I also read a number of blogs devoted
to linguistics and editing. One I
like a lot is written by John McIntyre,
formerly the head of the copy desk at
the Baltimore Sun, and now, after an enforced
hiatus, back there as night content
editor, or some such thing.

McIntyre snarked recently at an obit
for the late senator Ted Stevens, which
began, “Ted Stevens died Monday the
way Alaskans die, in a plane crash in the
wilds of the state he devoted his life to.”

No, the obit writer wasn’t trying to
be funny. But McIntyre invited his readers
to send him candidates in the same
style for the lead sentence in their own
obits, and they are funny. I especially enjoyed
seeing the comments from people
whose language blogs I read. Try it yourself,
and post comments on my blog.

There’s one Minnesota contribution among McIntyre’s comments:

Ole Finnerud died the way most Minnesotans die: of a massive heart attack while screaming his head off near the end of a close high school hockey game. His last words, “Did we win?”

Posted by: Toma

Your turn.

Bellesiles is now an adjunct lecturer in history at Central Connecticut State University, and his essay is about a student in his class in military history whose brother, the student told Bellesiles, was shot by a sniper while serving in Iraq and died.

The essay raised red flags for many readers, not only because of Bellesiles’ record, but because they couldn’t verify the details (casualty records are public, and none matched the story the student told Bellesiles).

Eventually, The Chronicle checked the story and couldn’t verify it either (their account is now appended to the essay). Their conclusion: the story was made up, but by the student, not Bellesiles.

Picking up the idea that the student was the one at fault, Megan McArdle at the Atlantic writes, “Of course, maybe the student thought it would help him pass the class; in fact, maybe it did. Whatever the motivation, Bellesiles was taken in. Stupid, yes, but not exactly incomprehensible. You’d feel like a monstrous jerk if you added to the pain of someone whose brother had just died in Iraq by demanding that he prove he wasn’t lying.”

One of her commenters, JamieMc, said, “But this isn’t a scholarly article or journalism. It’s a personal essay. I’m not sure why anybody would expect him to research it. . . . My point is that the genre he’s working in here doesn’t really call for the kind of fact checking that some folks seem to be outraged that he didn’t do. He isn’t a journalist.”

JamieMc is wrong about the obligations of journalism. I replied:

Even “personal essays” are expected to be factually correct if they are submitted to, and appear in, a reputable and prestigious academic publication. At that point, such essays become journalism, whether or not the author can otherwise be described as a journalist. (Heck, blog posts are expected to be factually correct, however seldom that expectation is met.)

I edited many such pieces in nearly 20 years as a journalist, at several different daily newspapers, and you’d better believe it was part of my job to reject submissions that didn’t check out, and to display a healthy skepticism about which ones needed to be checked out. This essay invited skepticism because it was just too pat; and given who it came from (The Chronicle had been burned by Bellesiles before, you know), it demanded skepticism, if not instant rejection.

Any professional editor should have expected him to provide evidence that the story was essentially true.

I wrote a column on Bellesiles and Arming America in 2002, when Emory’s investigation was just gathering steam; since the paper I wrote it for closed in 2009, here’s a Google cache.

Bellesiles has a book coming out shortly; you have to wonder why any publisher would take such a chance.

I listen to WFMT (streaming on the Web), and recently DePaul has been running ads focusing on a professor in the Chemistry Department named Quinnetta Shelby. She doesn’t stop at just doing her research, the ad gushes; no, she’s on a quest.

She “actively recruits undergraduate students of color, as well as female students, both groups that are underrepresented in graduate schools and careers in chemistry, for her research team.”

I am well aware that race and gender discrimination are widely practiced in higher education. I discontinued support to my college’s alumni fund when they proudly announced they had signed an amicus brief supporting the University of Michigan’s admissions policies. But bragging about it on the radio is still a bit much, don’t you think?

DePaul has no warrant to adopt discriminatory policies of its own in order to engineer social outcomes it prefers, even if it believes that “underrepresentation” is a problem. “Overrepresentation” is not a problem, and you can’t increase one without decreasing the other.

