Hand-knit, hairy-legged flying yellow people eater

It's been a great week on the Elongated Yellow Fruit front! First, "hairy-legged winged mammals," shared from World Elongated Yellow Fruit Headquarters in Kansas. Then this, from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Women wearing “pussy-hats” -- hand-knit pointy-eared pink winter headgear -- held posters with derogatory messages and phrases bashing the president and filled the National Mall.

My favorite derogatory message so far has been "Look at all the correctly spelled signs!" Your mileage may vary.

Elongated unsolicited diet advice

So, two questions that we seem to ask every year around this (Western calendar) time:

1) How long will it take the Freep to copy-paste its annual list of  "things you should know about paczki"?
2) And how long until the Freep breaks its own prescriptive rule on the singular?

OK, you peeked. The answers are "six paragraphs" and "not long at all." (Hint: If you say "a paczki," it's singular, no matter how many annoying, tired, over-hyphenated modifiers show up between the article and the noun.) Nonetheless, a few changes from previous years:

No elongated yellow fruit this year! Specifically, no "beloved jelly-filled and calorie-laden Polish pastries"; no "nummy waistline-busters." No insistence that "'paczkis' is not a word" (if you can spell it, that's a pretty sure sign that it's a word, whether you like it or not). In that light, an interesting tweak to #3: This year's "paczki are thought of" vs. last year's "the paczki is thought of."

McCartney-preposition-wise, I see the no-singular-paczki rule as a strange hill on which to plant one's flag on. If you're cool with "bedouins" (to stay among languages you can see on signage in Hamtown), you shouldn't have a complaint with "paczkis."

While we're at it: Don't do a comma splice in the hed if you don't have to (and you don't). Please proof the copy before you print it; if that's meant to be a force-hyphen at right there, it didn't take. If we've managed to get through the rest of the edition without Frenchifying "Fat Tuesday," I'm not sure there's a need to start now. And is there a reason for shifting from justified to ragged type in the same story?

The editor's work is never done. I'll take a custard.

Elongated-yellow fruit

When in-doubt, about? A punctuation question; "the" first step should! not be to slap hyphens between words because there's a noun in the neighborhood:

An article on Friday about the blunt-speaking style of Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, who withdrew from consideration as a possible nominee for secretary of state, described incorrectly her participation in President Obama’s pastime of basketball. She has dribbled the ball and taken shots in his presence, but she is not one of the few women invited to compete in his pickup games

It's true that both noun-participle ("man-eating") and modifier-participle ("smooth-talking") compounds are hyphenated, but "blunt-speaking" is neither of them here. Dr. Rice doesn't have a style that is blunt-speaking; she has a speaking style that is blunt. The Times could attribute a blunt style to the blunt-speaking Dr. Rice, but it should file "blunt-speaking style" with "elongated-yellow fruit."

Interesting day in the corrections:
Read more »

Annals of elegant variation

And today's Elongated Yellow Fruit award goes to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette -- with double bonus points, because the elongated yellow fruit itself is a form of "hand-held nosh."

Mildly off topic: Not much have I traveled in the realms of Arkansas, but "fancy a ..." for "do you want a ..."? Is that really part of y'all's dialect? Seems to me sort of like hearing "I've done considerable in the doctoring way" on the streets of Mayfair.

Banana banana banana

Do you think that maybe -- given that the kicker says "BAY OF PIGS" and all -- we could have figured out what the topic is by the time we get to "Bay of Pigs" in the main hed and the c-deck?

Display type is supposed to complement other bits of display type. One way to do this is to address a different "w" in each bit of display type: If the main hed emphasizes "what," the deck can go for "when" and the cutline for "where." The point isn't just avoiding variation; it's using the eye's natural attraction to variations in size, shape and weight to give the poor coffee-deprived reader as many reasons to enter the story as you can.

Even if you're the Miami Herald, after all, not everyone in your audience sat breathlessly by the radio in 1961 -- or grew up in an exile household. The Elongated Yellow Fruit syndrome isn't a ban on variation; it's a caution against Fowler's "elegant variation," which turns bananas into the elongated yellow fruit and sugar beets into the subterranean sweet treat. Try a when or a who to break up the incessant what-what-what.

Alert readers will also notice that the deck violates a basic rule of hed writing. Here's the lede:

Freshly released CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs invasion provide new details on the confusion, mixed messages and last-minute changes in plans that ultimately doomed the mission.

Heds come from main clauses. The core of this story is "documents provide details." The "major confusion and mixed signals" aren't news. That's why they're hanging around a relative clause after a preposition.

Elongated grammatical pastries

Two things are always true about Paczki Day in Detroit:

1) The local fishwrap will be at pains to remind you that "paczki" is plural and that you should NEVER EVER use it as a singular
2) It's going to be a footrace of a slugfest of a grand slam dunk of a Hail Mary to see what gets to the finish line first, singular "paczki" or the Elongated Yellow Fruit. And it's close again this year:

 There's another one in the cutline, if you're scoring along at home: "adds butter to a paczki." (Previous paczki whinges here, here and here.)

