rivard reported reading nine of them in one edition.

Puns have long been known as a form of low-class, cheap humor, often mocked for their silliness and stretching of language. Some of them, though, are useful and have a place when used properly.

Rivard clearly was angered by what he read. "I am prepared to take disciplinary action against our most senior headline writers and editors if my order is not respected," Rivard wrote. "I do not want to be the editor of a newspaper where we limit the creative use of language ... I want even less to be the editor of a newspaper riddled with puns." .

As Nicole Stockdale notes over at A Capital Idea,
Rivard also wrote, "It's a shame to see the good work of so many disparaged because of the immaturity of a few headline writers who seem more focused on peer approval than on producing a quality newspaper for the community."

Whew. Harsh language for fellow newsroom professionals.

Aside from the tone of Rivard's memo, a ban seems shortsighted. Once placed, bans are hard to lift. What happens when a story cries out for headline humor? Who will risk Rivard's wrath to write something humorous and risk being publicly identified as immature by the boss? UPDATE: Apparently, Don Podesta at The Washington Post agrees that bans aren't wise.

A further quibble is that some of them aren't puns.

Here are a few of the heads cited in a column by Express-News public editor Bob Richter outlining the matter.

"Old well ends well: River Walk threat wiped out"

"Mumps outbreak swells"

"Border violence killing tourism"

"Bell's name doesn't have a familiar ring for many voters"

"(Pope) Benedict names a flock of new cardinals"

Over at the wonderfully named Irregardless, Webster's definition is this: ""the humorous use of a word, or of words which are formed or sounded alike but have different meanings, in such a way as to play on two or more of the possible applications; a play on words."

Here's
another definition of a pun: a word play suggesting, with humorous intent, the different meanings of one word or the use of two or more words similar in sound but different in meaning.

In other words, a pun has to "work both ways," not simply use the word "killing" in a story about violence and tourism.

Cole vs. Hitchens

Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East, has a complaint about "attack journalism" and, more specifically, Christopher Hitchens. If the latter did what Cole says he did--and I believe Cole--Hitchens deserves a smack in the head and the condemnation of journalists everywhere.

Here's part of what Cole wrote today:

Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist
And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War!

Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology.

I belong to a private email discussion group called Gulf2000. It has academics, journalists and policy makers on it. It has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list. It is run, edited and moderated by former National Security Council staffer for Carter and Reagan, Gary Sick, now a political scientist at Columbia University. The "no-forwarding" rule is his, and is intended to allow the participants to converse about controversial matters without worrying about being in trouble. Also, in an informal email discussion, ideas evolve, you make mistakes and they get corrected, etc. It is a rough, rough draft.

Hitchens somehow hacked into the site, or joined and lurked, or had a crony pass him things. And he has now made my private email messages the subject of an attack on me in Slate. (I am not linking to the article because it is highly unethical and Slate does not deserve any direct traffic from my site for it.) Moreover, he did not even have the decency to quote the final outcome of the discussions.

I'd like to take this opportunity to complain about the profoundly dishonest character of "attack journalism." Journalists are supposed to interview the subjects about which they write. Mr. Hitchens never contacted me about this piece. He never sought clarification of anything. He never asked permission to quote my private mail. Major journalists have a privileged position. Not just anyone can be published in Slate. Most academics could not get a gig there (I've never been asked to write for it). Hitchens is paid to publish there because he is a prominent journalist. But then he should behave like a journalist, not like a hired gun for the far Right, smearing hapless targets of his ire. That isn't journalism. For some reason it drives the Right absolutely crazy that I keep this little web log, and so they keep trotting out these clowns in amateurish sniping attacks. It is rather sad, that one person standing up to them puts them into such piranha-like frenzy.

The precise reason for Hitchens' theft and publication of my private mail is that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

....

When Good Ideas Go Bad

News about the Los Angeles Times goes 'round the world.

Baltimore Sun Mr. Potato Head?

Hopeless black holes and automatic linking at
The New York Times as noted by Language Log

I sympathize with Kenneth Chang. According to his 5/2/2006 NYT story "Black Holes Collide, and Gravity Quivers":

Einstein's theory of general relativity changed the idea of gravity from a simple force dragging apples from a tree to a puzzle of geometry. Imagine a rubber sheet pulled taut horizontally and then tossing a bowling ball and a tennis ball onto it. The heavier bowling ball sinks deeper, and the tennis ball will move toward the bowling ball not because of a direct attraction between the two, but because the tennis ball rolls into the depression around the bowling ball.

If you follow the hyperlink that the Times helpfully provide for the word depression, you'll learn that

Depression, a mental illness, is marked by feelings of extreme sadness, hopelessness, and inadequacy. Individuals often experience disturbed sleep and weight change. Most people who commit suicide suffer from depression.

NOTE: The Times has since seen fit to eliminate the link for "depression."