When 'Disaster' Isn't Enough

What to call the Gulf oil disaster continues to confound people who are trying to adequately and accurately describe the situation.

"Spill" doesn't cut it, since it was and is no such thing, and "leak" doesn't do it, either.  I think "gusher" might be a bit better but still not strong enough.

Some links:

New York Times primer
Fake reporting by BP

New Language Honcho at the Times

The New York Times magazine has named Ben Zimmer as its new language columnist, succeeding the late William Safire.

Zimmer wrote about the trendy use of the word "optics" March 5 in the Times.

One Little Letter

Another in a continuing series of complaints about why we need editors and not technologists writing headlines. Even for the web.

 I suppose if two bands faced off, we would have a riff.  If you can't get through this link, consider yourself saved by a paywall.

Opinion: Riff between branches 'almost unprecedented'



When President Obama called out the Supreme Court, he set the stage for serious debate. ...

Bomb vs. Fire

This should be fun, figuring out exactly what material constitutes "incendiary" and which is "explosive" in the Detroit jetliner case. While we understand the different effects, I don't know how precise a distinction there is.

"A senior Department of Homeland Security official said that the materials Mr. Abdulmutallab had on him were “more incendiary than explosive,” and that he had tried to ignite them to cause a fire as the airliner was approaching Detroit."

A Word Every Editor Should Know

There's a word for everything.

It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."

You know that look. That's the one copy editors give the city desk when there's no copy forthcoming.

Can You Say Wiki?

John McIntyre is occupying his time writing enlightening commentary about style and writing rules, explaining newspaper lingo and other fun language-related stuff (including editor haiku.)

Someone on Facebook suggested to John that there may be a need for an "intervention" against the AP stylebook's errors and hoary rules, which leads me to nominate John to lead (no, I will NEVER say "helm") a kind of Editorpedia (there's already a dead-looking Editpedia) that counters or bolsters AP and other stylebooks.

I would defend the AP stylebook to an extent--at a time when our skills as editors are valued about as much as those of old-time elevator operators, I'm reluctant to trash anything that makes people think even a little bit about how to write, employ some decent grammar, etc. And I continue to wonder why we now reject rules we all grew up with as wrong or off track when there's no academy of language that says this is right, this is not. What's the starting point, folks? Who's the authority? I know, I know, there's always a pre-Shakespeare source to cite.


And, as far as the commentary going around about a Twitterer who treasures the AP stylebook--yes, it might be a little sad if that's all the person knows. But as someone who started in newspapers at 16 and in possession of as little knowledge of the world as you might infer from that, I found the AP stylebook to be a little treasure trove of information. I mean, who else knew why some countries' leaders were called prime ministers, while others were called premiers? Or offer a quick explanation of the world's major religions?

Yes, I've gone well beyond that, but I still page the stylebook just for fun, though not nearly as much as the gorgeous pages of a new American Heritage dictionary. And there are many great alternative sources of language rules and suggestions. But few serve so many people and publications and offer a common, basic approach that encourages at least some literacy and logic.

Now, if they'd just get rid of that damned no-split-infinitives rule...

Over There

JD at the Engine Room blog has a good catch on tricky headline constructions. It's not quite the famous

Russian Virgin
Lands Short Of
Goal Again

but it's pretty good.

Not What She Meant, I'm Sure

Another "f word" that can get you into trouble. Time to look up the definition, dear TV guest.

Copy Editing and 'The Wire'

"Apropos of Nothing" at New York Magazine looks at the depiction of a copy editing issue.

When we complained yesterday about a curmudgeonly copy editor's opinions on the proper use of the word "evacuate" in the Wire premiere, we never in our wildest dreams imagined the response we would get — not only from Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, but from David Simon himself! Merriam-Webster's Peter Sokolowski, using the handle "MERRIAM_WEBSTER" (heh), commented on our post, pointing us to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage's article on this very subject. Summarizes Sokolowski: "This was indeed a usage controversy until about WWII, by which time the 'remove (people)' sense had taken firm hold. According the MWDEU: 'The respectability of this sense is no longer subject to question.'"

The argument about "evacuate" reminds me of an editor I knew who wouldn't allow the use of "during" because of the different ways it could be interpreted. You could look it up!

UPDATE Romney and the Dictionary

Update 3: The Washington Post upgrades its Fact Checker rating of Mitt Romney and his Martin Luther King claim to "four Pinocchios," which means a seriously large whopper. Keep reading if you haven't been following this but basically: Romney claimed to have seen his father marching with Dr. King, then later said he meant that figuratively, not literally. Then on the Friday afternoon news dump to Politico.com, 2 witnesses claimed to have seen Gov. George Romney and King marching together in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Then, this weekend, the Washington Post and the Boston Phoenix blew a hole in that story too.
I keep going back to this story because in the beginning, I thought we sometimes get ensnared in too many petty details at the expense of bigger issues in the campaign. And because we need to make sure reporters are keeping up on this story and render the facts correctly as they develop. But this story continues to be very weird.

