The magic of names: Now with added Grammar®!

I do have some grammatical observations from the past few days, and they're actually relevant to understanding how some parts of the media spectrum want you to understand political violence. But first (we'll come back to this later), enjoy Friday's New York tabloids and consider whether the heds are saying the same thing or different things.

Anyway, grammar. If your question is "Did Fox News actually refer to the perps as 'husband and wife Muslim gunmen' at the top of the homepage Thursday?"

... the answer is: Yes, until somebody apparently decided several hours later that the (ahem) far more ambiguous "married Muslim gunmen" would be an improvement. That should make for an interesting discussion about epicene pronouns next time the Fair 'n' Balanced stylebook committee meets, don't you think?

If you're wondering whether the 1930s version of Fox would have referred to Bonnie and Clyde as "married Christian bank robbers," probably not -- "Muslim" is just something Fox needed to remind you about until those dilatory federal officials got the thumb out and said the magic word:

But there are other ways of reminding your audience that the world is falling in on them, and that's the really interesting grammatical point. Consider this hed from Thursday's Washington Times homepage:

Let's do some discourse analysis here: What does a clause of the form [proper noun] identified as [actor] mean? Here's a similar one from our time in the London bureau, noting that an actor had been chosen to play Doctor Who in the revived series:

TV Chris is new Dr Who
 
Which is sort of Redtop for "That guy Christopher* somebody you've seen on TV? He's the new Doctor." You could flip the clause around, because it works both ways: whether he's somebody you already know (or think you should know, to keep up with your friends), or whether you're just in it to find out who the new Doctor is. "New Dr. Who is TV Chris" would work about the same way.

Journalistically, both are a little different from the ones we saw last week. "Robber identified" would be standard turn-of-the-screw stuff: The cops have put a name on the person who held up the bank yesterday, so everybody call in if she's on your friend list. "Robber identified as bank chairman" is different. Like "Bank chairman identified as robber," it's flippable: you can be interested in what robbers do, or in what bank chairman do, and it's still more or less the same clause.

It's different, again, if we get specific:  "O'Reilly identified as gunman" or "gunman identified as O'Reilly." As with"TV Chris is new Dr Who," you're interested in both ends of the clause: What's Christopher Eccleston up to, or who's the new Doctor? O'Reilly, thus, should be somebody we've heard of -- whether we've just found out what he's been doing, or whether we;ve just found out that all those random misdeeds belong to him.

Thus the leap to "Farook and Malik identified!" is a little -- oh, should we go ahead and call it racist? In that the only reason they can go at the front of the clause is that they have scary names, so that the WashTimes audience can now wet its pants on cue?

The Times and the Post and Fox, then, are unusually thuggish, but they aren't unusually stupid -- as evidenced by the presence of the Daily News above. The Post was eager to proclaim that brown people are terrorists, and the News was eager to proclaim that everyone in its sights was a terrorist too. Each should take a deep breath and hire some adult editors. If we want to do something toward mitigating the effects of terrorism, we should start by figuring out what terrorism is, and one good way to do that is by ignoring everyting that New York tabloids say.  


* Pretty good at it, too. Lots of planets have a north

At play with the tabloids

Anybody want to start a pool on how long it takes this one to work its way up to the Fox front page?

That shouldn't be an entirely fanciful question, given Fox's fondness for picking up fabrications from the qualoids (under the guise of "it is being reported ..."). Here's what such a report looks like:
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Bring your own gloves

That pesky comma of direct address! Why does it give Our Nation's Tabloids such fits?

No, you can't say the comma is hidden by the subject's hair. Then I really wouldn't know whether you meant "Come, Clean Mr. Cain" or "Come Clean, Mr. Cain."

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.

Oh, grow up

It might not look that way from the outside (and for that matter, doesn't always look that way from the inside either), but mainstream journalism's turn against open sexism on the newspages was actually a fairly successful bit of social engineering in language.

Not that it lacked its amusing moments. The zealous hunt for adjectives in a story about Hillary Clinton was in general quite blind to the endemic anti-Arab racism marking the stories next door. Some attempts to formalize the effort (the famous "isms" chapter in Working with Words comes to mind) remain landmarks of epic clue fail. And the tabloids, bless 'em, have been blithely immune to the onrushing 20th century, well into the onrushing 21st. But generally, we did OK in establishing the broad principle that news writing shouldn't talk about what people look like unless it's clearly germane to the topic of the story. (If Star Writer thinks it is, that's a conclusive hint that it isn't.)

