The pump pain gang

Remember Orwell's advice -- never use a figure of speech that you're used to seeing in print? Here's a headline corollary: Whenever a story seems to call forth a particular hed, stop writing and find another hed. Immediately.

The hed that seems to be forever called forth is this, from the top of today's Palm Beach Post front. Look familiar? It should:

Those Who Live Here, But Work Elsewhere, Are Feeling Pain At The Pumps
Lancaster (Pa.) Sunday News, 4/20

Pain at the pump
Albany Times Union, 4/17

Pain at pump nears new high
Wisconsin State Journal, 4/15

More pain at the pump: Prices continue to rise
Atlanta J-C, 4/15

Drivers are coping with pain at pump
Dayton, 4/11

More pain at the pump
Santa Fe New Mexican, 4/5

U.S. consumers face chronic pain at pump
Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4/3

How do you suppose it looked last month?

Pain at the pumps continue to grow
Contra Costa Times, 3/25

Pain at the Pump and Beyond
NYT, 3/25

Pain at the pump
Telegram and Gazette (Massachusetts), 3/24

Pain at pump goes both ways
Columbus Dispatch, 3/15

More pain at the pump
Baltimore Sun, 3/13

In some towns, there's a pain war:
Utahns feeling pain at the pump
Deseret Morning News, 3/11

Pain at the pump: Utah catching up as gas prices break records
Salt Lake Tribune, 3/11

So March (as several newspapers noted) is the cruelest month, gas-pain-wise. How about February?

Expect more pain at pump
Milwaukee J-S, 2/29

More pain at the pump
San Jose Mercury News, 2/28

Pain at the pump grows
St. Pete Times, 2/23

Pain at the pump likely to intensify
Tacoma News Tribune, 2/1

Surely it's all a function of this year's price spiral?

Pain at the pump
Rock Hill, 11/17

Pain at pump continues; state's prices 3rd in nation
Freep, 11/12

More pain at the pump
Birmingham News, 11/10

As gas prices continue to climb, drivers feel pain at pump
Flint Journal, 11/9

Pain at the pump: $3+ gas
Miami, 11/7

Starting to get the idea? This one's embargoed until, like, the end of time. No exceptions.

Pain at the ... wait, what?

"Pain at the pump," as regular readers know, is permanently forbidden, under all circumstances, forever and ever amen. So does it occur at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network out of blithe disregard for the Cliche Police, or because statistical reasoning is a known handmaiden of liberalism, or ....?

Let's start by seeing what the problem is. Here's the AP, at Fox:

Americans are feeling the pain at the pump. In Hawaii, the sting just got a little worse.

Do tell.
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There's a word for that, you know

It's official: Christmas came early. Call it pain relief at the pump.

How else to explain the pinch-us-we're-dreaming tone that surrounds this minor statistical occurrence?*

It's really true -- gas dips below $4 a gallon
("Really true" distinguishing it from all those heds that are merely "true")

The signs don't lie: Charlotte-area gas prices really have dropped below $4 a gallon.
(That's good to hear. Because when the signs do lie, we have a word for that. It's called "fraud.")

Declining oil prices in the last two weeks – from a record-high of more than $145 a barrel to less than $124 Friday – have meant a little less pain at the pump.
(Don't hyphenate adj-noun combinations like "record high." Unless you're trying to take your readers' minds off "pain at the pump.")

Smart Shopperette of Charlotte filled up her white Mitsubishi Galant – whose license plate read LUVISLUV** – Saturday afternoon at the Quik Shoppe at East and South boulevards, where regular unleaded was $3.95 a gallon.

Ah, the beauty of news routines. A story like this isn't really official until a Real Person joins in -- i.e., until somebody buying gasoline is prodded into acknowledging that yes, it's usually better to pay less money for the same amount of stuff. And the white Galant is there -- well, for the same reason we always ask what kind of dog it was. More facts make a story truer.

“I drove over here to get this gas,” which was cheaper than stations near her home off Wilkinson Boulevard, Shopperette said, adding that saving only a few cents “makes a big difference.”

You know what might be more useful than playing Names Make News at the local gas station? Figuring out the point at which her statement becomes true. Let's keep it simple: 5 cents a gallon, 20 gallons a tankful -- five cents saves you a dollar a tank. At a ballpark figure of $4 a gallon, if you burn a quarter of a gallon getting to and from the 5-cent discount, it's a wash.

Isn't that fun? You wouldn't get to leave the office, but then again, you wouldn't have to ask people dumb questions like "Would you rather pay less money or more money for gasoline?"

