What do you get when you cross this month’s NCAA basketball tournament and the upcoming papal election in Rome?
The Wall Street Journal has the answer:
“March Madness, Vatican Style: Who’ll Come Out of the Sweet Sistine?”
Warren Buffett bought the Richmond Times-Dispatch and several other local newspapers last year. His company, Berkshire Hathaway Media, just bought the third-largest paper in North Carolina, The News & Record in Greensboro.
But in announcing the deal, the paper, well, misspelled the new boss’s name. Oops.
Yep, the front page story has the headline:
“Buffet media buys paper”
Unless someone can argue that “Buffet media” actually referred to a group of reporters lined up to chow down at the local Shoney’s, someone is headed to the doghouse.
H/t to jimromensko.com.
A big six-foot monument to the Ten Commandments was placed on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol on Thursday, three years after it was authorized by the state legislature.
Two problems with that. Three if you’re the Oklahoma ACLU, but more on that below. It has spelling errors of biblical proportions.
The monument urges Sooners to “Remember the Sabbeth, and keep it holy.”
And another commandment states, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidseruent.”
State Rep. Mike Ritze, R-Broken Arrow, dismissed the errors to the words “Sabbath” and “maidservant” as no problem.
“It’s a simple fix,” he told The Oklahoman. These kinds of errors are “not uncommon with monument manufacturing.”
Try telling that to a judge if you file a motion or brief riddled with errors.
Ritze was the guy who pushed the monument in 2009, sponsoring the necessary legislation. It passed the House, 83-2, and the Senate, 38-8. Sixteen legislators were, um, absent when the vote was taken.
The monument, which cost about $20,000, was paid for entirely with private funds and Ritze’s family will pick up the tab for maintenance.
Opponents, meanwhile, may lawyer up. The ACLU in Oklahoma is mulling a lawsuit challenging the monument as a violation of the separation of church and state.
Proponents will be ready. Ritze said a group called the Liberty Legal Institute, which recently helped to defend a challenge to a similar monument in Texas, stands ready to help.
Presumably all parties will use spell check before filing anything with a court.
The word of the year for 2012, according to Oxford University Press, is “GIF.” Go figure.
A 20-some-year-old word from technology, it stands for “graphics interchange format,” and most designers will tell you that GIF pictures have long since been eclipsed by JPGs as the medium of choice.
But according to the Associated Press, GIF was the word this year because it made the transition from noun to verb.
“To GIF” means to create an image or video, then post it on the Internet. All kinds of GIFs are online, from funnies about the election to pricelessly cute kittens to stuff from the Olympics.
The top word in the United Kingdom, according to the OUP, was “omnishambles,” a term describing a complete and total series of blunders, such as the state of the British media or its gaffe-prone government. At least they’re not GIF-prone. Yet.
The selection of GIF as the word of the year already has prompted some controversy. Katy Waldman, who writes for Browbeat, a “culture blog” at Slate.com, sniffed that it’s not even a word; it’s an acronym. And it’s so last century, Waldman noted, despite its 2012 morph into a verb, and no one much knows how to pronounce it.
For the record, don’t use a hard “G.” The proper pronunciation of “GIF” is “jif,” not unlike a certain brand of peanut butter.
Waldman observed that 2012 produced any number of possibilities overlooked by the OUP: malarkey, double down, fiscal cliff and Obamacare, among others.
The Brits apparently got it right about their own word of the year. As Ross Hart commented below, “The British have done it again. ‘Omnishambles’ is a lot more polite than that “cluster” phrase that’s so common . ..” Indeed.
Waldman’s suggestions notwithstanding, the Oxford Press dons said the runners up in the U.S. include “superstorm,” a weather term applied to Hurricane Sandy when the storm somehow no longer was a hurricane, and “YOLO,” a carefree social-media acronym for “you only live once,” as opposed to a certain James Bond movie from about 1967.
Some intern in New York will never live this one down.
Former NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong died over the weekend, but as noted at JimRomenesko.com, it wasn’t reported that way on the NBC News website:
Frank L. Visco is a New York-based copywriter who hit gold in 1986 with a piece in Writer’s Digest. Entitled “How to Write Good,” the article provides 23 pointers on … good writing. It continues to circulate across the Internet. Here are the tips:
HOW TO WRITE GOOD
by Frank L. Visco
My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)
4. Employ the vernacular.
5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Contractions aren’t necessary.
9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
10. One should never generalize.
11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. Profanity sucks.
15. Be more or less specific.
16. Understatement is always best.
17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be avoided.
21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
23. Who needs rhetorical questions?
We’ve celebrated Headlines of the Day on this site, the hedders that are clever or capture a story so well.
Anyone who has written the sterling headlines will have a number of clinkers in his or her clip file as well. The unfortunate thing is they are so public.
The theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., last week was terrifying and awful and incomprehensible. A former medical student killed 12 and injured many others at a screening of the new Batman movie.
A story on page one of today’s print issue went to press on Thursday night before the incident with this headline: “First shots fired in summary judgment battle.”
For the Friday Daily Alert we were able to change that to: “First salvos launched in summary judgment campaign.”
Others didn’t have that opportunity. In retrospect, the guys and gals at “Entertainment Weekly” magazine probably wish they had chosen a different head for their July 20 cover: “Batman’s Killer Finale.”
The News & Observer down in Raleigh had this headline a few days ago:
Chapel Hill house where 15 lived badly damaged by fire
If only the 15 had lived better…
H/T to James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal for flagging this one.
Here’s some valuable advice from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, an outfit in London that describes itself as a “professional organisation based in the UK for editors and proofreaders – the people who strive to make text accurate and readable.”
USA Today takes honors for yesterday’s gem from its purple “Life” section, the hedder on a profile of musician Yo-Yo Ma:
“Yo-Yo Ma’s message: There’s always room for cello”