It is thus a regrettable sign of the ongoing tabloidization of the once-respectable broadsheets that the Freep has found "sexy politician" an appropriate hed for the 1A centerpiece. That's the nicest thing we can say about it. Are you freaking dimwits kidding? Are you writing about the commissioner in her official role, or in her role as a purported accessory to whatever alleged mischief her husband is supposedly accused of, or in her role as poster person for your adolescent offspring's bedroom wall?

"Sexy" (or "hot," which Commissioner Torrice is alleged to be in the jump hed) is a judgment of a particularly annoying kind. It tells your readers where they can get off if they happen not to share your particular aesthetic standards. Imagine the poor reader out there somewhere in Freep-land who's generally annoyed with vacant-looking blonde women but finds Jennifer Granholm to be a complete and utter babe. (Or the prime minister of Australia, and if you didn't know one of our major allies had a new head of government, you can and should draw conclusions about the competence of your neighborhood fishwrap.) Is there some reason those folks -- or (ahem) the roughly 90% of Detroit's population that happens to be (ahem) black -- should feel welcome in your pages?

Occasional moments of self-inflicted hilarity aside, the inclusive language movement actually did some good. It helped make newspapers look a little less stupid on occasion. If the Freep is still trying to convince me of how little I need to have a newspaper in my life anymore, it's found a genuinely effective new trick.

In the land of the tabloids

Noun these mean streets a verb must go. What makes a tab hed like this (from the Boston Herald) distinctive isn't the length of the noun pileup but the Wuxtry-Wuxtry-spinning-front-page clipped forms: "'86 bro kill" belongs in the Tabloid Hall of Fame.

Relatedly, if you haven't checked in at You Don't Say recently, hurry out to the lobby and get a bag of popcorn before the newsreel ends. John is everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be, and it's Pulp Diction time.

In the land of the tabloids

Nothing on here really qualifies as a noun pile, strictly speaking, but it's still impressive by US tabloid standards: four chunks of display type, and not a verb in the bunch:

Shock Murder Claim
Diana Slay Plot
Scotland Yard Probe
Exclusive Author Interview

"Exclusive" is a well-established newspaper noun, but I'd score it as an adjective here, which is something like a single in the top of the 10th after nine perfect innings. Otherwise, we're all nouns, all the time.

All the pesky grammar is over and above the question of why the Most Super-Important Story in the World for Post readers is the, ahem, Crown-endorsed MI6 death-by-Fiat plot to take Diana down for her plans to destroy Prince Charles by "releasing embarrassing information about his sexual peccadillos."

You just never know what you're getting when you sample a Murdoch product, do you?

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?
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Well, go break it again

The persuasive power of Fox News doesn't necessarily spring from the things it makes up, though Fox does make things up with some regularity. The instructive part about Fox is the stories it tells: the facts that it isolates and prioritizes, the narrative structures through which those facts are channeled, and the nudge-nudge context that reminds you of which story you landed in. Hence a few observations about Monday morning's lead story at the Fox homepage. (Explanation of the data set below*.)

The function of the headline (this is not the time to tell me you skipped that day in your editing class) is -- in a limited space -- to show what happened and why it's relevant. Ideally, an active subject-verb-object clause will tell you why today is different from yesterday, and the palette from which those constituents are drawn -- whether the event is a collision, a shark bite, a shooting or a "horror" (a noun in 36 unique headlines in 2024, with three of those being "horror in paradise"), whether the object is a resident, a mom or a veteran, and so on -- tells you how to categorize the story and store it for future reference and comparison. Relative clauses and prepositional phrases support the event's importance: The core of the headline is "Journalist breaks silence," with the complements -- which journalist, silence about what -- signaling why it's in the lead position. Good to go?

So far this year, silence has been broken in 45 unique headlines at the top of the page. Silence-breaking is a less time-bound construct than speaking out, but the journalist in question nonetheless was unsilent about the laptop story in three foxnews.com stories in June alone. Lid-offblowing is rarer and newer, with six of seven unique headlines occurring since April 15. Unlike silence-breaking, it's distinctively valenced. The  first three cases are all about a Fox-made "scandal" over NPR's "left-wing bias"; the others deal with "when cops knew of potential threat at Trump rally," "who really knew about now-scrapped 9/11 sweetheart deal" and "vice president's claim of championing America's workers." The power to declare a scandal is, erm, also variable. At some shops, you'd need to wait for someone else to say it; at Fox, it appears to be vested in the headline writer.

