Category: Words
Report a tpyo
Attentive Contrarian readers will have noticed the new “Report a Tpyo” link at the top of each post:
Copy editing has never been Contrarian’s long suit. Countless fine editors — Doug MacKay, Alexander Farrell, Jo-Anne MacDonald, Jack Thomas, Bill Turpin, Stacey Pineau, Penny Body, Doug McGee, and other too numerous — have saved my sorry bacon from embarrassment again and again.
Now it’s your turn. Often written in haste, Contrarian relies on crowd-sourcing for error correction. Mike Targett, Contrarian’s techno-fixer and geopolitics scout, added the Report a Tpyo link to ease this process. Clicking the link brings up a pre-addressed email you can use to alert me to errors typographical, lexicological, or factual. Please indicate the headline on the post you are flagging.
Report a tpyo. Get it? That Targett, what a card!
The unbearable whiteness of flesh
If the largest news service in the United States still feels the need to run musty sidebars about the distaff side of state functions, then we can’t be too surprised when it makes a boo-boo this cringe-inducing:
First lady wears Naeem Khan gown to state dinner
By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL (AP) – 4 days ago
First lady Michelle Obama chose to wear a gleaming silver-sequined, flesh-colored gown Tuesday night to the first state dinner held by her husband’s administration. She was tending to her hostess duties in a strapless silhouette with the beads forming an abstract floral pattern that was custom-made by Naeem Khan.
Er, what color was that again?
As The American Prospect pointed out, Crayola got with the program in 1962, when it “voluntarily changed ‘flesh colored’ to ‘peach’ …partially as a result of the U. S. Civil Rights Movement.”
Sociological Images collected a gallery of images rooted in the same assumption. The website’s Lisa Wade of Occidental College wrote:
Part of the privilege of being white is having a society that considers you the norm and is, therefore, organized around you. A really nice example of this is “flesh” color. What is flesh color?
Contrarian confesses to feeling some sympathy for poor Samantha Critchell, who will wear this for a long, long time.
Vin Scully will call the play-by-play on his 60th Dodgers season
Vin Scully said last night that he would continue to serve as the Los Angeles Dodgers play-by-play announcer through the 2010 season. Scully, who turns 82 this month, began broadcasting Dodgers games in 1950.
Contrarian began listening to him not long after as a devoted Brooklyn Dodger fan living in Chappaqua, NY. Hiding under bed covers, ear pressed to the radio speaker, we heard games come alive through Scully’s gift for vivid similes.
He said Bob Gibson “pitches as though he’s double-parked.” He said, “Losing feels worse than winning feels good.” He said, “Sometimes it seems like [Bobby Bonilla's] playing underwater.” He said, “Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.” He said, “When [Maury Wills] runs, it’s all downhill.”
While calling 1987 All-Star Game, Scully saw the Toronto Blue Jay’s uber-smooth shortstop Tony Fernandez for the first time. “He’s like a bolt of silk,” Scully said.
Because of Scully’s gift for words, we still prefer listening to baseball on the radio over watching it on TV. On the radio, games unfolds in your mind, unconstrained by camera angles and closeups. As the Terry Cashman tune puts it. “I saw it on the radio.”
After the jump, the word-for-word transcript of Scully calling the 9th inning of Sandy Koufax’s Perfect Game, September 9, 1965:
Generación Y
A few months ago, a friend and I spent a week in Cuba—not the usual Canadian stay in a beachside resort, but a week spent tramping the streets of Havana seeking out baseball games, opera, and the wonderful music that is the island nation’s rightful trademark.
We enjoyed the music and the weather, but the overwhelming impression was depressing: grinding poverty, decayed buildings, and the leaden air of a police state.
Last week, Yoani Sánchez, a 34-year-old Cuban writer, editor, and linguistics scholar, won the Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism that advances inter-American understanding. Cuban authorities exercise tight control over Internet access, but Sánchez somehow manages to write a critical blog, Generación Y (also available in an English version), cataloging with wit and grace the spirit-crushing quality of life under totalitarianism.
The Cuban government refused Sánchez’s request for permission to travel to New York for the award ceremony, but she managed to post a YouTube video of her acceptance speech. She also recounted her conversation with the functionary who denied her request for an exit visa. Moneyquote:
Clerk: At this time you cannot travel.