* Copy editors: For real fun, next time you get a story about the "average price" of a gallon of gasoline, ask the originating desk for the standard deviation. Then ask for the sample from which the mean is calculated and whether the change from last week is significant. They'll love you!
** Forgive me for being unimpressed. Now if it had read LUVISNOTLUV THATALTERSWHENITALTERATIONFINDS, that'd be worth putting in the story.

Speech acts: Ur doin them wrong too

A couple days back, a visitor wondered what exactly was the problem with putting a hed like "Myrick takes aim at terrorism" over a tale in which a duly elected solon announces her 10-point anti-terror program. With apologies for not answering sooner, let me offer a hed that illustrates the same point: the failure to distinguish which sort of facts arise from what candidates proclaim about themselves, each other, and the issues that are supposed to be pertinent to voters.

Brief detour. Probably the simplest way of thinking about speech acts is as "performative" speech. Somebody with the right level of authority says something, and the thing comes about: I declare that a state of war exists, I pronounce you spouse and spouse, I dub thee Brave Sir Robin, I bet my money on the bobtail nag (assuming you're standing in front of the betting window). The idea has been modified and hedged a lot since its introduction, to account for changed minds, broken promises, or the tendency of higher authorities to decide that the marriage you've just solemnized is invalid, owing to whatever theological or biological issues are on the authorities' minds that week. But it's still a handy way of telling stuff that's independently true or false, like "it's raining outside," from stuff that can be made true merely by being said.

See the distinction between "Myrick announces 10-point plan" and "Myrick fights terrorism"? The first one's either true or false, independent of what's in the 10-point plan. The second requires that the plan include something other than "rotate your tires" -- or that Myrick has special powers to declare what is and isn't part of the Global War On Newts Terror.

As in the example above. The hed declares "a question of civil rights" (it's expletive, in the same way "pain at the pump" means "[there is] pain at the pump"). Is there such a question? Or is this just sort of the press-conference equivalent of e-mailing 400,000 of your closest friends to see if anyone wants to help you split the contents of the Freedonian treasury?

Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue's record on civil rights came under criticism again Friday from her opponent for the Democratic nomination for governor, State Treasurer Richard Moore.

Oh, really?

The flashpoints this time were beer bottle koozies and a legislative maneuver by Perdue in 1989 that the then-chairman of the legislative black caucus called "a slap in the face of black people."

Giving us the idea that the writer doesn't necessarily take this too seriously. Which, while appropriate, is also a bit unfortunate, because there's always the possibility that (a) your subtle wit will miss a reader or two and (b) somebody might actually believe that a story hedded "A question of civil rights" is about -- who knows, maybe a question of civil rights?

Well, you be the judge. One part of the "question" is a short-lived dispute two decades ago about how far below a majority the level for avoiding a runoff should be set. Another is the discovery of Confederate-flag-type garb at stop-n-robs (in another state) owned by a company chaired by the candidate's husband. But because we decided to label it a "question of civil rights," rather than a "garden-variety late-primary political attack," we've managed to elevate sartorial asshattery to somewhere near the level of the Voting Rights Act.

Handing the terms of the debate over to the inmates is a basic failure of the "mediating" function of media. There's a slightly bigger issue as well. The "securitization" approach conceives of security as a speech act: Politicians want to be able to call "security" on an issue, because when you get to define security, you get to say how far outside the norm a "security" issue is. Or, among other things, which civil rights you'd like to take away and how long it'll be before you consider giving any of them back. So it's more than just, um, whistling Dixie when the likes of Sue Myrick is allowed to call security on "terrorism."

There isn't a lot to the Wake Up America Act: A little guilt-by-association, a demand to keep an eye on Those Damn Arabic Translators,* a few dabs of irrelevance mixed with racism, and basically nothing at all related to detecting and stopping substate political violence, whether against Americans or anyone else. So it'd be nice if the media would do a little better at checking IDs. It's our job to report what these folks are up to; if they want to wrap themselves in a particular mantle, they can buy an ad.

* You think maybe Sue Myrick, Sweetheart of the Seventh Commandment, would be OK with not throwing translators overboard just because of their sexual orientation?

No, don't. Please

And back by popular demand ... wait, that can't be it. Why did someone think it was necessary to drag "pain at the pump" out of that comfy box of earth from its home country where it had been sleeping and turn it loose once again on an innocent world?

Rather than tracking down all the fishwraps that have indulged themselves in a little pump masochism over the past week or so, let's see what the same writer had to say three years back:

A new report from the Oil Price Information Service says most of Ohio, including all of the central part of the state, is doing comparatively well in dealing with gas prices.

The Pain at the Pump Index finds that the median Franklin County household spends 4.6 percent of its monthly income on gasoline, a figure that is lower than in 86 percent of counties nationwide.