The summary hed (more or less what we used to call a "hammer hed") and the photo mashup also work together to categorize the story. "Follow the scent" occurs in Hunter Biden headlines March 10 and March 20, with an "On the scent" Jan. 22 and the related "Gathering Hunter" (Jan. 12) and "Hunting and gathering" (June 3) for good measure. You hardly even need a story at this point (which is literally how tabloids work), but ...

Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop - falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation – became part of the American lexicon four years ago today, on October 14, 2020, kicking off a years-long scandal with big tech, corporate media and the intelligence community.

"I think that virtually every single mainstream outlet disgraced themselves," former New York Post deputy politics editor Emma-Jo Morris told Fox News Digital.

Well, we're all entitled to speak our minds. That's what we have a First Amendment for. (Likewise the right to make things up about "the American lexicon.") But the right to freedom of the press isn't a right of access to everyone else's press, or to dictate how those presses handle your "exclusives." Here's CNN, for example, applying some context a mere two days after the momentous revelations:

The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani “was being used to feed Russian misinformation” to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit.

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In the land of the tabloids

Just another day in the City that Never Sleeps, huh?

Alex Rodriguez smacks of phoniness, and unsurprisingly, New Yorkers are seeing right through his latest attempt to set things right: a handwritten apology he published Tuesday afternoon.
 
Yep, gotta get up pretty early in the morning t put one over on those New Yorkers! Unless you're wondering what the guy in the tie is doing there (since he doesn't actually appear in the story or anything). Wonder what the inset says?

Well, that clears a lot of things up.

Son of the Flying Verb

Spare a moment of regret for the magnificent Flying Verb -- once roaming the midlands of North American continent in its mighty flocks, now so rare even in its remaining strip of East Coast habitat that many have never seen it in the wild. So here are a few from a different research project, inspired by Ed's comment on Saturday's post.

I'm not surprised if they look especially weird to British eyes, and I'd welcome any observations about whether this specific form -- an active clause with an elided third-person* subject -- had any currency outside the US. And it makes sense to read "charges" in that example as a noun standing for "There are charges," in that British heds make very tidy use of that sort of understood existential phrase. One of my favorites:

Storm after FA let manslaughter coach teach kids

... meaning (There is a ...) or (there has been a ...)

These examples, with "take" and "cremate," don't have the ambiguity of "charges."

Pondering all that, I think I've finally started to puzzle out what the Flying Verb was doing. It's like the passive voice, only shorter and, well, more active. Any time you're tempted to begin a hed with "Officials" or "Authorities," just take the pesky subject out! "Take 2 Pictures" is one count shorter than "2 Pictures Taken," and for the second, you'd have to create two separate passive clauses, each a count longer: "Nazis Cremated And Ashes Disposed Of Secretly." In another Tribune example cited here before, "Plan Dictator If War Wipes Out Capital," you save three whole hits over "Dictator Planned..." -- and that's hard to resist.

The Canadian example, again, is different because it has a singular subject: one draft official. We don't have enough data to talk about whether that's an actual difference in hed dialect, but it'd be interesting to look into.


If it's so handy, why did the Flying Verb go extinct? Well, first, it isn't exactly the ivory-billed woodpecker. You can still see it occasionally if you keep an eye on the New York tabloids, and a hybridized version -- with an explicit subject in a neighboring deck, as in the "Reveals:" hed at right -- even shows up in some broadsheets, like the Washington Times.

Further observations and comments, of course, are welcome.


* I expect that the understood "you"-- Try these three tips for tastier tomatoes! -- shows up in almost every hed dialect.

Life among the tabloids

And this is the World's Most Super-Important Story because ... OK, it has to be the "as," right? Scandal rocks summit, and where's the feckless chief diplomat?

Having a beer. Or, as the Daily Mail put it with its firm grasp on American bar dialect, "swigging back" a beer. (It's "slugged back" in the Post story itself.)

Now, granted, the "brewing Secret Service prostitution story" is a fairly interesting tale. So interesting, perhaps, that it might be worth a little content on the front page along with some adult having a beer.

That minor problem may be why the narrative runs out of steam so fast. However quickly she might have guzzled or swigged or slugged it down or back or up, nobody seems able to far to pin more than one beer on Secretary Clinton herself, even if she was "swilling ... straight from the bottle." (The Post, which seems to be putting things together from a distance, credits the whole party -- "a dozen pals and her State Department security detail" -- with "a dozen beers, two shots and bottles of water," which sounds like everyone had a drink, notwithstanding the Mail's "partied the night away.")
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Separated by a common welcome

Today's wizard hed noun prang head-scratcher comes from the BBC. You probably got the meaning right away -- or, put a bit better, you probably got "a" meaning right away, and it was different depending on which side of the pond you opened your browser on.

