The letter and the spirit

A reminder from the local fishwrap last week that it doesn't do a lot of good to follow the letter of the law if you ignore the spirit of the law.

Some background, in case you haven't been paying attention: The Gannett empire announced in mid-June that it would join other news outlets in capitalizing the "B":

Through a series of internal conversations that began with the USA TODAY diversity committee and ultimately cascaded across our network of local news organizations, we have reviewed our current stylebook and are making the following change:

Effective immediately, the USA TODAY Network — one of the nation’s largest print and digital media companies — will capitalize B when describing Black culture, ethnicity and communities of people.

My view, which is worth every penny of your subscription price: Good. This was overdue. Now provide the resources to enable smart, sensitive editing at the hubs that will put your style into practice, because otherwise you're just dressing up the cop blotter with a small orthographic change:

According to the City of Westland Police Department, two or three Black males began arguing inside a perfume store in the mall, which is located at 35000 Warren Road. 

Stylebooks and textbooks have long cautioned against randomly tossing race and ethnicity into news coverage. Here's the 1999 version of the Freep's own stylebook, for example, under "race":

Identify a person or situation by race, ethnic origins, religion, etc., only if that information is relevant and essential.

And under "crime":

When writing about suspects, physical descriptions are useful only if they give enough information for a reader to identify the person. Race, ethnic origin, religion, etc., are relevant in detailed descriptions -- ones that fit very few people. The following is NOT a detailed description: a man about 6 feet 1, in his mid-30s, Hispanic, wearing light-colored clothing. 

The AP (2019 version) is blunter about the underlying reasons:

Consider carefully when deciding whether to identify people by race. Often, it is an irrelevant factor and drawing unnecessary attention to someone's race or ethnicity can be interpreted as bigotry.

This is your occasional reminder that proofreading is not the same thing as editing. The change in style didn't just fall out of the sky. It arose from a series of sharp reminders that news language ought to be taken seriously. (As we like to remind students in editing classes: No, I don't know what you meant, but I have a really good idea of what you said.) The new rule is about what to do when ethnicity is relevant -- not a lowering of the bar for relevance. If anything, it's implicitly a call to think more closely about what "relevant" and "essential" look like and at who should make those decisions.

Again, I'm not blaming the overworked hub editor who had neither the time nor the social capital to throw a flag on this one. It'd be nice, though, if the system was built in a way that rewarded the editor who pointed out that "two Black dudes arguing at the mall" is exactly what the spirit of the stylebook is meant to stop.

Elongated iconic double-dip

What better than the Rolling Stones (and their iconic tongue logo) to illustrate the One  Thing to take away about "iconic"? 

If it's iconic, you don't have to say so. If it ain't iconic, no amount of saying so will make it so. Amen.

Conveniently, the local fishwrap rams the point home with a second double-dip "iconic" story in the same section. Apparently unable to find a home in the Monday paper, the Super Bowl advertising story was a frontpage centerpiece on Tuesday:

But it's Fiat Chrysler, so one can't be enough:

We're not in the word-banning business around here, but consider yourselves empowered to delete "iconic" on sight. 

Do you speak American?

Like it or not, the local treasure that is the Duke-Carolina rivalry* has gone national on us (which is one reason it's so often afflicted with Dick Vitale). But one doesn't have to speak a particular regional American dialect to wonder where CNN is phoning this one in from. The online hed might have been a giveaway, had you stumbled there first:

Amazon pirates are ruthless and all that, but I don't recall much transitive scuppering from my years of reading American sports pages. On to the text:

A star-studded crowd including former US President Barack Obama had gathered to watch hotly tipped college basketball player Zion Williamson, but the 18-year-old's night unraveled after just 33 seconds when his Nike shoe fell apart. 

Likewise "hotly tipped." You could at this point also wonder how the "star-studded crowd" of the lede became the "star-studded match" of the hed, but that risks taking our eye off a different ball. Do you suppose some of the star-studded crowd (Obama, for example) might have actually been there to, you know, watch Carolina and Duke play? But onward:

... Tickets for the local derby were reportedly available for over $3,000 and freshman forward Williamson -- described by double NBA champion Kevin Durant as a "once-in-a-generation athlete" -- was a big reason for the inflated prices.

Williamson's top-ranked Duke side was on a nine-match winning streak, but without their 285-pound 6 feet 8 inch star player the Blue Devils fell to a 88-72 defeat Wednesday.