It's nice, in a way, to observe distinctions like paczek/paczki. I'm almost tempted to call it quaint, except that questions about when foreign words get to retain their own plurals and when we assign them whatever we like can turn into larger social issues before we quite realize it. If you're going to maintain that "paczki" is only and always a plural, though, you might want to assign the same person to read all components of the display with that idea in mind. You could call that person -- I don't know, a copyczker or something.

Elongated yellow fail

No, no, no. An essential characteristic of a properly constructed Elongated Yellow Fruit is that it's definite. "A popular orange vegetable" might as well be a sweet potato, and "a furry rodent" could just as easily be Alvin the Chipmunk or Squirry the Squirrel or Boris the Undead Rat from the Path Lab. The weather gods do not listen to them. The reference must be at least to "the furry rodent," and for best results, insert an adjective: "the avuncular furry rodent."

Nor is it "a shadow." The groundhog cannot use its little groundhog fingers to make a cute bunny or a horsie or a Dalek. The groundhog needs to see its own shadow. 

Too much space to spend complaining about a post-Groundhog Day brief? Imagine the trouble we'd save if you simply stopped running the damn things.

Carnivorous yellow fruit

Why do you suppose the Raleigh paper uses a story from Charlotte (which, unless we're leading with the earthquake, is quite a bit farther inland) to warn its readers not to feed the elongated yellow fruit?

A seal sighting reported by the National Park Service on North Carolina’s Outer Banks has prompted a warning to tourists: Seals bite.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article195917444.html#storylink=cpy

... The ocean-going marine mammals come from growing colonies in New England and Canada, it is reported.

Thanks as always to alert fruit-spotters in the Old Home State. And, because the elongated yellow fruit AND the popular orange vegetable both come in bunches ...

In the first study of its kind, the researchers carried out an in-depth audit of various sandwiches throughout their life cycles and found the triangular meals could be responsible for the equivalent annual carbon emissions of 8.6 million cars in Britain alone.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article195917444.html#storylink=cpy

More about that one later.

Elongated yellow safety restraint

The people in the first motor vehicle?

Neither of them were wearing their seatbelts, according to the highway patrol report.

And in the second?

Rippee was using her safety restraint, while Kitchens was not, according to the highway patrol.

Unless "seatbelt" goes behind a paywall after the first 15 uses a month, it's hard to see why "safety restraint" made its appearance here.

If house style calls for making the Kansas Highway Patrol into "the highway patrol" on second reference, by the way, house style should be reconsidered. Shortened versions of proper names are still proper names; if you're John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith in the eyes of the DMV and the draft board, you're still Jake Smith, not jake smith, in the news columns. The Kansas Highway Patrol, the Highway Patrol, the agency. Clear?

And thanks to the Elongated Yellow Fruit Bureau for the tip.

Elongated yellow Hormel product

The only Elongated Yellow Fruit reference in the text of this Post masterpiece is to "the Hormel product." But surely the headline gets bonus points for "the wildly popular 'mystery meat.'"

Should you wonder how far the gospel of "omit needless words" has fallen? No, don't:

Elsewhere on the island at about the same time, three women loaded up shopping carts at a Long’s drugstore with 18 cases of — you guessed it — Spam. They made a rush for the exit.  Fortunately, an alert customer, Pleasedon't Embarrassmefurther, saw the attempted heist in progress, stationed himself at the door on Spam patrol and stopped them in their tracks. They shoved the carts toward at him and took off, Embarrassmefurther told KITV4.

Could you go on? Of course. But eventually, you'll find yourself asking whether the story itself is one long string of needless words.

Elongated predatory felines

What do you call a mountain lion on second reference?

It was an even bigger deal when the photos hit social media. Suddenly, it seemed Kansas was over-run with the tawny-colored predators.

But wait -- there's more!

... So, is Kansas becoming overrun with the large, predatory felines?

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/sports/outdoors/article110088707.html#storylink=cpy

Not only a double helping of Elongated Yellow Fruit, but a coin toss on hyphenating "overrun.

(h/t the Bremner Editing Center, world clearinghouse of the popular orange vegetable)

Elongated yellow determinism

On the bright side, we're spared the "tundra-trailblazing beavers" of the main headline.

Thanks, as always, to the Bremner Editing Center and Elongated Yellow Fruit Presidential Library.

Elongated yellow fruit flies like a banana

Isn't that just the thing about stylebooks? They'll demand that you inflect "alumnus" all the way through for gender and number, but they won't tell you to lay off of the elongated yellow fruit.

And a tip of the fur-lined headgear, as always, to the Bremner Center for  Popular Orange Vegetables.

Today in elongated yellow fruit

It's a good day on the elongated yellow fruit front! First, this from our neighbors to the south, passed along by the ever-alert Bremner Editing Center:

South Carolina’s state beverage is milk. Its insect is the praying mantis. There’s a designated dance—the shag—as well a sanctioned tartan, game bird, dog, flower, gem and snack food (boiled peanuts). But what Olivia McConnell noticed was missing from among her home’s 50 official symbols was a fossil. So last year, the eight-year-old science enthusiast wrote to the governor and her representatives to nominate the Columbian mammoth. Teeth from the woolly proboscidean, dug up by slaves on a local plantation in 1725, were among the first remains of an ancient species ever discovered in North America.