Let's propose a testable hypothesis: This particular flavor of verb-elided hed produces distinct British and American readings. The American reading puts a linking verb after the noun phrase:

Anger at Lockerbie bomber [is] welcome

The British reading is an expletive verb at the beginning:

[There is] anger at Lockerbie bomber welcome

Which is more or less what other verb-free heds on the front page are doing: "Israel fury at Sweden organ claim" and "Mexico probe over kidnap deaths" (three-word pileups like "child smack ban" and "gender row athlete" -- or "Lockerbie bomber welcome" -- are a different matter).

The American reading puts a few extra Wheaties on the keyboard because it crosses a perceived bright white line into editorializing: You could get away with saying a forecast of rain is welcome, but anger is a different matter. We'd generally try to displace that with a passive verb. "Anger welcomed" doesn't say who's doing the welcoming, but at least it makes clear that it isn't you. (UPDATE: As the tabloids often make clear, some flavors of newspage editorializing are more welcome than others.)

We can probably adapt to each other's hed dialects pretty fast, but I'd still put it in the category of remembering which way to look when you cross the street: Don't try it for the first few hours after you get off the plane.

At play in the land of the tabloids

Q: All right for you, Mr. Broadsheet Pants! How would you do one of those foreigny-uprisy things in a way that makes your product stand out among all those other ones on the newsstand?

A: Oh.

This looks like a job for ...

Just assuming, for the sake of argument, that the common cold is well and truly cured and the Fractious Near East at peace, thus justifying the expenditure of frontpage space on a story that boils down to Supervisors Don't Mind That Previous Job Didn't Break Any Rules -- is Probie Hoseman* just another Popular Orange Vegetable, or is some deeper meaning afoot?

For all that they're the Voice of The People and everything, tabloids make The People work pretty hard sometimes. You don't just have to get "probie" and "hoseman," you have to know the Bravest from the Finest. Good thing the Daily News had -- um, triple byline and two more in the shirttail, five reporters free to work on bringing this epic to the reader. It does sort of make you wonder: Do you guys have any copy editors left?

* Stay tuned for the sequel, "Four Hosemen of the Apocalypse." Thanks, I'll be here all week.

There'll always be a noun pile

This must be why tabloids have Deputy Defence Editors:

A WOUNDED squaddie who had just lost both legs in a Taliban bomb blast begged a medic to show him her boobs — to help relieve his agony.

There is a point of syntax and practice here on which I solicit the input of our friendly UK subs as well as syntaxheads of all nationalities. I'm familiar with the idea of using prepositional phrases in heds, rather than scrambling around for a verb that fits and isn't libelous, and my first instinct is to think of the subject in those heds as an actor -- somebody who makes or gives the thing that's the object of the preposition:

Escaped gorilla in bid to eat toddler
US military chief in Iran warning
Pool mum in bid to save drowned boy

But in looking through the files, I see cases where the subject is the receiver of an action or event:

Yob brothers in hoods ban
Lad on jogger stabbing rap

Since the medic in question was mentioned in despatches for the rescue, inquiring minds want to know: If you're a Sun reader, can you tell who's the hero in this hed? Or is there more than one?

On this old rockpile

Here's another one for the If You Want A Friend, Get A Dog contest.

Sorry, no. "Around 6:30 a.m. Tuesday" will be three or four minutes after sunrise, and the forecast calls for isolated thunderstorms with a 30% chance of rain. How much did you say you wanted to bet on "sunshine and balmy weather"?

But that gets us into quibbling -- whether what you see at 6:30 in the morning a few days hence counts as "sunshine" or not. And we need to be looking at a bigger concern. What do the predicted meteorological conditions have to do with this story?

Giant shock alert, kids. It's cold around here in February! That's a much safer prediction than declaring sunshine around dawn five days in advance. But random weather fabrications aren't the point. This seems to be a story about the former mayor's impending exit from jail. Shouldn't we be writing about that, rather than about what the reporter thinks will be happening in the clouds next week?

While we're here? I've grown deeply tired of heds and cutlines of this form:

Prisoner #702408, aka Kwame Kilpatrick, was jailed 14 months

I propose a ban on any and all text and/or display type that calls 'em by a number, not a name. That's for tabloids and country songs. Grownup newspapers don't do it.*

* Though if you don't like Lester 'n' Earl, you have deeply and seriously come to the wrong blog.

Please be embarrassed

What does it take for international news to make the front pages of America's Daily Newspapers? Oh, go figure it out for yourself. (Hint: It helps to watch a lot of Fox News.)