If my son were still of an age where he was choosing a college, I would not permit him to apply to DePaul.

I never received a reply, and then the station went into a pledge period and so I wasn’t listening to it for a week or so. But since I came back, I haven’t heard any ads for DePaul at all. Maybe the recruiting season just came to its natural end. Or just maybe, somebody thought better about advertising that it practices and approves race and gender discrimination in its science programs.

I also note, with professional regret, the numerous typographical errors throughout the book, many of which have been corrected by a previous library patron. Apparently I am not alone in finding them irritating.

I used to do that, but then I felt bad about defacing library books. Can one deface that which is already defaced by error? At least, there is someone else who appreciates the impulse.

The site describes the intended audience:

She’s Geeky events are neutral, face-to-face gathering spaces for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

I read about this event in a post by Amy Gahran, who blogs for the Poynter Institute. She was planning to attend, and she cited it as an example of the kind of activity that journalists should be participating in more often, as a way of breaking out of their “insular, self-referential” culture.

Not a bad idea, although many newsroom managers are quite allergic to the idea of their reporters and editors getting deeply involved with community affairs. However, what struck me about her description of the desirable aspects of this particular convention was this, under the heading “Female culture” (emphasis mine):

Most tech conferences are a heavily male playground. This affects not only the topics covered and event structure, but the tone of interaction. In my experience, conferences that are primarily oriented toward women in a given field tend to be more welcoming and less cliquish or hierarchical than at events where male culture predominates. This means that even male journalists who are newcomers to tech culture might get more out of an event like She’s Geeky than an uber-geekboy rave like Gnomedex (which is fun, but maybe not for your first stop).

Perhaps her experience with conferences for women is more extensive than mine, because I do not join separatist organizations or routinely attend separatist events (”You just have to be a woman . . .”). But I did attend one once, and a less welcoming and more cliquish environment is hard to imagine.

In 1996, I was invited to join a panel discussion on the California Civil Rights Initiative, then on the ballot in that state, which was part of the program at the fall conference of the Journalism and Women Symposium held that year in Napa, Calif.

“Come for the weekend,” they said, so I did.

I didn’t belong there. At the mix-and-mingle introductory wine tasting, in the interims between talks, it was clear that one was expected to establish her right to be there by bashing (the absent) males.  So wonderful, I’d hear, to be free of masculine domination and hierarchy. And who are you?

Well. in the belief that every good garden party  deserves a skunk, I started telling them how discomforting I found it to be among people who despised half of humanity, or, at least were willing to say they did in order to establish their credentials with the other half.

Actually I thought it was like being at a Klan rally, but I think I didn’t go quite so far as to say so.

The panel discussion was an Experience. The two of us who had been invited to support the initiative, which bans racial (and gender) preferences in government policy were hissed from the audience. That’s female solidarity, yes. Some woman (an affirmative action token professor at Berkeley) spoke at length from the audience about Cal’s admission policies, but didn’t know what they were. One of the two pro-discrimination panelists snidely implied that I and anyone else who supported CCRI were allies of David Duke. I pointed out that it was her side who had paid David Duke to come to California to speak in favor of CCRI (a good idea may be supported for bad reasons). She miffed that she didn’t deserve to suffer personal attacks.

Hey lady, you started it.

In contrast,  my experience with largely male professional events has been just as largely positive. Leave aside the fact that I was a college math professor for a while, and ran a small printing company, and then worked as an editorial writer (all male-dominated jobs), and just look at BlogNashville, 2005.

I signed up, because it sounded like fun and I’d get to meet lots of people I knew only online. Bill Hobbs, who organized it, invited me to be on a panel, and that was a hoot. True, the attendees skewed white, male and young. But they didn’t care.

Mark Tapscott, then at the Heritage Foundation, had a car and generously offered to ferry me and my walker around.  We were joined by Robin Burk — ooh. She is a touch-the-hem-of-her-garment someone. She helped build Darpanet. She knew Adm. Grace Murray Hopper. You know, computer bug.

