terrierista

Two superb news hounds receive vastly different AP sendoffs

English Composition 101 assignment:

Compare and contrast the tone and language used in the following Associated Press articles and then argue whether the AP has lived up to its own Statement of News Values and Principles.

(1) The recent death of long-time NBC Meet the Press host Tim Russert, an entertaining, universally liked, fair-minded, intellectually rigorous liberal who had an immense influence on politics and political news gathering

(2) The recent death of long-time Fox News host Tony Snow, an entertaining, universally liked, fair-minded, intellectually rigorous conservative who had an immense influence on politics and political news gathering

(flickr photo by jazperroz)

Right, yeah, I think I'll vote for the guy who's most "artful"

This isn't about my vote in November. It's about the meaning of words.

     On November 20, an unnamed spokesperson for Barack Obama said the candidate believed that the Washington, D.C. handgun ban was constitutional. In February, Obama himself said pretty much the same thing on camera. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the ban was unconstitutional--and Obama sort of said he was okay with that decision.

     Okay, flip-flops happen and campaign-speak becomes enhanced. I get that. But an Obama spokesperson now says that the candidate's earlier remarks were "inartful." Wait: there's more. In early July, Obama also said that Gen. Wesley Clark was being "inartful" when he said John McCain's military experience didn't necessarily make him better-prepared for the presidency than Obama.

     "Inartful" is not in English dictionaries, but "artful" is. Merriam-Webster says it means "clever at attaining one's ends by indirect and often deceptive means." Inartful," therefore, must mean sincere, candid, straightforward, and unaffected.

     "I didn't really mean that; I was being too candid."

     "I shouldn't have said that; it's too straightforward."

     Is "inartful" really a word that Obama and his staff should use to describe the very language they're now saying they didn't really mean?

(flickr photo by itsmetj)

Dark matters in Dallas County

Well, it's SOME kind of hole....

From the Dallas City Hall Blog, July 7, 2008:

"A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

"County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

"Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections 'has become a black hole' because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

"Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud, 'Excuse me!' He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a 'white hole.'

"That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

"Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps 'the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape.'

"Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all."

(flickr photo by palmea)

Write for the reader. Duh.

Keep your eye on the ball: reader understanding.

Last fall, I started teaching several sections of grammar at the excellent state-system community college in my city. This fall they're going to let me teach an English composition class.

I'm falling to pieces with joy and trepidation.

To keep myself sane and avoid scaring the bejeebers out of my students with the massive amount of information we need to get through in 17 weeks, I'm going to focus on this: Write for the reader, not for yourself.

Most of these students have never had this possibility laid gently between their ears.

Write to communicate with your intended readers. If you're journaling, you're the only reader and you can do anything you want. Pack that sucker full of comma splices and weird punctuation if you want to. But if you're hoping for other readers, take pains to make sure they "get it."

If they do, you're golden. If they don't, you're screwed. What a forehead-slapping, eye-rolling "Duh!" of a concept, right?

(flickr photo by .Laurie.)

Reconsidering stillness

From The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall:

"In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street--from 152 to the garden of 150--over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening. After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had travelled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We'd also travelled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much further as part of the wide spiralling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday's here is not today's here. Yesterday's here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It's behind the sun, it's in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we're all moving forwards and we're never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It's the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we've been forced to abandon."

(flickr photo by weldong)

Please don't rest in peace, Evan Jenkins

Even now, keep your sharp eyes open for language atrocities.

Last November 30--nearly six months ago--Evan Jenkins died of cancer. I didn't learn about it until recently. The thoughtful writers and journalists in the world are poorer from his having left the room.

When I was communication director of a large state agency, I subscribed for a time (pre-Internet) to the Columbia Journalism Review. It's a fine publication through and through, but I always turned first to the Language Corner page. I'm sure that's how I met Ev.

He cared about adverb placement, danglers, hyphens, and the difference between refute and rebut. He was adamant about not mangling Shakespeare, about using bad and badly, flaunt and flout correctly, about following rules that made writing clearer and more powerful and disposing of rules that no longer did that.

I was smitten.

I sent him a few gripes of my own and was knocked flat with pleasure when he used them in his column. We wrote a few notes to each other and then, when we both acquired email, wrote more frequently, although our correspondence was always sporadic. A dirty joke from Ev was always a real treat: clever and usually rolling-on-the-floor funny.

He was a lovely gentleman, a bulldog when it came to using language to within an inch of its life. Wherever he is, I feel certain that Evan Jenkins is making sure the writing is spare, elegant, and as good as it deserves to be.