No, no and no. "Derby" for "any kind of important sporting contest" (as the OED tells it) appears to be exclusively British. We can do "our side" or "their side," but the definite "side" -- as in "Group F's top and bottom sides" is also "chiefly Brit." And those things with 20 minutes to the half are games, not matches. (And if you can hyphenate one number compound, you can hyphenate another, and let's not forget the delightfully blown participle in the second graf: "Williamson ... went down hard when his shoe split in half while planting his foot.")

We should expect things to be different in different Englishes, and toy departments everywhere will always provide their own delights. (I affirm that my life is richer for the British sports phrase "banana skin," but I wouldn't bet on me to use it correctly in a headline.) But could we at least raise the possibility that CNN misunderstood both its audience and its story here?

I raise the latter point because of this follow-up, which suggests why news organizations tend to be easy prey for practitioners of fake news:

Nike is playing damage control after Duke basketball phenom Zion Williamson tore his sneaker in a game Wednesday evening.

Nike's (NKE) stock was down more than 1% on Thursday. Nike builds its reputation around creating premier shoes and clothes for athletes, but that image took a hit with Williamson's sneaker snafu. 

That's the sort of combination of evidence and guesswork that leaves you open to claims that we have the Greatest. Economy. Evar. And indeed, if you overlook the baseline and increments on the Y-axis, it looks like a case for damage control:

One of the nice things about the CNN site, though: it provides the context that the reporters don't seem interested in: whether Thursday's decline (1.05%) is a lot, a little, or sort of in-between. Here's Nike for the past month:

We don't seem to be seeing much hair-pulling over a similar one-day decline at Raytheon:

... or Martin Marietta:

"True" is a necessary condition of news, but it's not always a sufficient one. If a change of 1% in a stock price isn't a story most times it happens, why are we sure it's a story just because we can run a picture that -- curse the phrase -- "went viral"?

* How old is Your Editor? "Drop-add means standing in line for 80-column punch cards in the Tin Can in August" years old.

Laced and laden

Of all the ways in which Rashida Tlaib's lone Very Naughty Word has been transformed into a basketful, the Freep's "expletive-studded" (at right) looks like it's farthest from the mark. Here's the OED on "studded":

Containing a number of objects or features placed or occurring at intervals. Chiefly with modifying word: strewn or punctuated with a specified object or feature.

Since one motherfucking sparrow doth not strew a summer, no. Somebody wasn't paying attention.

Points to the Freep, though, for calling out a Trump lie:

"I think she dishonored herself and she dishonored her family, using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there. I thought it was highly disrespectful."

Tlaib's office didn't respond to Trump's remarks, though it confirmed that neither of her son,* who are 13 and 7, were present at the event when she made the comments. 

"Laced" and "laden" seem to be much more common misinterpretations:

 

The NYT's print hed has less space, but the text manages to get "exuberant, expletive-laden" above the fold:

And full marks to the Times for printing the Magic Word itself:

Broadly, I'm inclined to put "expletive-laden" in that category of terms that journalists reach for automatically, whether or not they've looked closely enough to see if the thing they're getting breathless over actually happened: like "limped into port," to borrow one of the Magic Phrases of Journalism, or anything having to do with bluegrass, anywhere. For the record, here's what an "expletive-laden rant" looked like to Fox last weekend:

Cardi defended Patientce in a since-deleted Instagram video (via In Touch), telling her followers, "That’s my b—h, that's my homegirl, and matter [of] fact, I am mad at Patientce. Wanna know why I'm mad at Patientce? Cause she should've spit in that f–king lady's face. That's why. So don't f—king tell me about my b—h, that's my b—h. And she's been doing a great f–king job and I thank her every single f–king day. Thank you."

"Laden," of course, means "loaded"; the two examples in the Merriam-Webster usage dictionary use noncount nouns ("wisdom" and "disquiet"), but they're pretty clearly in nontrace amounts. "Laced" is a bit trickier; I think of "rum-laced" as "LOADS AND LOADS of rum," but I suppose I could see a case in which "laced coffee" might be just a drop or two. Still, editors and writers would do well to avoid reaching into the cliche bag here; it's careless, sure, but it's the kind of carelessness that's hard to distinguish from stereotyping. If you aren't prepared to demonstrate that Rashida Tlaib has a lower lading capacity than your standard white Protestant college football coach, might as well not stick a paper clip in that particular light socket.