Anyway, Mark’s car was later joined by La Shawn Barber. When we all got out together, three females, two old, one black, we were trampling stereotypes underfoot with every step we took. And everybody thought it was cool, if they noticed at all.

Not noticing at all seems to me to be the ideal we should aim at.

To set the stage she now sees herself taking, she invokes not only Gandhi and Rev. King, but Rep. John Lewis, who was beaten by Alabama state troopers as he and others marched in Selma in 1965. “They knew they might be hurt, yet they stepped on past the fear.”

On Inauguration Day, she tells us, she dropped by the cafe/bar of her gym to get some soup.

One of the employees was checking the tea and noted out loud that they were out of black tea. To the other server, she made a joke about ordering some more “Obama tea.”

On this day, of all days, I could not turn away, pretend I didn’t hear.

My pulse raced a little. Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. In the larger scheme of things, calling her on it was a small act.

You could say that, yes.

So she “did the uncomfortable thing” and spoke to the club manager. He asked what she wanted him to do, and she “suggested racial sensitivity training at the very least.”

As if that would help with the problem, if there were a problem, which there wasn’t.

Look, there are times when people should mark even casual comments as distasteful. If the server had said something about “(N-word) tea,” I too would think it worth complaining about, and I hope I would. The thing is, the opportunity doesn’t arise that often. The only time in the last 50 years I, personally, have heard a white person use the N-word, it was the trainer at a court-mandated “racial sensitivity training” session our employer required everyone to attend. She intended, presumably, to instruct the audience in how to do all the things they should not do, and which they were already not doing.

Obama tea? That’s like suing Southwest Airlines for “Eeeny meeny miny mo.”

As it happens, Browning-Blas’s 13-year-old son understands the lesson she taught him better than she does. At school the same day, he told her, one of his classmates in geography class said, as Obama placed his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office, “It’s still not too late to shoot him.” Her son told his classmate to be quiet, as well he should. Butterflies and racing pulses, if any, not reported.

James Taranto, at the Wall St. Journal, has a great send-up of this pretentious delivery.

He concludes:

We shall overcome–but we haven’t yet. Racism in America is far from dead. It turns out there is even a Web site called Obama-Tea.com, featuring a caricature of President Obama in which his face appears to be made of herbs and fruit.

Let us all follow Kristen Browning-Blas’s example and take a stand against injustice. If not us, who? If not now, when? If not honey, lemon?

Bloggers seem to like this story — I’ve run into it several times — but they also seem to be accepting it as legit, though the idea that the second inauguration of President Bush garnered a mere 1,000 stories is implausible on its face. Fewer than Obama? Sure, I believe that. But by a factor of 35? Not likely.

So who was Reuters relying on for what we journalists call a one-source story? Why, it was Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

He’s got form as a purveyor of dubious linguistic self-promotions. The guys at Language Log nailed him good for a series of predictions about the millionth word in English. Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

Gullible reporters keep falling for a self-aggrandizing scam perpetrated by Paul J.J. Payack, who runs an outfit called Global Language Monitor. As regular Language Log readers know, Mr. Payack has been trumpeting the arrival of “the millionth word” in English for some time now. In fact, he’s predicted that the English language would pass the million-word mark in 2006… and 2007… and 2008… and now 2009. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, the date that Payack has now set for the million-word milestone is April 29, 2009.

In a previous installment of the Payack saga, I wrote that the Million Word March was “a progression that he turns on and off based on his publicity needs.” So I can’t say I was terribly surprised to learn that April 29, 2009 just happens to be the publication date of the paperback edition of Payack’s book, A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting The World. What a stupendous coincidence that Global Language Monitor’s word-counting algorithm has timed itself to accord with Payack’s publishing schedule!

Payack calls Obama “the biggest story of the century so far,” and Reuters quotes him further:

Payack said that according to his group’s monitoring, the Obama campaign and election story had generated 717,000 citations in print, television and radio across the world in 2008 and 254 million mentions on the Internet and in Web blogs.

