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...

20 December, 2009

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,...

29 November, 2009
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. Vin Scully BaseballContrarian 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:
11 November, 2009

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...

18 October, 2009
faulkner-cJames 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:
12 October, 2009

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...

30 September, 2009

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.) Previous discussion of the "so" tic here and here....

23 September, 2009

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...

22 September, 2009

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...

20 September, 2009
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.
02 July, 2009