* This might be a War on Editing first: the typo is in the online version, but not in print.

Give them hell, Harrison

No, they don't. OK, they do plump pretty well, but that's not how the slogan goes. If you remember something more in line with what the company says:

... or the ad at Wikipedia:

... you too might wonder what's going through the minds down at the remaining Sunday fishwrap that says "Detroit" in the nameplate.*

This is not a call for carefree g-droppin', but surely some balance of attention to what's said and what's being represented is in order. Here's a coincidental example from a midweek piece on the centenary of the Rouge River plant:

Bet he didn't. Like many of us, he probably contracted "must have," with the writer -- and any remaining editors -- never having heard the explanation that you're not "changing" a quote when you assume that the speaker got it right before the contraction. (Since this is an academic the paper quotes regularly on labor issues, it doesn't look like a class thing.) 

The AP, as is often the case, combines a good basic rule ("do not use substandard spellings such as 'gonna' or 'wanna' in attempts to convey regional dialects or substandard pronunciations") with just enough leeway to let writers trip themselves (" ... except to help a desired touch or to convey an emphasis by the speaker"; it's not the AP's fault if the "desired touch" is desired more often among people who don't look or talk like reporters). There's nothing substandard about "must've," though. And if the "emphasis of the speaker" is borne out by written practice -- well, give them hell, Harrison.

* Having a native speaker of Detroitish in the next room, I did ask. "Plump when you cook 'em" was what she remembered as well.

Fox weirds verbing: Double downed

Looks like we have enough data points for a trend here: Fox moving the inflection from the verb to the preposition, as in the earlier "water-downed." (Alas, it's been fixed in the text online, but the screen grab doesn't lie.)

I haven't seen a slightly different version, in which the inflection in a VP moves from verb to object ("Trump lower booms"), for a bit. Hope it's still out there.

Fox weirds verbing: Watership downed

Another entry in Fox's where-does-that-pesky-inflection-go ledger! Unlike the last installment, which offered a couple of verb phrases ("lower booms" for "lowers boom" and "open fires" for "opens fire"), this one features a phrasal verb -- and, cleverly, poses as a quote without trying to represent one. The lede is standard Fox:

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy scorched James Comey in a blistering opening statement at a high-profile congressional hearing on Tuesday, declaring “we can’t survive with a justice system we don’t trust.”

... but the only suggestion of watering down is in the sixth graf:

Gowdy accused Comey of watering down his initial statement on the investigation's findings and making other decisions on his own. While Comey has suggested he acted unilaterally out of concern for the Justice Department's handling of the case, Gowdy questioned why he didn't seek a special counsel -- as he indirectly did regarding concerns about the Trump administration. 

Fox is obviously a busy place these days. Do you suppose there are things Fox doesn't want you to read a lot about?

We're no angels

Spare a kind thought for our little friends in the party press. When their president speaks, they listen -- but what do you even do with a clause like "Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy"? Do you read the first part in your Sam Elliott voice and the second as Marlowe? Let's see how it looked as the lead story Saturday afternoon at Fox:

Well, not exactly. How do you think it looked when you clicked through?

That's not much better at all, is it? Though at least we appear to have actually read our own lede:

President Trump called Andrew McCabe a 'choirboy' as he lauded the former acting FBI Director's firing, suggesting multiple federal reports show “corruption at the highest level.”

OK, double quotes in text, please, and the comma goes inside the quotes in the hed, but no. The president didn't call Mr. McCabe either of those things. Both are plausible insults:

McCabe, you're a choirboy!
McCabe, you're no choirboy!

... but (aside from being, you know, completely opposite) they're not what he was talking about. He was talking about James Comey, not McCabe. And you'd like to think that, even at Fox, there might be enough native speakers to figure that out.

 Don't spend too much time thinking nice thoughts about Fox; they've chosen to serve their orange monkey-king, and if that doesn't work out, plenty of coal and steel jobs will no doubt be waiting. (The same can't be said of grownup journalism.) But surely we can all understand that brief moment of panic at the arrival of the midnight tweet. You can see why it took until the following day to figure things out.

Kids these days

Everyone's a little different when it comes to getting those pesky large numbers into headlines. You can be extra-formal and insist on the zeroes, or you can guess that your audience can figure out B for "billion" and T for "trillion." You can use M for "million," unless the greisly voice of your first editing teacher is shouting from beyond the grave that M really means "thousand," for which you can't use T (above), so you probably fall back on K.

