Kids these days

That defining moment unfolded Nov. 22, 1963, after Cronkite was drawn to the urgent, five-bell summons of the United Press International ticker in the CBS newsroom: Shots had been fired at the motorcade of President John F. Kennedy.

Bah, kids these days. Your Editor had to walk uphill through a swarm of pterodactyls to his first newsroom shift, and when he had sharpened all the quills and put whale oil in the photo machine, he sat at a desk in front of the UPI ticker, and an "urgent" was four bells. Five bells was a "bulletin."*

Attention to detail aside, wouldn't it be nice if newspapers could tell a big story without the need to make it the Biggest Story Ever in the History of the World in Space?

He led us to Saigon, to Jonestown, to Selma, to Attica.

He escorted us to all corners of the Earth, then he showed us to the moon.

As anchorman of the “CBS Evening News,” Walter Cronkite – who died at 7:42 p.m. Friday at age 92 after suffering from cerebrovascular disease – not only narrated a tumultuous era in American life, but presided over the instant that television achieved its potential to be the most powerful communication tool in history.

And that moment, as you've guessed above ...

For the next four days, he led a mourning nation through wrenching grief. For anyone alive in that time, the TV images of the Kennedy funeral procession, the salute of Little John-John to his dead father and the jailhouse execution of Lee Harvey Oswald are indelibly stored in memory.

Cronkite was still a few years away from being the top-rated news reader, let alone the Most Trusted Man In History, so it's hard to give much credence to his "leading" the nation through much of anything. (And -- ahem -- "execution"? Do you guys still look words up before you use them?) Apparently we've followed another of those fine old Liebling observations and thrown out all the type smaller than Very, Very Large.

I think it was William McGuire who best summed up the persistent urge to believe in big-effects theories of media: People look around and think, quite naturally: With all that media, there must be some effects. News, like other media products, tends to produce small, cumulative and contingent effects. A single broadcast, even one as famous as Cronkite's Tet commentary, doesn't turn public opinion around in its tracks. But consistently friendly reports from a variety of sources over a period of months can make a really dumb idea seem like the logical state of things.

One doubts Old Walter would have approved of all the breathlessness. And one hopes he would have raised one of those biased liberal eyebrows at the idea of leading the frontpage with the demise of a 92-year-old retired journalist.

* Ten was a "flash," but by the time I saw my first flash-level story, we had a real front-end system, which made the same annoying buzz for anything from "bulletin" on up.

Annals of Making Stuff Up

George Will adds to the stack of evidence discussed last week about the ideological use of language assertions:

“Bailout” is now both a noun and a verb, and FedEx characterizes what Congress might do for UPS as the “Brown Bailout.” But properly used, “bailout” denotes a rescue of an economic entity from financial distress.

True, or true-ish, enough. "Bailout" isn't a verb, but "bail out" is -- has been since the 17th century, to hear the OED tell it. (That's in the sense of bailing out the water; bailing out the boat is dated to 1840.) "Bailout," the noun, has a citation (as "bail-out") from 1939. So it's not untrue to say it's both noun and verb, but it's no truer now than at any point in the past 70 years.

What all this has to do with Will's point (should he have one) is more opaque. I'm going to categorize it as a sideswipe -- just an o-tempora-o-mores indicator tossed off in passing that the Language of Shakespeare has taken another hit below the waterline, and we know who we have to thank for that, don't we?

How does the Obama administration love organized labor? Let us count the ways it uses power to repay unions for helping to put it in power.

Yep. First the socialists took away your SUV, then they came for your primary care physician, then they came for your vocabulary. (I'm a bit baffled that a column purporting to be about the Obama administration spends so much time on what Congress is up to; I'm used to hearing "administration" to mean the executive.) What he's saying is that our thinking has been so warped by These People that it's showing up in language -- in language-myth terms, we've developed a new word for "snow."

Thoughts?

Say what you mean

Symbolic 1A illustrations in general are a shaky idea. For one thing, the morning paper tends to arrive when we mortals are spending our cognitive resources elsewhere; if you're going to be subtle, you need to be subtle loudly enough to be heard in the upper deck. For another, they're often amazingly unoriginal -- as in, stop us if you haven't seen the health-care cliche (below) that got Orlando's attention today.

But if you insist on using visual symbols to invoke a metaphor, do it right. That's where the Columbus front falls short. It's trying to show the "housing roller coaster," but it doesn't. It just shows "roller coaster," and if you get into the heds and graphics and wonder why everybody's talking about housing, rather than roller coasters, you have reason to be annoyed. The photo has sent its message pretty well before the poor coffee-deprived eye manages to work back to the smallest of the type overlaid on the photo.