(flickr photo by ok2mom)

The humble comma (Parts I and II)

PART I

Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains is about Dr. Paul Farmer, who works four months a year as a top physician in Boston and eight months a year in the poorest of the poorest places on earth. Kidder asks Farmer what sort of compensation (in any form) he gets from his considerable efforts and hardship. Here's Farmer's response:

He told me, "If you're making sacrifices, unless you're automatically following some rule, it stands to reason that you're trying to lessen some psychic discomfort. So, for example, if I took steps to be a doctor for those who don't have medical care, it could be regarded as a sacrifice, but it could also be regarded as a way to deal with ambivalence." He went on, and his voice changed a little. He didn't bristle, but his voice had an edge: "I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma."

This was for me one of the first of many encounters with Farmer's use of the word comma, placed at the end of a sentence. It stood for the word that would follow the comma, which was asshole. I understood he wasn't calling me one--he wold never do that; he was almost invariably courteous. Comma was always directed at third parties, at those who felt comfortable with the current distribution of money and medicine in the world. And the implication, of course, was that you weren't one of those. Were you?

(flickr photo by The Welsh Knight)

PART II

LEAVING THE REST UNSAID

--by Robert Graves

-

Finis, apparent on an earlier page,

With fallen obelisk for colophon,

Must this be here repeated?

-

Death has been ruefully announced

And to die once is death enough,

Be sure, for any life-time.

-

Must the book end, as you would end it,

With testamentary appendices

And graveyard indices?

-

But no, I will not lay me down

To let your tearful music mar

The decent mystery of my progress.

-

So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,

Rising in air as on a gander's wing

At a careless comma,

-

(flickr photo by n-n)

14th-century communication glitch

Or: Galileo is from Venus, Kepler is from Mars?

Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King: Filippo Brunelleschi designed and built the incomparable Duomo in Florence, and throughout his life encoded his notes to make sure no one could steal his ideas. In a footnote about other geniuses' use of codes, King writes:

"Galileo used a cipher to announce to Johannes Kepler his discovery of the rings of Saturn, an anagram that, once unscrambled, should have read, OBSERVO ALTISSIMUM PLANETAM TERGEMINIM (I have observed the most distant of planets to have a triple form). Kepler, however, translated it thus: SALVE UMBISTINEUM GEMINATUM MARTIA PROLES (Hail, twin companionship, children of Mars)."

If you have something important to say, make sure you say it clearly.

Even if you're a genius.

Especially if you're a genius.

(flickr photo by palmea)

95 days of silence

I've rethought blogs. It's possible that the emperor is attired only in a thong and flip-flops.

No qualifications required. Any idiot can have a blog, for free, or--hey! even less work!--can comment anonymously on other people's blogs. The Cult of the Amateur, indeed. It's my fervent opinion that we're drowning in fervent opinion, unreasoned conviction, and sloppy, ineffectual writing these days. I don't want my blog to nourish the enemies: Ignorance, Surfeit, and Waste.

Communities of what? Although blogs are touted as "community builders," they're mostly gathering places for people with identical opinions. That's not a community--it's a cult. A community is people who are forced or have chosen to live together in equality with all their similarities and differences in tow. I just don't see a lot of that happening in the blogosphere. Maybe it's because we humans naturally embrace those who are like us and distrust those who aren't--but let's stop kidding ourselves that blogs tend to "build community."

So blogs don't naturally attract big thinkers or build "global communities" (whatever that means)--but they can. Maybe each of the 77 million current blogs is just a humble little opportunity for its owner to say, "Here I take my stand. Here I draw the line. Here's what I found out. Here's what I think is wonderful."

And suddenly the emperor's thong and flip-flops, even though they don't fulfill the hype, are just enough to make a blog worthwhile.

(Flickr photo by Telzey)

Ash Wednesday lesson

Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.

Last night at Ash Wednesday Mass, my husband and I were distributors of the ashes for the first time. Because we're Eucharistic ministers, looking people in the eye and offering them the body and blood of Christ, I thought the ashes would be easy: just dip your finger in the container of ash, make a dusty cross on the recipient's forehead, and say the words: "Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."

Easy. Hmmm. I can't remember when I've been so wrong.

The first person in my line was a tiny, pale, wild-haired three-year-old in a tiny wheelchair. Suddenly, what I was saying--what it meant--glued my throat shut and welled up my eyes. I thought, "Oh, honey, I can't say these words to you!" But I did. I don't know how, but I got through it with her, and then with her parents, and then with several rows of people: little children and teenagers and adults and very old people. Saying those words to the very old people was almost as hard as saying them to the little children.

Later, our priest told me he'd felt the same way the first time he'd had to distribute the Ash Wednesday ashes at a hospital, to people who were sick or dying or waiting for a loved one to get well or die. "Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return."

I don't mean to use these words as weapons against people whose behavior I don't approve of: "Don't be so smug and sure of your power, [fill in name here]--you and all your possessions will be worm food along with the rest of us." I mean to use them against my own bad behavior. All I know is that remembering them helped me today when I had a chance to be thoughtless or kind, and chose to be kind.

(flickr photo by Devoidarex)