Surely a record for the NYT sports section: both stories on the front page of Sports Monday this week were about language — language, televised sports, and gender; and language learning, baseball, and tv shows:
“Safest Bet in Sports: Men Complaining About a Female Announcer’s Voice” (on-line head) by Julie Dicaro.
“‘Friends,’ the Sitcom That’s Still a Hit in Major League Baseball” (on-line head) by James Wagner.
I’ve been on break from remarking on some of the obsessions of the New York Times — its periodiphilia, its taboo avoidance, and so on — but I’m moved to return to the second of these topics because the Gray Lady has managed to reproduce, in deail, one of its previous encounters with taboo vocabulary, a tussle with poet Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”.
Recently the admirable Margalit Fox has been posting on Facebook a series “Demented P.R. Pitch of the Day” (Margalit seems to read more of her nonsense mail than I do). I’ll give the two most recent examples and then turn to some long-standing advertising themes in my own postings: absurd ad copy for premium men’s underwear and for gay porn. (So, yes, in the second case there will be some incidental sex talk.)
Many notices on Google Alert for Fred Zwicky, always on the occasion of a story he’s written for the Peoria (IL) Journal Star (with photos of the subject of his piece). He has a portfolio on the journalists’ site Muck Rack, where he’s identified as the “Visual Assignment Editor” on the paper. The identifier combines two journalistic terms, one (assignment editor) that’s been around for some time, one (visual journalist) that seems to combine the traditional roles of reporter, photographer, and photo editor.
(#1)
From yesterday’s NYT, a long obit by William Grimes, with two different heads
(on-line) Harper Lee, Author of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ Dies at 89
(in print) Nelle Harper-Lee, 1926-2016: ‘Mockingbird’ Author, Elusive Voice of the Small-Town South
In the print edition, the story begins on p. 1, continues on p. 14, and continues further on p. 15. Lee’s sister Alice is mentioned in passing on p. 14 (details below), and then 20 sizable paragraphs later, on p. 15, we get:
[Ex] She lived with Alice, who practiced law in her 90s and died in 2014 at 103.
And of course I totally failed to recognize who Alice was — to me she was a new character who just dropped out of the sky — so I had to track back through the story to find her introduction. The practice of newspaper journalism that caused my problem could be called No Recharacterization: people in a story are named and characterized at first appearance, but thereafter are referred to only by a short-form name (Prefix + LN, LN alone, or in certain cases FN alone), with no re-description or re-introduction. As I wrote in an earlier posting on journalistic conventions, this practice
diverges from the usual practices of story-telling (also adopted by many writers of non-fiction), where people are re-introduced into the discourse if they have dropped from topicality.
The addition of the two words her sister to [Ex] would have averted the problem, but (as I noted in the earlier posting, many newspaper people regard No Recharacterization
as absolutely [inviolable]: it’s what newspaper writing requires.
The November 2nd issue of the New Yorker is the food issue; there are three pieces in it I’d especially like to recommend: Calvin Trillin on pork barbecue in North Carolina, Dana Goodyear on making seaweed palatable, and Nicola Twilley on how the packaging of food can affect (our perceptions of) its flavor. The first has special meaning for me, since it features my friend John Shelton Reed, and this is the second time Trillin has devoted a New Yorker food piece to covering a friend of mine (the earlier occasion was a 1983 piece on the great linguist Jim McCawley on cooking and eating in Chinese).
For some time now, the New York Times has been reporting, in almost daily stories, on the Canadian elections, culminating in Liberal Justin Trudeau succeeding Conservative Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. Some of these stories, by Ian Austen, refer to an episode in Trudeau’s past that some have interpreted as showing that Trudeau was not mature enough to serve as his nation’s political leader. A version from yesterday, in Austen’s “Justin Trudeau, Son of a Canadian Leader, Follows His Own Path to Power”, about Trudeau’s history:
Mr. Trudeau showed a penchant for unscripted remarks that could be refreshing or embarrassing. When Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that Canadian fighter jets would join the American-led campaign against the Islamic State militant group, Mr. Trudeau responded with a vulgar metaphor that many called juvenile.
Now, I’ve been following Canadian politics (at some distance, the way I follow American politics; it’s often a crazy, dirty business), and I recall Trudeau strongly opposing Harper’s fighter-jet proposal, but I don’t recall any “vulgar metaphor” or any outcry about one, and I can’t find any evidence of it on the net. Of course, the proudly fastidious Times wouldn’t actually cite offensive language, but Austen doesn’t even cite or link to any story in which the episode was reported in the clear, with context. So there’s no way for me to judge whether Trudeau “broke the unwritten law” (cue the Piranha Brothers) and merited opprobrium. Words of one syllable.
[Added a bit later: Ben Zimmer has now tracked down the actual quote, which is much less exciting than Austen made it out to be. More below to fold.]
From an op-ed piece in the NYT yesterday, “No Sanctuary in the Holy City” by Patricia Williams Lessane, about the church massacre in Charleston SC (the “Holy City” of the headline) on Wednesday:
I can’t help but think of this senseless act of terror, the largest mass shooting in the country since 2013, within the historical context of the Birmingham bombing [of 1963], but also within the very current context of the increasing terror we African-Americans face on a daily basis.
The boldfaced parenthetical is intended to convey the enormity of the event, using a standard journalistic device for this purpose, citing the years since the last grievous event of its type (natural disaster, extreme weather, mass murder, whatever). But it’s not at all effective here: 2013 was only two years ago, so the Charleston massacre ends up being treated as everyday, even trivial.
The journalistic device gets its effectiveness from the assumption that events of great enormity are rare, but that assumption doesn’t always hold: random events sometimes cluster (necessarily); one event can sometimes help to trigger similar events; and some types of events can be increasing in frequency over time. In any case, monstrous events are monstrous, period, no matter how long it’s been since the last monstrous event of its type. Lessane was right to cry out against “this senseless act of terror”, but that despairing cry is undercut by an implicit reference to the fact that more than nine people (the number murdered in Charleston) were killed in an American mass shooting as recently as 2013.
(It’s possible that Lessane didn’t write that parenthetical herself. It might have been inserted by an editor who reflexively and thoughtlessly employed the journalistic device: that’s just the way these things are reported.)
Today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
The ambiguity in selling … drugs for … prostitutes (which turns on the function of the PP for … prostitutes in the larger structure) briefly distracts the characters from the image-mong(er)ing that is their pressing concern, when it really isn’t important which of the readings is the correct one; either way, they’ve got a huge scandal that’s going to take a lot of media management. (more…)