So not only is there a "Pain at the Pump Index," but it shows that Columbusians are doing fairly well out of things? Well, shazam. Since the writer remembered to call the same professor to opine on the likely impact of that latest doings, do you suppose he could have checked in this alleged index while he was at it?

You can have lots of fun just running phrases through a database from the comfort of your own home. Imagine how cool it would be if you got to show reporters the gory details before hitting the "send" button, rather than after.

That's what he was when they found him

Striking unanimity among the Illinois fishwraps this morning, eh? Not so much the choice of lead story (even for the most up-to-date present- ation editor, the impeachment of the chief executive is hard to ignore) as the nature of the heds. Only one of eight bothers to include the subject ("Blagojevich"); for the rest, it's just IMPEACHED, above, beside or within a picture of the governor. James Thurber ("Dead. That's what the man was when they found him") must be smiling.

I don't think the topic-comment approach is necessarily bad, misleading or wrong. I do think the evidence suggests that we've passed some sort of watershed in the collective understanding of what makes for necessary elements in a headline or presentation. We're probably not entirely at the rebus stage yet, though that could get kind of interesting too.

It should go without saying that there are far, far worse ap- proaches to the Blago hed than "Im- peached." Charlotte and Detroit manage to get almost everything wrong:
Ill. House votes to impeach
Ill. House OKs impeachment
Sigh. One, Illinois is near the top of the list of States You Never Abbreviate If You Can Help It. It's fun in lots of ways depending on the font, from the numeric
Ill. Men Charged In Mass. Murder
to the Noahic
Ark. Man Kills Ill. Livestock
Two, the active voice is the enemy of cops-and-courts reporting. Particularly in unique-actor cases (you can't get an impeachment at the Home Depot), the object is nearly always more pertinent than the subject.
Three -- pace Orwell, S&W and more news writing gurus than you can shake a bludgeon at -- it's entirely possible for an active subject-verb-object sentence to be indirect. That often comes about when writers fall into the trap of emphasizing process over outcome, leading to sound-like-your-sources yawners on the order of "Police executed a search warrant" (rather than "Police searched a house") or "Police made an arrest" (rather than "Police arrested a naked, screaming, ax-wielding City Council member").

There's nothing wrong with writing an obvious hed, as long as you meet the underlying obligation of the hed business: Tell me why today is different from yesterday. "It's official" and "Pain at the pump" can't do that. "Governor impeached," on the other hand, does it pretty well.

No, they're noooooooootttttt

Q: What could be worse than the return of "pain at the pump"?
A: A cliche on top of a cliche followed by a pointless simile!

They’re drilling, baby, drilling
– and gas prices still going up
They’re baaaacccck. Like locusts ravaging fertile crops, gasoline prices are soaring again and eating away at the purchasing power of ordinary Americans. And again, financial speculators appear to be a big part of the story.

See how much easier life gets if you simply delete the cliche as soon as you write it? No need to worry about where to place a hyphen to get the sing-sing effect, no worries about whether the vowels are supposed to go "aah" or "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA," no messy string of consonants that shouldn't be repeated, more time to think about getting rid of the locust bit and telling us what your story's about in the first place!
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Demons are often summoned ...

... by the mention of their names. You try to point out gently that when a particular bit of display type is the first thing to come to mind, it probably comes to mind because -- up, up and away! -- it's the display type you always see with a particular story. And thus it gets to be a cliche in a real hurry. As happened long ago for, say, "pain at the pump."

The paper that provides today's example (from a 1A "alternative" form) is as prone as any to a syndrome the wise John McIntyre has identified: It isn't a cliche when I use it! But could we at least point out that it used "pain at the pump" in a subhed as recently as Sunday?

Isn't it pretty to think so?

As long as there are rimrats who will write "pain at the pump" heds, no. The worst is not behind us. The worst is yet to come.
 

Nor does there seem to be a particular reason for the random g-droppin' in the editorial hed. The edit is, at least, about trash; it isn't about talking trash, but that's beside the point. Whom are you guys trying to endear yourselves toom with the random pseudo-dialect?

Pump pain and dinettes

If you haven't been saddled with writing the hed on the latest swing in gasoline prices, want a suggestion? Anything but "pain at the pump."

It isn't fresh now. It wasn't fresh last time we wasted a morning cataloging it. It won't be fresh when you fill up your personal atomic helicopter on the way to Spacely's Sprockets and gaze in wonder as the meter goes around. So don't. OK? Thanks!

FOY 'pain'

Sometimes it's like being on bird-poop watch at Capistrano, you know?

Once more with feeling: No "Pain at the pump." Ever. Retire it. Shun it. Let not your friends fall into temptation. Upside the head with sticks hit them if necessary.