Today in sourcing

Before you make that toll-free call to ensure that YOUR FAMILY will be EATING DELICIOUS FOOD rather than fighting for scraps in a FOOD RIOT, catch the sourcing. It's not just the Daily Mail, it's the Daily Mail quoting the Express!

EUROPEAN political chiefs are to take advantage of Brexit by unveiling their long-held plan to morph the continent’s countries into one GIANT SUPERSTATE, it has emerged today. 

I think my favorite part is this:

Responding to the plot Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski raged: "This is not a good solution, of course, because from the time the EU was invented a lot has changed.

“The mood in European societies is different. Europe and our voters do not want to give the Union over into the hands of technocrats.

“Therefore, I want to talk about this, whether this really is the right recipe right now in the context of a Brexit."

Whatever plot he's actually reacting to, you have to wonder what he sounds like when he's being reasonable.

Department of silver linings

A recipe for Ginger Apple Stir-Fry in the Oct. 29 Food section was missing two ingredients. Add 2 cored, sliced apples and 2 tablespoons minced gingerroot while stir-frying the vegetables.

... on the bright side, though, we did remember the vegetables!

Today's editing tip

When reading copy for the food section, always read the name of the dish:

The Potato-Pea Tortilla recipe in Wednesday's Carolina Living section omitted one ingredient. It should have included 1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed.

But things seem to be getting better. At least we didn't leave out the potatoes.

Y'all hiring?

This week's entry in the Everybody Needs an Editor category: We were over at Umm Czarina's the other night and had a chance to catch up on the local fishwrap (not the Ozymandian husk of a metro that lands in the driveway every morning; the ex-pyem that Czarina used to string for when she was but a little sorceress). It runs a column called "Dot-com Mom," whose topic this week was ...

Bowled over by Carolina 'barbecue'
(Desk, futurely, get your hands off that "quote" key or I will personally whap you upside the "head" with a "spatula")
Dear Mom: I was in North Carolina and had something they called "barbeque," but it didn't have tomatoes in it. We really liked it. Do you have a recipe?
Dear Carolina: There are two kinds of Carolina barbeque. One is called western and is tomato-based. The other is eastern and is vinegar-based. (Dear Mom: There are three. You're leaving out the mustard-based heresy served in Lesser Carolina. Regardless, you ought to settle on a single way to spell "barbecue.") ... Barbeque is often served with coleslaw hush puppies.

Whee! That's an interesting sort of WTF error, because, of course, barbecue isn't. "Often served with coleslaw hush puppies," I mean, because there are no such thing. There's coleslaw, which goes on the sandwich, and hush puppies, which go next to the fries and slightly uphill from the baked beans on the plate with the sandwich, but there ain't no such animal as "coleslaw hush puppies," as ane fule who didn't already know* could find out in a couple seconds of searching.

And after all, that's what editors do. They know stuff, and they look stuff up when they don't know it, and when they run across something as cognitively bizarre as coleslaw hush puppies, they ask dumb-sounding questions until Dot-com Mom explains exactly how her "Internet and cookbook" sources handle the oil-temp-vs.-cabbage-in-mayo thing.

I wouldn't throw the whole column out; the sauce recipes are a little picky but not out of line (no, you don't have to use brown sugar**). But let's be serious for a second here, Daily Tribune. You guys send a flyer around every few weeks suggesting we ought to subscribe. If y'all can't tell the difference between slaw and hush puppies, what particular claim do you have on my reading time?

* And didn't have the sort of Burger King-level curiosity to think: d00d! Deep-fried cabbage in mayo! That's got to suck.
** If you have to be kinky, cut with rice wine vinegar, sted white. Prosit!

Holiday editing tip

We're all doing more with less and working smarter, not harder, these days. So if you're rotating over from sports or Washington news to cover the features desk, here's a tip for editing those pesky recipes:

1) Read name of dish
2) Check list of ingredients
3) If anything in (1) doesn't appear in (2), kick story back to originating desk

Right, Newspaper of Record?

The Minimalist column last Wednesday, about 101 suggestions for Thanksgiving dishes that can be made in advance, omitted an ingredient for recipe No. 12, for garlic-rosemary figs. Rosemary should be added to the garlic and olive oil, then heated.

Grammar gripes

Familiar sermon time again: Copyeds don't generally decide what writers are going to say. We help them make sure they're saying it effectively. Sometimes that means walking them through some grammar points -- not whacking them upside the head for inverting subjects and verbs or putting adverbs after auxiliaries, but pointing out what the blocks of meaning in their stories are trying to do to each other. A few examples from today, starting at the top:

Dandridge stepping up
Sophomore’s role could be expanding with the Missouri baskeball team.

Prepositional phrases can modify lots of things, and the one in the deck -- "with the Missouri basketball team" -- is going to look for the closest reasonable target. That's the verb phrase "could be expanding." The result is perfectly good "grammar." The house dictionary gives a bunch of meanings for "with": in the company of, alongside, in the same degree as ("I was learning with my classmates"). Trouble is, they aren't what we want here. We want it to modify the noun "role" and to take the meaning "as a member of," and the right way to do that is to put it directly after the noun:

Sophomore’s role with the Missouri baskeball team could be expanding.

See? The split-infinitive thing is a myth, but there are rules that really do make a difference. On to the story:

Walk into the Missouri Tigers basketball locker room after a game and many trends are noticeable.

Using the second person in the lede, again, isn't our call. Our job is to point out the shift from second-person active ("walk") to third-person linking ("are") and to suggest that once you've decided to use the second person, you should stick to it. The next point is order of cumulative adjectives. The lede isn't describing the Tigers' basketball locker room but the basketball Tigers' locker room. Quick solution: Let the adjectives modify "game":

Walk into the locker room after a Missouri basketball game and you'll notice many trends.

That gets around the Random Sports Apostrophe problem (quick, punctuation fans: Was the possessive correct above?), but it underlines the flabbiness of "many trends." But the writer can work on the fine-tuning; the grammar issues are fixed.

“It was a time to reflect and just think (about what he needs to do to play),” Dandridge said.

First point: This quote is as much the writer's as the source's. Never use an eight-word parenthetical insert to clarify a quote (there isn't a hard and fast rule, but a good cutoff would be three). And that puts the spotlight on the grammar problem: Dandridge appears to be talking about himself, but that's not what third-person pronouns in direct quotes do. We've created a parallelism fault. Borrow some tissue from the preceding graf and turn on the surgery lamp:

Dandridge, who didn't play in four of the Tigers' first seven games, said the postgame time in the lounge is a chance "to reflect and just think" about what he needs to do to play more.

All the ideas are there and we've kept him from referring to himself in the third person. We've had to trim the quote a bit, but better a partial quote that's all his than a full quote that's half yours.

Desk Q&A
Q: Is the sports department still using that random apostrophe generator it got for Christmas?
A: You make the call!
At some point, Kevin Young’s corner of the locker room becomes livelier as reporters’ laugh at another candid response from the Tigers senior center.

Q: Well, how about the New York Times? Is it generating random story links on its diabetes series?
A: See No. 5
Bad Blood: Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis
An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as an epidemic.
1. Bad Blood: Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis
2. Best-Selling Memoir Draws Scrutiny
3. More Companies Ending Promises for Retirement
4. Bad Blood: Living at an Epicenter of Diabetes, Defiance and Despair
5. Recipe: Crusty Macaroni and Cheese