I'm not at all convinced that "housing roller coaster" is a good metaphor anyway -- going by the trends shown in the 1A graphic, foreclosure rates make for the most boring roller coaster in history. But the bigger problem remains: "Housing roller coaster" might have been what you meant, but it isn't -- visually, overall -- what you said. It's hard for type to undo what a photo has done.

The Yankeesinterns are coming!

Gather 'round, kiddies, and we will tell stories about the good old days, when people called "editors" read things called "stories" until late in the night.

What did editors do? Well, they made sure writers were using the right words:

Buried where he lay, Carr, a Union casualty, somehow escaped re-internment at the Marietta National Cemetery.

I think what he missed was "re-interment," which is also known as "reburial." If I'm recalling it correctly, when troops are "interned," they're usually (a) still vertical and (b) in the hands of a neutral power* (though I'd want to look that up if time allowed). Whether he "escaped" internitude or not -- that's an ear call. Good writers are likely to get the ear call, bad writers are likely to lose it. Though if the Yankees had him fetching coffee and making copies all summer, maybe it's appropriate.

Editors looked for wasted words. Since we've already noted that he was serving in the U.S. Army and that he's dead, "a Union casualty" adds exactly nothing to the story. Needlesser words could hardly be found.

And editors recalled stuff from third grade:

His great-great grandfather, a Union soldier from Indiana, fought in the siege of Vicksburg in 1983 and, due to bad weather that ruined necessary paperwork, his ancestor wound up buried in an anonymous grave on the battlefield.

Look. I'm from the land of "Forget, Hell" license plates too, but -- 1983? Isn't that carrying the past-isn't-past thing a little far? The editor who thoughtfully provided a link to the Atlanta weather conditions but allowed the War of the Northern Aggression to extend into the first Reagan term needs to rethink some priorities. And whose ancestor is "his" ancestor -- the story subject's or the great-great-grandfather's? (Please remember all the hyphens while you're at it.)

Then there's the lede. Normally we're wary of whacking them too hard, but when the fluffs start to pile up in the text, the lede gets a second look:

Private Mark Carr, U.S. Army, sounds like the kind of guy who’s the backbone of any military unit — the loyal, consistent grunt who does the heavy lifting.

How did that discussion go in "Scoop" again?

"But you do think it's a good way of training oneself -- inventing imaginary news?"
"None better," said William.

Atlanta, like many (if not most) papers, has been hammered pretty severely by the iron ball. Good journalists lost jobs. Other good journalists are left to cover those gaps and whatever new ones are created under the let's-do-more-stuff-with-fewer-people philosophy. That said: Please, can we take at least one set of eyes, brain and hands away from updating the weather, writing minor cop briefs and feeding the Twitters (or whatever you kids do with your internets) and direct them back toward critical assessments of the actual copy in the for-real publication? Because if you can't even get the Civil War in the right part of the wrong century, you have issues beyond the ability of a multimedia platform to fix.

* "Sweden?" "Orr!" "Orr?" "Sweden!"

Kill Poe before serving

Anything look familiar in this morning's NYT corrections?

The column also misspelled the given name of a journalist and venture capitalist who argued for more disclosure. He is Alan D. Mutter, not Allan.

Maybe it's this, from yesterday's NYT corrections:

A cover article last Sunday about Isaac Stern’s 1979 visit to China, chronicled in the documentary “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China,” misspelled the given name of one of the filmmakers. He is Allan Miller, not Alan.

Given the Times's well-documented troubles with Edgar Allan Poe ("at least 82" misspellings noted in the delightful "Kill Duck Before Serving," and they weren't the last), here's a suggestion. Any reporter turning in a story that mentions anyone named Allan (or Alan, or Allen, or Alun, or Allyn, or Ælwyne) will henceforth leave a major credit card with the chief of the appropriate copy desk. If the name turns out to be misspelled, the copy editors take the credit card to the bar.

Or, more practically, the Times could spend less time enforcing its more arcane style rules and more time -- on the apparently well-founded assumption that reporters can't or won't do it themselves -- looking up every Allan that crosses the desk. It'd be nice to get up to the coin-toss level of accuracy, at least.

Unseen Hand Club

An interesting post over at the Log today fills in a bit more of the ongoing tapestry of language-about-language -- specifically, how the commenting class uses linguistic features of political speech to shed light on True Motives and Meaning, whether or not the features in question bear any resemblance to reality (or to the speech of the politicians they're imputed to). Here's the lede:

For most intellectuals today, grammar is no longer a tool of rational analysis, but rather a source of incoherent metaphor.

Aside from the gross misclassification of Margaret Carlson as an intellectual, I agree -- with one exception. This particular set of metaphors is anything but incoherent, as the evidence the Logsters have gathered in recent months makes abundantly clear. It's at the point where I'm tempted to ask whether there's a Society of the Unseen Hand for grumpy Washington Post columnists out there that we don't know about.