G for thousand is a little more tabloid (in the spinning-front-page-indicates-passage-of-time sense), partly because it's tightly restricted. It doesn't mean "thousand," it means "thousand dollars" (or pounds, for which the OED has a cite from 1958). So somebody at Fox reached one shelf too far for the hed above, but you have to admit it has sort of a grapefruit-in-the-face charm to it.

Martinis, steaks and cold-blooded belles

So with the UN slapping America in the face, Republicans finally wising up to the Kenyan usurper's Mideast perfidy and Massster's beautiful tax cuts held hostage by those pesky budget rules, what do you figure should have been the world's fourth most important story on Thursday afternoon?

Aw, you peeked. Having done so, though, you might have wondered how the elements of this story fell into place so naturally, so let's have a look:

She’ll drink to that!

The Latvian woman who watched her fiancé drown in the Hudson River walked out of prison Thursday — and celebrated with a martini and steak lunch.

There's no "police said" or "according to eyewitnesses" or "Fox News can reveal" (though there is that delicate accent on "fiancé," in case you've forgiven the French for anything in the past few decades). But there is an outline of the structure under which we're supposed to understand stuff. "Walked out of prison Thursday" is an easy claim to verify. "Martini and steak lunch" is close, but .. hang on a little and we'll get back to the martinis. "Celebrated" is actually a bit different from what you see in sports photo captions, where at least people are usually jumping up and down or something. As for who's drinking to what -- well, you can't call it a lie, because there's nothing for it to be true or false about. It's a framing device. It doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you how to think about the things you're poised to learn.

Watching one's fiance drown, of course, is substantially different from drowning one's fiance; both have the makings of a good country song, but to make sense of the second paragraph, you need to know in advance that this isn't your ordinary Latvian woman. She's the one ... oh, come on, you read about it a couple years ago, it's on the tip of your tongue, she's the one in that story! So now you're ready to look at how tabloids make news. Indeed, let's just go ahead and shift over to the New York Post, the Murdoch stablemate from which Fox appropriated this story:

The part that Fox added to the hed -- the steak dinner -- seems to be the better attested,* but what the heck. How many martinis, and how do we know?
Read more »

Fox weirds verbing

Was the morning's lead story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network -- "Trump lower booms on GOP Senate" -- just a glitch? After all, it was fixed ("Trump lowers boom") within half an hour or so. But before jumping to conclusions, consider this:

"Man open fires" was from the early stages of the Texas church massacre, and it too was replaced before long. But with two of them in three weeks, you have to wonder if something's gotten into the water cooler at Fox. Are we going to regularize all these idiomatic verb phrases by moving the inflection to the noun? Can we bring back Tribune spelling, too?

We can't let this one go without a look at the level of booms-lowering in the tax story (which might help explain why it's fallen completely off the homepage as of this writing; hate it when that happens to a lead story). The inside hed (and the link) are fall-off-the-bone milquetoast: "Trump to visit GOP Senate in push to deliver tax 'Christmas present' to Americans." But it appropriately reflects the high drama of the lede:

President Trump is meeting next week with Republican senators in a push to get a congressional tax reform bill on his desk by Christmas, with a final vote purportedly coming as early as Thursday.

Surely there's some Trumpian elbow-throwing, though?

Trump is eager to pass major tax reform -- the first in nearly three decades -- to get his first major legislative victory.

"We're going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas,” Trump said last week. “Hopefully, that will be a great, big, beautiful Christmas present."

Hardly what you'd expect from ... how's that, Oxford English Dictionary?

Amer. slang. to lower the boom on: to inflict severe damage or harsh punishment on; to treat severely; (also) to put a stop to (an activity). Also to lower the boom: to deal a decisive or destructive blow.

No doubt Massster appreciated the effort.

Twitter as speech act

You've probably noticed in recent months that Fox's frontpage story selection looks a lot like the good old days of the authoritarian press: Whatever the Big Man is doing is good enough us. 