Now. Quite a few papers aren't included in the snapshot above. Those would be the ones who said something on the order of "American acquitted." (The Austin fishwrap put it best: "Italian court clears U.S. woman in lurid slaying," in that "lurid slaying" is what our friends at the tabloids have been telling us all along.) They still put the story on the front, but at least they maintained a bit of a polite fiction: OMG one of Our Innocents is escaping the claws of furrin justice!

The papers shown above are in a different class. (Except for the Post, holding down the lower left corner, which really is a tabloid.) You lot -- the Strib, Buffalo, the R-J, Anchorage, Raleigh, Richmond, USAT, Charlotte, Tampa, Norfolk -- really? Amanda Knox is a headline name? At the top of the front?

That isn't nearly as embarrassing as it should be. The Local Anesthesia movement has been relentless in driving that pesky grownup news into hiding; exclusive, original content is the franchise, the argument goes, because readers can get tales of faraway places anywhere. The Knox story really gives the lie to that line of thinking. It's not the cause of news audiences' cluelessness toward how the outside world works, but it's a pretty clear example of how news organizations deliberately, happily encourage that cluelessness.

The view from Planet Tabloid

We count on the tabloids sometimes to alleviate the unrelieved solemnity of the American press, but -- that's quite a little fan dance from the Post there, isn't it?

OK, granted. Everything goes better with a little pop-culture reference,* but what in particular is going on with this one? Is it just a fun way of teasing to the Oscar nominations at the bottom of the page, or are we dog-whistling the audience again? Let's ask the nice folks who commented on (entirely unrelated) stories at the Post's fair-n-balanced stablemate over the past 18 months:

he absolutely thinks that he is the king of america!! IMPEACH HIM NOW!!

The King and his followers shall dine on the finest of foods supplied and paid for by the peasants ..... Amateur, corrupt, arrogant userper. Unseal all your records Barry, that would be a thanksgiving treat.

THE BOY KING! TEMPER TANTRUMS AND ALL!

I thought obama sounded and looked arrogant and rude. He wants to be king and I personally am not looking for a king to run my life.

To modify the song title just a bit: You've got to be taught, but you don't have to be very carefully taught at all.

* The News has nothing to do with this post otherwise. It's just there for random fun.

Lost in translation

Here's an entertaining case of how headlines go wrong, courtesy of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

Wondering how it was that "earmark" came to be "Hillary's favorite word"? Perhaps you should be. There's no mention of Hillary Clinton in the hed:

Report: 'Earmark' now a word in the English dictionary*
or the deck:
Merriam-Webster Inc. announced in early July that the word "earmark" -- used to describe pork-barrel spending projects both loved and loathed by lawmakers -- is now a part of the dictionary, according to a report.
(By the way? Don't use the deck to repeat the hed. Waste of space.)

And, funny, there's no mention of her in the four-graf story, either. But the second graf indicates that the story originated at the WashTimes, so let's have a look there.

In the print edition, the Times calls "earmark" a "congressional favorite," but on the Web site (odd, given that there don't appear to be any real space constraints), that's shortened to "Hill favorite." And at the Murdoch tabloids, "Hill" is a standard hed term for "Hillary," so ... ta-da!

Summary? Some perky editor at Fox saw a chance to a throw a stray dart at a Clinton and, heeding the biblical admonition, let not the right hand know what the right hand was doing. May it never be said that slanted and stupid are mutually exclusive.

The Times itself is a little too excited about this move by "Merriam-Webster Inc., guardian of the English language," perhaps because it sees a politically favorable Trend:

It's the latest sign that the practice of directing money back home for pet projects is becoming a potent political issue, and the editors at Merriam-Webster said they credited Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, for pushing the word into the lexicon.

Eh, maybe -- though given that "pork" and "pork barrel" for local-appropriation spending have been around since the Civil War, it's a bit hard to see a major social wave building. Maybe it's those special 4-D glasses worn during the 1A budget meetings.

There is a matter of some linguistic interest in this tale, though, and that's the thorough integration of singular "they":

In a 2006 report, the Congressional Research Service - beset by all the vagaries of legislative language - struggled to say what constitutes an earmark. They said it varies from bill to bill.

But don't bother looking for a picture to illustrate earmarks such as the now-scrapped "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. Mr. Pitoniak said they try to play it safe politically and wouldn't want to single out any project.

Style policy or style slippage? Anybody from New York Avenue care to check in?

* Think we ought to remind Fox that there is no "the English dictionary"?