That surpassed media interest generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the global financial meltdown in 2008, the Iraq War in 2003 and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, Payack said.

The tallies were calculated using the group’s proprietary algorithm which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, the Internet and major databases.

People with editors are not supposed to fall for silly press releases.

Someone posted to the list serve for the National Conference of Editorial Writers a link to a screed by Chris Hedges in the declinist genre. He said:

Subject: Newsrooms Article
This is a terrific, if scary, commentary about our business.

Erm, “terrific” isn’t the word I’d choose. “Terrible,” yeah. I wrote:

This is a piece of meretricious claptrap, endless cliches tossed together without thought, all in order to lead up to the concluding line, a ringing affirmation of the author’s Bush Derangement Syndrome:

“And the citizens in these degraded societies, [Cicero] warned, always end up ruled by a despot, a Nero or a George W. Bush.”

This deserves a full fisking, but I’m taking a break from deadline so this’ll have to do (still long, though).

The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

For those of you who missed the memo, Noam Chomsky has been mewling about the rise of the corporate state for decades. Hedges never minded that at all because the corporate state’s agenda was aligned with his. What needs explaining is why the corporate state, in the form of big media companies, used to coin money and now is hemorrhaging it. To dismiss the relevance of the Internet in this context is obtuse.

The loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world.

As far as I can tell, Rupert Murdoch is every whit as driven by civic and public responsibility as Pinch Sulzberger. He’s certainly a more successful entrepreneur. (Which direction they’re driven, and whether you like it, is a separate question.)

Some 6,000 journalists nationwide have lost their jobs, news pages are being radically cut back and newspaper stocks have tumbled. Advertising revenues are dramatically falling off with many papers seeing double-digit drops.

Indeed, compelling evidence of rising influence.

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust.

If newspapers are a public trust, they are so without regard to whether they are “well run.”

They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life.

They can, I suppose, though the extent to which they ever did is debatable, but so can other media, including the Internet, where even non-citizens can be engaged.

When I began as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow.

I can’t claim Hedges’ antiquity, having first walked through a newsroom door as an employee on the last day of 1988. But I doubt this was ever true to any significant degree. Because of the vast distances in America, newspapers moved toward reliance on wire services for coverage of international, national, and often state news in the middle of the 19th century — the AP dates from before the Civil War. Such “major city papers” as had foreign bureaus were mostly the flagship papers of chains that financed them through their wire services.

Reporters and photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders looked, thought and believed.

Some of them, sometimes. Others, not so much. Consider Duranty on the Soviet Union, or the remaining American reporters and photographers in Iraq, who’ve stopped reporting or come home now that there’s good news to report.

Anyway, why would we need them there now? You want to know how the world beyond our borders looks, thinks and believes, read the Economist or the Guardian or both. Not to mention Al-Jazeera and Xinhua. Put your subscription money in a tipjar for Michael Yon, or Michael Totten. You want engaged, you’ve got it.

News-gathering will continue to exist, as it does on this Web site and sites such as ProPublica and Slate, but these traditions now have to contend with a new, widespread and ideologically driven partisanship that dominates the dissemination of views and information, from Fox News to blogger screeds.

Nothing new about “widespread and ideologically driven partisanship,” he merely notices now because his ideology no longer has a monopoly. Otherwise, why cite Fox News but not CBS and 60 Minutes?

The filtering of information through an ideological lens, which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t care what you think.

Ideally, yes, but unfortunately it is very difficult to perceive information that contradicts what you think. Opinion journalists who know that can be far better reporters than journalists who imagine themselves above bias.

To this crowd, I think I can safely observe that people whose job is putting opinion into their writing are better at keeping it out than people who fondly believe they never do that.

Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit errors. . . . Facts, for many bloggers, are interchangeable with opinions.