The Monday page has a bit of a twist, though. The Big Man's morning Twitter outburst is given a performative effect in the No. 2 and No. 4* stories. At upper right, it manages to quash fears all by itself (the public apparently having learned to take him at his word). And at lower right -- kids, that's why we still teach the stuff about "refute" and "rebut." On the weekend's developments, the Times saved "refute" for when it works: "After Video Refutes Kelly's Charges, Congresswoman Raises Issue of Race." Even Fox is tamer on the inside; Trump merely "denies Army widow's claim he struggled to remember soldier's name."

It's probably always been true that Twitter could have an illocutionary function. If you're going to declare that "a state of war exists with Freedonia," there's no particular reason it has to be on radio rather than Twitter. It's kind of neat to see the perlocutionary function laid out as well.

* The new design usually has a top story, with four featured below it. It's more Fox for the buck!

Today in getting off my lawn

From the June 1924 edition of Popular Radio, also featuring this tantalizing ad from Brandes:

This is indeed a radio summer! The vital interest of the presidential campaign -- waged right in your own home. The glorious and inspiring church services. The important sporting events, market reports, home hints, intensely interesting talks, gay music -- all these diversions are brought directly to you.

Order now, of course, if you want the "momentous proceedings and orations" of Cleveland "in all their original naturalness."

Smite them, Lord Apis

No, he didn't. Had Mr. Trump actually said "God damn the Bush-Rubio relationship," that might have been interesting. Instead:

KEENE, New Hampshire -- GOP frontrunner Donald Trump came out on the attack in New Hampshire on Wednesday, with strong language to describe Florida senator Marco Rubio's warm relationship with his former mentor, Gov. Jeb Bush.

How strong?

"They hate each other," Trump said of his rivals for the Republican nomination. "They hate, trust me I know. They hate so much. They hate more than anybody in this room hates their neighbor. But it's political bullsh*t, do you understand? It's true."

CBS might faint at the very thought of the elongated yellow barnyard epithet being used in polite company (assuming it can figure out where all the pronouns attach and what Mr. Trump is actually trying to say, which are preconditions to figuring out whether this round of gibberish is remotely a lede). But on behalf of copy editors everywhere, I reserve the right to be annoyingly prescriptive on this topic: Without the presence of a certified bull god, "bullshit" is not profanity.

Dainty asterisks aside, is he describing the "warm relationship" itself as bullshit, or saying that his rivals' alleged public facade of enmity is bullshit? Or does the day's top political news from the elongated yellow primary state actually boil down to Grownup Says Bad Word? (Given that we're reduced to taking a wire story on Grownup Mistakenly Says True Word, there's cause to be concerned about the distribution of staff resources here.)

Covering the bull race is one thing. Ignoring everything but the bullshit is another. Beware the wrath of Apis.

Volcano gods angry!

My favorite potential band name from the recent ACES conference came when one of the dictionary editors was defending the standards of the trade: "We're not free-love descriptivists." Few word people are. Some innovations work, and some don't, and it's probably a good idea to hold off on the champagne until you have an idea of where stuff is going and how likely it is to get there. Apparently, that isn't happening downtown (online hed shown above, bullet item from the print edition at right).

Sorry. "Offer" doesn't do that -- or, worse, that's exactly what "offer" does in the OED's first definition:

To present (something) to God, a god, a saint, etc., as an act of devotion; to sacrifice; to give in worship

Yes, there follows a definition ("now chiefly archaic or regional") meaning "to make an offer," mostly of marriage, but it takes the preposition, as in "Lord Lansdowne offered to Miss Molesworth." A similar one, to offer on a house, crops in British, Canadian and US usage. But "offer" meaning "to make an offer to" is a new one on me. Still,  rimrats as well as writers seem to recognize it, it gets passive the way verbs do, and story subjects themselves use it elsewhere in the Saturday paper. It's clearly a verb for some people who write about college football recruiting.

I'd be less annoyed -- well, not much less annoyed -- if I hadn't seen this at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network around the same time:
 

Sure, you can upgrade to first class, but tropical cyclones don't invent weather scales and probably don't even use them. Somebody has to upgrade the poor things; they can't upgrade themselves. You can't make "Ana upgraded" better by making it active; you only make it sillier.

Descriptivism is sort of the grammar equivalent of realism. You don't have to like a regime or what it does or the people who run it, but if it's been in power for six decades, you should probably go ahead and treat it like it's in power. As a corollary: If you don't like seeing jargon slip into news coverage, the time to stop it is now. Tell people to write for their audience, not for their sources. Tell cops writers to stop sounding like cop reports; tell sports writers to stop sounding like the sort of dirtbags who recruit junior-high kids to play Division I revenue sports. Don't be a Free Love Descriptivist -- though if you do, rehearsals are in my basement.