Yoani: Why don’t you want me to put one foot on a plane? What are you afraid of? What can this 110 pound person do? Create a tsunami? Why then won’t you let me leave the country?
Clerk: I already told you…
Yoani: You are being ridiculous. But no, I don’t want to repeat. You are making a travesty of life. This institution, that you represent, this permission to leave, some day this is going to end. My grandchildren are not going to live under these conditions. When I tell them the story of how the institutions of my country violated my rights, my right to travel, they’re not going to believe me. What will you tell your children? That you dedicated yourself to violating the rights of Cubans? Is that what you’ll say? Because really, I feel sorry for you for what you are going to have to tell your children in the future.
Obama’s first bad speech?
James Fallows, author, Atlantic Magazine writer, and erstwhile speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, has cataloged with discernment his admiration for several of President Obama’s landmark speeches over the last 18 months. So it was surprising to read his prediction that the president’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize will flop.
Fallow’s argument is “probabilistic:” Of the hundreds of Nobel prize acceptance speeches delivered over the years, he contends, only one was ever noteworthy: the three-minute oration by novelist William Faulkner, a man notorious for hating to make speeches.
Here is Faulkner’s remarkable address, delivered on December 10, 1950:
The full text is after the jump:
Late advice from William Safire
A tribute this morning by Maureen Dowd to fellow New York Times columnist William Safire, the conservative speechwriter and elegant arbiter of English usage who died Sunday, contains a couple of gems.
When White House officials wouldn’t return calls, Safire suggested leaving a one-word message explaining what the caller wanted to discuss: “Malfeasance.”
Dowd once saw Safire having lunch with Bert Lance, a former Carter administration official whom he had eviscerated in columns that won Safire a Pulitzer and cost Lance his job. When Dowd asked why he’d been breaking bread with this former nemesis, Safire explained, “Only hit people when they’re up.”
So… (cont.)
Maritime Noon host Costas Halavrezos has interviewed hundreds of so-talkers:
“So” is the name of a great Peter Gabriel album, but I’ve had precisely the same discussion with colleagues about its use as a preface to answers.
I first noticed the “so” tic when interviewing American academics and bureaucrats, but it has clearly become an invasive species here, with increasing prevalence over the past year.
(I should start assembling the digital detritus I’ve edited out of interviews: so, um, well, uh.)
So…
Contrarian reader John Hugh Edwards has noticed a linguistic quirk of recent origin:
For some time I’ve been meaning to mention how people being interviewed begin answers with, “So…” As in:
Q: Am I right to say the market has stabilized over the past several months, relative to the volatility it experienced since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008?
A: So, if we examine the graphic in today’s NYT we can see that since the low point in March…..
I am hearing the “so” more and more. Is it a particular strategy? If so, what is the rationale? Great graphic by the way. Way to go Contrarian.
Contrarian first noticed this trend on the CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks. It was so glaring, I mentioned it in an email to executive producer Jim Handman, who replied:
The question of why so many of our guests begin every sentence with “so,” is a baffling one. It first came to our attention about 2 years ago, and since then, dozens of listeners have written to point it out. It is definitely an American thing – but other than that, I can’t notice any pattern. It is very irritating with many of the guests, and I’m sure they don’t realise they’re doing it. Might be an interesting research project for a young PhD.
Almost a year later, on March 7, 2009, Quirks and Quarks put the question of the strange “so” tic to Maite Taboada, associate professor of linguistics at Simon Fraser University, and received the following less-than-definitive answer:
The slippery slope
As the US right hurls ever more fantastic slippery slope arguments at health care reform, the Atlantic’s James Fallows has challenged readers to come up with a single non-specious example of a metaphorical slippery slope. Aside from, “birth leads inevitably to death,” they’ve been pretty much stumped.
But one reader offered this 19th century advice from Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater.
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. Principiis obsta — that’s my rule.
For those unschooled in Latin, Fallows translates principiis obsta — resist the first inklings, nip it in the bud — as “the slippery-slope concept with a college degree.”
What bothers Contrarian about slippery slope arguments is that they always seem to be used as an excuse to avoid doing the right thing.
Expunging Liberal phrases
Embassy Magazine outs the Harper government’s effort to strip foreign policy documents of vestigial Liberal language:
DFAIT insiders tell Embassy that since the Conservative government took power in 2006, political staffers have directed rank and file Foreign Affairs bureaucrats to stop using policy language created by the former Liberal government. Read more »