Established reporters, and their editors, and their publishers, have to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit errors. Case in point: the Rocky Mountain News, where I used to work, has said at least five separate times this year that the Republican National Convention will be in Minneapolis. No, it’s St. Paul, and yes, I told them. They’ve promised not to do it any more, but I don’t think any of the stories have been corrected.

The line between fact and opinion is not so bright as people think, and when you spend all your days in the company of people who share the same opinion it comes to look very much like a fact. (Is it a fact, or an opinion, that the Earth is 6,000 years old?)

When there is a long piece on the Internet, most of us have to print it out to get through it.

By “most of us,” Hedges means “I.” Even if what he says is true, how would he know?

Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think.

“Whaddya mean ‘we,’ white man?”

And news that does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing.

“News that does not . . . challenging the status quo is not worth pursuing.” Let’s run that through the syntax machine one more time.

Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters.

According to Hedges, supra, corporations’ turn away from what he thinks is “real news” is responsible for the free-fall in their stock prices. So which narrative is he plugging here?

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies.

In what imaginary golden age did any democracy depend for its survival on “trustworthy and impartial sources of information”? The Roman Republic did not decay, nor the Empire fall, for lack of crusading newspapers or from the popular taste for spectacles in the arena. Ruinous taxation or the debasement of the currency contributed, but then as now those ills are to be laid at the feet of government. Not corporations, as none then existed.

And in conclusion, to return to my starting place:

And the citizens in these degraded societies, he warned, always end up ruled by a despot, a Nero or a George W. Bush.

Apart from the ludicrous anticlimax, it is improbable that Cicero warned anybody about Nero, as he died many years before that notorious emperor was born. He was, however, a defender of the Republic in its last days, and lost his head for picking the wrong side. They knew how to do despotism right in those days.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jim Miller for the link from his blog Miller on Politics

Rocky edit page editor Vincent Carroll asked if I wanted to respond, and I did.

For some reason, sportswriters and broadcasters have lately taken (I know, that’s a split infinitive, but I allow myself some of those) to writing or saying, “four RBI,” leaving out the “s.” They may believe they’re being grammatically correct but they’re wrong on two different levels.

Mike Rosen is quite correct (“The trouble with English,” Feb. 1) that there is nothing grammatically incorrect about a “split infinitive,” despite what Mrs. Wellington used to say in my seventh-grade English class, back in the prehistoric era when teachers still believed that it was a good idea for children to be taught the basics of English grammar.

However, the example he generously allows himself, “have lately taken,” is not an infinitive of any kind, just a verb form containing more than one word, and an adverb in its usual and customary place after the first of them.

An infinitive expresses the part of the meaning of a verb that is independent of person, number, gender and tense, as you likely know if there was a Mrs. Wellington in your past. Like “to take,” or “to be,” as infinitives are written in English. In Latin, they’re single words — esse — whence cometh the peculiar idea that they shouldn’t be split in English.

The rest of Rosen’s column illustrates another peculiar phenomenon — that people who know nothing at all about linguistics assume they do because they speak and write a language, and in absence of actual knowledge they just make stuff up.

“The election of the first woman or black president of the United States would surely be an historic event.” No it wouldn’t! But it would certainly be a historic event. Putting history and politics aside, let’s focus on the grammar.

This happens to be one of my pet grammatical peeves. I suspect it’s because people somehow feel “an historic” sounds more elegant than “a historic” that they break a fundamental rule in this case. If you aspirate the “h” at the beginning of a word — that is, if you can hear the “h” — you precede it with the article “a.” If you don’t hear the “h,” you precede it with “an.” So you eat a hot dog or you’re an heir to an estate. You wouldn’t say, “he hit an home run,” so why would you say “it’s an historic event?” (Don’t ask me about “herb;” that’s pronounced both ways.)

There are principles that govern the alternation of “a” and “an,” but they’re phonetic, not grammatical, and not as Rosen describes them. “A hot dog,” but “an uncooked hot dog” and “a delighted heir.”

First, sports jargon is often granted special exemption from the rules of grammar, as in expressions like “he went yard” or “you the man.” It’s a cultural thing.