Nouning weirds language

By the standards of the redtops, this wouldn't even count as a particularly interesting noun pile, except for -- you know, the noun. And even that is pretty straightforward: A confession becomes a "fess" in the same way a slaying becomes a "slay." The only odd part -- unless the Post is now in the habit of complaining about Those Kids using their 'phones on the crosstown 'bus -- is the apostrophe that marks the clipping in 'fess.

The inside hed also helps you infer a few things about tabloid attribution practice. The quote in the story is "What the hell did I do? . . . Killed them all of course," so the more fastidious version leaves "I" out of the quote. And the standard Old Editor response to a televised admission is that it's a confession when it's admitted in court, not when it's given to some goober with a microphone -- hence the second pair of quotes around "confession." Maybe libel lawyers know better than to think anyone believes the front page anyway?

As for why a distant slay (even one attributed to "bizarre real estate heir and longtime murder suspect Robert Durst") is jostling for frontpage space with basketball, while the usurper is still plotting to give away the nuclear candy store and the Hildebeest* is frantically subverting justice -- well, that's why we have tabloids, innit?

* Almost certainly not coined by either of the Obamas, in case you're scoring along at home. Consider the source.

With any luck, it might be true

Wow, that all-purpose image of Sad Panda Usurper is coming in handy these days!

President Obama reportedly penned a secret letter to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month discussing their shared interest in fighting the Islamic State -- a development one congressional source told Fox News "f***s up everything."

Guess you've got him this time, right?

... A senior congressional source told Fox News that there is not anything definitive as to whether the letter even exists. But the source indicated they don't doubt that it's true because "we've seen [the president] do it before, so there is [a] precedent."

Well, there's some high-quality sou***ng for you. And was it just last week that Fox had a lecture for us on how not to talk about other people's heads of government?

The White House on Wednesday sought to tamp down the controversy over a magazine piece that detailed deep tensions between the U.S. and Israel – and quoted an unnamed senior Obama administration official calling the Israeli leader a “chickenshit.” 

Why, that's just ...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Tuesday accused the administration of “hurling expletives” at the Israeli leader.
Read more »

Yes and no, but no, and yes. And no.

Q. Hello. How would you write "a drugmaker that makes generic drugs": "generic-drug maker," "generic-drug-maker" or something else? Thanks. – from Tustin, Calif. on Thu, Sep 18, 2014

A. The Stylebook spelling is drugmaker, so the first is correct.

Dear AP: You're at least partly right about something, though not about what the questioner asks or even entirely about what you answer. The question from Tustin appears to be about how to shorten the phrase by preposing "generic drugs," not about whether the longer form is already correct-ish. You could instead be raising consciousness about why "generic-drug maker" is an exception to the Stylebook's spelling of "drugmaker."

What we want to avoid is letting the Stylebook drag us into doing something stupid -- making the drugmaker, rather than the drugs, generic, in the same sort of way careless writers turn women who run small businesses into teeny-tiny businesswomen.You don't want the adjective to modify the compound noun: small businesswoman, generic drugmaker. What you want is a compound modifier, and you're going to link it up just the way Tustin suggested: small-business woman, generic-drug maker. Or you can just use the longer form: A maker of generic drugs, women who run small businesses. And if someone wails that you're not being consistent, you should respond: At least I'm not being dumb.

On what planet ...

... with how many backward-rotating methane-fed suns, does the editor of the, you know, New York Times become "NYT Jill"?

Oh, right. The strange world of the Murdoch redtop! These are from the spring 2004 stash:

TV Henry is broke
TV Kiefer injured in bar fight
TV Carol sees spot where skydive daughter died
TV Chris is new Dr Who

In other words, The Drudge Report* isn't just the sort of place where stories reflecting gender equity issues get headlines that, you know, exemplify gender equity issues. It's also the sort of place that bows to foreign headline dialects, and that's just flat-out un-American. (Not to mention the claim quotes.)

When, when will Drudge and the New York Post be held to account for their traitorous headlines? Only you have the answer, America!

* If you get the "war" bit, you read far too much paranoid media for your own good and should take a vacation.

We don't have a Roderick, either

You can mock the first round if you want, but you can't do it by holding a mock draft.