You probably had a different name for it in your shop,* but an Unseen Hand Club is a secret society that you join by getting a particular phrase ("It was as if an unseen hand had ...") into print, preferably in a really creative and incongruous way. I think we have an especially devious one on our hands here, but it starts with technical features of grammar. If you haven't already, check out the Log's work on George Will and the first-person pronoun:

"I," said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, "want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector."

... and Charles Krauthammer and verb voice:

"On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the 'divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence' (note the use of the passive voice)."

Flatly fabricated and flatly wrong, respectively, but far from "incoherent." These are very well organized assertions about personal and political character, and they fit neatly into a consistent pattern. Look again at Will's lede -- "the president, who is inordinately fond ..." -- and the beginning of Krauthammer's second graf: "Not that Obama considers himself divine. (He sees himself as merely messianic, or, at worst, apostolic.)"

Now let's flip ahead a month:

Krauthammer, July 9: A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage.

Will, July 8: Seemingly confident that managing the competition of nations could be as orderly as managing competition among the three** members of Detroit's oligopoly, McNamara entered government seven months before the birth of the current president, who is the owner and, he is serenely sure, fixer of General Motors.

Incoherent metaphor? Hardly. I think we're seeing a carefully arranged meta-frame emerge -- the sort of metaphor by which a certain part of the population lives.*** And amid the serenity, the plumage and the inordinate fondness for certain pronouns, I'm half inclined to bet that Will and Krauthammer have their eye on membership in the Club of the Hand that Is Not Seen.


* Recollections and observations are welcome, particularly from you non-US readers.
** No, he can't count, either.
*** Brief off-topic rant: Please be sure to enjoy the entire Will column for a good sense of Will's shallowness and intellectual dishonesty. If he's that desperate for an example of naive behavioralism gone wrong, could we suggest the administration that thought the "democratic peace" was the sort of ironclad law that justifies imposing "democracy" at gunpoint? Thank you.

Orwell in the news

A burst of semantic weirdness on NPR this morning is worth noting, if only to make clear that Your Editor is Not Procrastinating on That Chapter. Mara Liasson is summing up some of the latest turns of jargon and politically advantageous language from Our Capital. She starts with "legacy securities" for "toxic assets," then moves into more interesting territory:

LIASSON: National security is another area chock full of Washington buzzwords that are designed to obfuscate rather than communicate. (Here we get a bit on the use of "overseas contingency operations" for foreign wars.) Writer Joe Queenan thinks political euphemisms like "overseas contingency operations" are Orwellian, and they drive him crazy.

QUEENAN: "War on terror" is very, very specific. Everybody knows exactly what it means. "Overseas contingency operations," which is what is the official designation now, is just stupid. what if the Taliban started doing this? ....

With all due respect, but -- are you out of your mind? The great advantage of "war on terror" is that it's anything but "very, very specific." It's everything from a metaphor to an actual shooting war, and it happens everywhere from the Afghan-Pakistan border to whatever those suspicious neighbors of yours are up to behind the curtains there. It means vastly different things to different members of the audience. That's why -- at least partly why -- it works so well.

LIASSON: Queenan thinks leaching political language of its most powerful terms -- axis of evil, war on terror -- fits right in with President Obama's nonpolarizing, inclusive leadership style.

Hard to see a case for deeming those the "most powerful terms" in political language (compared to "freedom" or "democracy" or "Communist," they're distinctly second-tier). They're powerful in a particular way, under particular circumstances, for a particular part of the audience. To assume they exert some sort of universal magic, you have to buy into a speech-act approach -- proclaiming a "war on terror" makes the War on Terror® a real thing -- that really can't carry that much weight. If "axis of evil" was that powerful, you couldn't purge it from the language anyway, no matter what Orwell said.

Nice to see NPR paying attention to the language of politics, but it'd help to spend a little more time studying the terrain.

Don't even think about ending ground here

Some thoughts about Fox News and the rewriting of history and current affairs, but first this candidate for Mondegreen of the Year, thanks to Sean Hannity:

WINSTON CHURCHILL: We shall fight down the beaches. We shall fight down those ending ground. We shall never surrender.

Surely if you're going to ridicule that sneaking Maoist Al Gore for daring to invoke Sir Winston, you must think enough of the old coot to have heard, oh, something like "fight on the landing grounds" somewhere in the dim, dark past?

The Gore-Churchill thing is a story for Hannity, of course, because it's been a big deal around the right-wing wankosphere. Here's how Fox handled it Tuesday:

Al Gore: Climate-Change Fight Like Battle Against Nazis
Al Gore on Tuesday compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

Wondering why you didn't see that in your favorite source of news? Two reasons suggest themselves:
1) The craven librul media are covering up for one of their idols again!
2) It never happened. Al Gore didn't compare climate change to Hitler -- at least, not outside the fevered little minds of the Murdoch press.