From the Washington Post:

After news reports challenged Mitt Romney's repeated accounts of his father marching with Martin Luther King, his campaign put a reporter from Politico in touch with eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the former Michigan governor "hand in hand" with the civil rights leader. But their memories are almost certainly flawed as contemporaneous news reports show that King was addressing a meeting in New Jersey at the time the eyewitnesses supposedly saw him in Grosse Pointe, MI.

And, also from Michael Dobbs of the Fact Checker:

I called up one of the eyewitnesses cited by Politico and the Romney campaign, Ashby Robertson, a data collector now living in Massachusetts. Robertson told me that he called the Romney campaign last week because he had vivid memories of the Grosse Pointe march and was upset by media reports challenging the Mitt Romney version.
"I was fifteen feet away from them [Romney and MLK]," said Robertson, 64, who attended Grosse Pointe high school. "You don't forget that kind of thing."
When I told Robertson that news reports placed Martin Luther King in New Jersey at the time, he replied: "Well, it was somebody who certainly looked like him."

UPDATE 2: And yet another turn, Talking Points Memo rounds up some links that seem to prove that Gov. George Romney DID march with Dr. King. Curiouser and curiouser.
UPDATE: It gets better, according to the Boston Globe:

Mitt Romney went a step further in a 1978 interview with the Boston Herald. Talking about the Mormon Church and racial discrimination, he said: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Yesterday, Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom acknowledged that was not true. "Mitt Romney did not march with Martin Luther King," he said in an e-mail statement to the Globe.

Earlier:

Ah, the dictionary enters the political arena.

This is Mitt Romney explaining his statement that he "saw" his father, George Romney, "march with Martin Luther King."
From MSNBC:

A defensive Romney was peppered with questions today on exactly what he meant when he said -- most recently on Meet the Press -- that he "saw" his father march with Martin Luther King Jr. Recent articles have indicated that his father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, didn't march with the civil-rights leader.

Admitting that he didn't see the march with his own eyes, he said, "I 'saw' him in the figurative sense."

"The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights," he said, "and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership."

"I've tried to be as accurate as I can be," he continued, smiling firmly. "If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described.

Now, personally, I often think there are many more important things* to write about instead of automatically seizing on minor word choices in many candidate comments. When we complain about candidates and their surrogates seeming stiff and formulaic, why do we suppose that is? Here, we're concentrating on whether Romney was speaking literally (he definitely wasn't) or figuratively (that's what he says now) or his mixup of Super Bowl and World Series events. I can't stand this urge to hold every candidate to perfection, 100 percent of the time, in every single comment or word choice when we're not perfect** and am fed up with snarky shit passing as journalism or commentary.
But Romney's comment is a biggie in terms of race and given the not-so-distant LDS policy on black members, he needs to be much more careful when dealing with any and all race-related questions. Heck, any white person needs to think twice before invoking any variation of the "some of my best friend are" kind of claim.

*Domestic spy satellites
Mortgage mess
Military readiness
Iraq
economy
CIA torture
the Federal Election Commission
Election dirty tricks
Auto emissions
**Today's language outrage: I saw a newspaper headline that used "gift" as a verb, as in "Celebrity 'X' Gifts $5,000 to Alma Mater" as if "give" wouldn't have worked just fine.

Keeping You Regular

Tracking the evolution of language
Researchers discover that irregular verbs change in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms.

By Denise Gellene
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
Tracing the evolution of English verbs over 1,200 years -- from the Old English of "Beowulf" to the modern English of "The Princess Diaries" -- researchers have found that the majority of irregular verbs are going the way of Grendel, falling to the linguistic equivalent of natural selection.

The irregular verbs, governed by confusing and antiquated rules, came under evolutionary pressure to obey the modern "-ed" rule of regular verb conjugation, according to a report today in the journal Nature.

That the English language has undergone dramatic change over a millennium will come as no surprise to generations of high school students who have struggled to decipher "Beowulf," which dates to the 9th century, or Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," written about 1200.

Linguists have constructed elaborate "family trees" showing how English has developed over time but have been unable to detect the principle driving irregular verbs toward regularity.

The researchers, led by Martin A. Nowak, an evolutionary theorist at Harvard University, discovered that irregular verbs evolve in a predictable manner -- just like genes and living organisms. Analyzing databases containing millions of words, Nowak and colleagues showed that the patterns of change depended on how often irregular verb forms were used.

Thinking of Things

I admit that I always, always thought saying was, “If you think BLAH BLAH BLAH, then you’ve got another thing coming.” I know for a fact that’s what was said in my house as a kid, and usually carried a bit of a threat—something bad was going to happen if Action X was pursued.

Evidently, it’s “you’ve got another THINK coming.”
Over at Metafilter, a huge argument has broken out about the correct phrase. The two heavy hitters, Language Log and Language Hat have weighed in; the former has a posting just this weekend on the matter. I’ve borrowed his newspaper citation but go read his postings, then check out the argument over at Metafilter.

Don’t be deterred by the “.99999...=1” that is the original reason for the posting and pops up throughout the discussion.

Metafilter must have a lot of copy editors as members.