Granted by whom, hmmm? I’m surprised he didn’t complain about the “passive tense.”

Secondly, “RBI,” in this case, is a compound noun treated as a unitary term. Hence, even though you’d say four “runs batted in” if you spelled out or spoke all the words, when you use the abbreviation as a term, you say four “RBIs.”

I’d probably say “four RBIs,” as Rosen prefers, but whether and where to put the “s” in an acronym is very idiosyncratic, and often different for abbreviations.

Or how about “height” pronounced, “hieth?” The only correct pronunciation is “hite.” Check the dictionary. “Weight” is spelled much the same way and you wouldn’t pronounce it “wayth.” “Height” ends in a “t,” not an “h,” like the word, “length.” It’s not spelled, “heighth.”

Rosen is correct that pronouncing height as “hithe” instead of “hite” is wrong, but so is explaining why by recourse to “weight,” which would argue just as cogently for “hayt.”

Then there’s the annoying use of the word “problematic.” It’s a great word as shorthand for describing some thorny issue or predicament that’s unsettled, uncertain, debatable, indeterminate, baffling or difficult to get your hands around. I don’t like it when broadcasters, reporters or analysts casually use it to describe something that’s merely troublesome or just a run-of-the-mill problem, as in “the snowstorm has made the rush hour drive problematic.”

Stick to politics, Mike. It’s less problematic, because in politics nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Linda Seebach, a former Rocky editorial writer, is a resident of Northfield, Minn.

Predictably, someone in the comments complained about “nobody . . . they”

Posted by Old_Grouch on February 7, 2008 at 6:20 a.m.

“Ms. Seebach might want to look at the principle of grammer that holds a singular noun — “nobody” — takes a singular pronoun — “he”, or “she”, NOT the plural, “they”. However . . . !

“One might ask if anybody at the RMN, really knows what he, or she, is talking about, in or out of ‘politics’.”

I used to write to OG back when I was moonlighting as the letters blog [Hall Monitor], and replied:

Posted by lindaseebach on February 7, 2008 at 10:11 a.m.

@Old_Grouch
As I noted, people who don’t know anything about linguistics often incorrectly believe they do. The so-called “principle of grammer” (sic) that “nobody” is always a singular noun (or “they” always a plural pronoun — it can be analyzed either way) allows for a variety of exceptions, going back to the King James Bible and earlier. See, for example, numerous posts on the linguistics Weblog “Language Log.” *

How would OG complete the tag question, “I guess nobody liked the dessert, did ____?”

And someone else, perhaps mildly irony impaired, informed me:

“Linda,Nobody granted the sports writers an exemption, because there never was a central authority in England to mandate correct grammar and pronunciation, as there was in France and Spain. This situation has led to centuries of bickering. If sports writer jargon is understood and accepted by sports fans, so be it. Just avoid using sports writer jargon in a scholarly article”

People really get into this language stuff.

* See, for instance, Mark Liberman’s post on syntactic and notional number, citing research indicating that pronouns tend to agree with a speaker’s meaning, while verbs are more likely to reflect the form of a noun such as “nobody.”

I said in the comments:

Editors consider many factors in judging whether a particular happening is “newsworthy”; for instance, is it something the people who subscribe to newspapers will be interested in reading about? Or perhaps more to the point, is it something advertisers believe the customers they want to reach will be interested in?

Another is how uncommon the occurrence is, whether it’s “man bites dog” (possibly yes) or “dog bites man” (probably no, unless the dog is a pit bull, and the person bitten is a child, or an adult who dies).

But specifically with regard to coverage of murders, it’s a double bind forced on the media by “activists.” If the media give more attention to white victims or killers, they claim it’s because the editors are white racists who think the lives of people of color are less valuable. If the media give equal attention to all murders, then the picketers are out marching with their signs accusing editors of being white racists who want to emphasize everything that’s bad in minority communities.

As long as crime rates are actually different, there’s no way to balance these competing demands for “fairness.”