I'm going with Door No. 2. This is another case in which some elements of the (ahem) British media have taken a few light liberties with what went on, meaning that by the time it reaches Fox territory, no one's going to go back and do any verifying. There's no need to -- it's in the Times!

Except, of course, that it isn't -- in the Times, that is. Odd, the link says "likens climate change to battle against Nazis," but the Times article online has the tamer -- and actually true -- "Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill in battle against climate change." Nor does Gore seem to invoke the H-word in the text:

Speaking in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by The Times, Mr Gore said: “Winston Churchill aroused this nation in heroic fashion to save civilisation in World War Two. We have everything we need except political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

How much of that he "admitted" is open to debate. The hosts don't seem to have posted a transcript, but Gore doesn't say any such thing in the video at the Times site, and there's no further indication (I'm looking at reports from the Scotsman and Press Association as well) that Gore brought Hitler into things. And when some public whackjob invokes Hitler, it's standard journalistic practice to provide a supporting quote or two (as the Guardian does here). Absent some such evidence, I'm inclined to categorize the admission as primarily rhetorical stretch on the writer's part -- but it's the sort that allows Fox to produce an out-and-out lie without actually having to, you know, lie or anything.

It's hardly unusual to catch Fox making stuff up about people it doesn't like, but there's a bit of delightful irony in this one. For one, Hannity is a spear carrier for a political faction that excelled in hijacking Churchill for its own purposes. Here's the New York Post in February 2003:

Tony Blair's not the first British leader to risk political disaster by saying things his people weren't ready to hear. Winston Churchill, in the mid-1930s, repeatedly warned that Germany was re-arming, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and would eventually march across Europe once more. For that he was hooted down in Parliament and ridiculed, even by his own party, as a demagogic alarmist.

Well, sorta. But Churchill, a realist, was talking about a large continental power that had reached air parity with Britain by 1935 and was soon to surpass it -- not a onetime regional power in the Middle East whose airspace was effectively owned by its antagonists. It's hard to imagine Churchill demanding an invasion of Iraq in 2003, because Churchill was not an idiot.

Which brings us to the second point. Churchill wasn't just ridiculed by "his own party" (to the extent that was true in the first place; for a notional exile, he retained a very high level of access); he was an object of scorn for the American right. The cartoon above,* from Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune, is a typical depiction: Churchill is ready to let anyone else's boys die -- that'll be yours, Mr. and Mrs. America -- in the interest of some obscure European tribal war that we're well advised to stay out of. Nor was Col. McCormick alone. His Patterson cousins, who owned the largest papers in New York and Washington, were as virulently anti-Roosevelt and anti-intervention as he was. If the Big American Media look "liberal" today, that's partly because they were so monolithically right-wing for much of their history.

Sean Hannity isn't the kind of guy who would have been comforting Churchill in the Tory wilderness; his ilk were in the isolationist camp until the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Supporting the troops? When the Reuben James was sunk, they were writing the "We asked for it" heds in the Tribune. It's a pity Churchill -- no mean hand with the ad hominem attack -- isn't around to tee Hannity up for the lying gasbag that he is.

* Nov. 4, 1941. The cartoonist, Carey Orr, later won a Pulitzer; one of his post-Pearl Harbor cartoons provided the main title for John Dower's outstanding "War Without Mercy: Race and power in the Pacific war."

Up with this is now put?

There's something about NYT corrections that makes garden-variety NYT prose seem to crackle with literary fire by comparison:

Because of an editing error, the Châteauroux Journal article last Monday, about the American influence in Châteauroux, France, formerly the site of the largest American military base in postwar Europe, misstated the size of a stone cellar that once housed a dance hall beneath the Joe from Maine hamburger restaurant, founded by an American G.I. and his French wife.

An article on Friday about the intersecting lives of Johanna Justin-Jinich, a Wesleyan University student fatally shot inside a campus bookstore, and Stephen P. Morgan, the man accused of killing her, included an erroneous location from a city official for the discovery of a computer belonging to Mr. Morgan, and misstated the location where his journal, which contained threats to Ms. Justin-Jinich and others, was found by the police.

These two weigh in collectively at a cool 30.0 on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level test, leading one to suspect that the Times has a policy of making you fall asleep before you figure out what the correction is trying to correct. What a pleasure, then, to see this sentence among the morning's crop of WWWs:

An article on Tuesday about the ecological role of beetles that are attacking pine forests in the West misstated part of the name of the climate organization that Steve Running, an ecologist, is affiliated with. Dr. Running is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, not the Internal Panel on Climate Change.

Not only are we down below 30 words a sentence, but -- is that a preposition with which that first sentence is seen by us to be ending? It's as if it had been decreed that corrections could now be written in language that is plain and comprehensible.
[NB: Edited in light of the comment below (tnx, Ray!) -- should have left the rest of the correction in place to begin with. My goof.]