And then there's the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Seven decades after ­Allied troops stormed Normandy’s beaches and saved France from the Nazis, the surrender-happy nation is turning its back on hundreds of US veterans who want to return next month to mark the invasion’s 70th anniversary.

And our source for this is ...

France has broken its promise to pay for the vets to fly to this year’s commemoration, according to Rep. Michael Grimm.

Would that be the Rep. Michael Grimm passing the word along to the New York Post there? The one who threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony for daring to ask about the investigation that, um, led to his indictment? Interesting way to get back into the spotlight, don't you think?

“Our chief-of-staff heard it from the French Embassy in DC — that they would be flown out to France [for free],” said Nick Iacono, a spokesman for the Staten Island congressman.

But when The Post contacted the embassy Friday, the French turned up their noses as if smelling rotten Camembert.

Since it's still May in a year that ends in "4," do you figure somebody ought to remind the rubes in New York that the French are a little meaner than they let on, surrenderwise?

Elongated yellow fail

I think we're all saddened at the news that Superior Fish is closing, but come on -- couldn't we do better than "the eight-legged sea creature" for the required Elongated Yellow Fruit reference? I was expecting at least a "slimy eight-legged cephalopod."

Elongated yellow tape

OK, fine. I've complained about the infamous yellow crime scene tape before -- but if it's between another round of Elongated Yellow Tape and repeating the same old police-lights photo at the top of the page, I'll take the tape.

Of course, there's always the option of a map. Or, you know, a photo of the scene. Or almost anything.

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.

Elongated arboreal arrangement

This just in from the Department of Non Sequitur and Novus Ordo Seclorum:

Michigan is home to what’s believed to be the U.S.’ largest singing Christmas tree.

And that has nothing to do with the municipalities that have decriminalized pot.

Uh, right. In case you're completely unfamiliar with the topic (the AP photo above of the Charlotte Choral Society appeared in the Chicago Trib in December 1962), let's explain:

A singing Christmas tree is a multi-leveled conical-shaped structure, filled with singers performing Christmas carols. Michigan’s tree is so unusual that it’s drawing the interest of the Travel Channel.

The home base of the country’s No. 1 such acoustic arboreal arrangement — in height and in number of carolers — is in Norton Shores, a Muskegon suburb. The Mona Shores High School Choir has 225 in its singing Christmas tree, which comprises 15 tiers and stands 67 feet tall — the equivalent of a five-story building. Another 41 singers, who don’t fit in the tree, stand next to it.

Remember, editors: Friends don't let friends slip on elongated yellow fruitpeels.

Hold those calls, ladies and gentlemen!

... it looks like we have a winner in the Elongated Yellow Fruit* of the Year competition! It's as if the pandas had been lying in wait all along.

Somehow, it seems that there are no mountains left to climb.


* With thanks to the Bremner Editing Center in Lawrence, home of the World's Most Elongated Ball of Twine

Second-person ledes: Tool of the clueless

Bad science collides with bad writing like a Reese's Cup with a Bud Light. Numbers in the text refer to notes below:

Can you rub hippo sweat on my back?
Fresno Bee(1)

FRESNO, Calif. - Someday, you might smear gooey hippo sweat all over your body.(2)

You'll be using a sunscreen with the chemically manufactured sweat of a hippopotamus. Not only will it prevent sunburn, but it will ward off bugs and protect you from skin infection.

As creepy (3) as it sounds, slippery(4) hippo sweat could become the toast of the skin care industry.(5)

But first science must unlock the secret of this massive mammal's(6) secretions: What makes them work?

In that vein, research on hippo sweat marches forward at the University of California, Merced. (7)Professor Christopher Viney soon will publish what could be(8) a key study on the molecular structure of the secretions.

He studied samples of the reddish fluid(9) over the past year after gathering samples from Bulgy, the venerable hippo at Fresno's Chaffee Zoo.

1) Tank-town paper alert! Why publish other folks' bad writing when you produce so much of your own?
2) Think so, eh?
3) Random adjective alert.
4) What, "gooey" wasn't enough for you?
5) And then again ...
6) Elongated Yellow Fruit alert.
7) Dive! Dive! Localitis alert.
8) And then again ...
9) Elongated Yellow Fruit alert II.

There's a reason this is more than just another chunk of grate-your-back-teeth-awful feature writing from America's Newspapers. Look again at the fifth graf: "Soon will publish" has all the journalistic value of "plans to sue." Does this mean he has an article under review? Accepted for publication? What journal? What's the acceptance rate? What does the hippo-sweat-research community think about his work?

Those are the questions that help us start to determine whether this "could be a key study" -- not the reporter's opinion, not the researcher's sharing a Zip code with the paper, not the adjective overload. If the article doesn't include at least some of the evidence, the odds are good that it's blowing smoke.

Surely something out there had a better claim on your newshole than this slippery reddish fluid.