CQ 'refute'

As part of our once-a-year effort to say something nice about Fox News -- hey, how about the copy editor who correctly stetted "refute" in the nut graf (above) of this WSJ pickup:

As a presidential candidate in August 2015, Donald Trump huddled with a longtime friend, media executive David Pecker, in his cluttered 26th floor Trump Tower office and made a request.

What can you do to help my campaign? he asked, according to people familiar with the meeting.

... The Trump Tower meeting and its aftermath are among several previously unreported instances in which Mr. Trump intervened directly to suppress stories about his alleged sexual encounters with women, according to interviews with three dozen people who have direct knowledge of the events or who have been briefed on them, as well as court papers, corporate records and other documents.

Taken together, the accounts refute a two-year pattern of denials by Mr. Trump, his legal team and his advisers that he was involved in payoffs to Ms. McDougal and a former adult-film star. They also raise the possibility that the president of the United States violated federal campaign-finance laws.

Even hard-core prescriptivists should probably admit by now that the refute/rebut distinction is slowly sinking beneath the waves -- though it's still fun to  catalog the occasional case where "refute" is more about ideology than carelessness. Here, too, it's nice to think that someone knew exactly what they were doing.

And good for the occasionally toothy Journal, too.  Hope everybody at least gets a window seat on Mr. Murdoch's unheated cattle train to Siberia.

A terrible beauty is born

You have to hand it to the wordsmiths at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. When they repurpose a word, they really, really mean it.

The view at top right was on offer when I got up today; somebody didn't get the word that heds of the form "Let the N begin" are on the forbidden list, but otherwise it appears to be shutdown business as usual.

The change in attitude appears to have come in this story, which showed up (I think*) sometime around noon:

What the Obama administration is portraying as a "shutdown" of the federal government -- complete with signs posted at the entrances to government buildings, parks and monuments -- is turning out to be more of a "slimdown," as all but non-essential workers reported to their jobs Tuesday.

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