Please make it stop

Once upon a time, children, some editor working in quiet anonymity on a feature about suburban libraries would have spotted a random relative clause as it wandered into traffic and stopped it. Terminated its command with extreme prejudice, maybe, if it was movie night at the library, but by all means kept it from afflicting readers whose only offense was to start reading in the first place.

Truth be told, of course, we used to lose those battles as often as we'd win them. Someone up the food chain might like the flow of it, or want to lighten up and have a little fun, or complain that boring editors are driving away the readers who will sustain us in the future.  To which -- fine, but if you have to drag your innocent restaurant critic into your orgy of writering, could you at least spell his name the same way he does?

Some purge

OK, it's not nice to pick on individual spelling errors, and there but for the grace of God and all that. But all you kids who went into copyediting because you won the spelling bees in junior high? You can laugh at Fox now.

The inside hed and the link spell "perjury" right, which takes some of the fun out of things. But we can always start a pool on how long it takes to fix the homepage, or open the comments for a definition of "purgery." (Witch trials? Colonoscopy prep?)

Why need we editros

So what's new in the delegate selection process today, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The Associated Press on Saturday declared Sen. Bernie Sanders the winner of the Alaska and Washington Democratic presidential caucuss.

Erm ... both of it?

With 73 percent of Alsaka precints reporting, Sanders was leading front-runner Hillary Clinton 73 percent 79 percentt to 83 percent.

We always tell students that "spellcheck" isn't the same as "editing." But even the oldest-school among you will admit it's better than nothing.

"We knew things were going to improve as we headed West," Sanders said at a rally in Madison, Wis. "We are making significant inroads in ... Clinton's lead. ... We have a path toward victory."

Not even a guess here. Somebody had an advance transcript and didn't fill in the blanks? Reporter couldn't hear and didn't want to go with "argle-bargle"? Did he actually say it?


The Vermont senator is looking for big wins in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington’s caucuses, trying to cut into Clinton’s sizable lead and kick-off a Western swing that he can ride to the July nominating convention.

The biggest prize will be Washington, in which 101 delegates are up for grabs.

Hold that thought, kids:

Sanders hopes the win in Alaska along with ones in Washington and Hawaii, which offer 16 and 25 pledged delegates respectively, will ignite his campaign after a rough trip across the South, and lead to wins in Oregon and California, which offers 546 delegates.

Pretty much unchanged from an update around 5 p.m., suggesting that the graf was resutured for the first results without much attention to its content: "Alaska" was moved up in the edit, but the vote counts for the two smaller states just stayed where they were. That sort of edit is called "leaving the scalpel in the patient," and it looks equally bad on the X-rays. 

True it is that we are all prone to typos, and anybody can slip up in a hurry, and kids got no respect for the law today. That is why we have "editors." Editors stand athwart progress yelling "do the arithmetic" and "where's Alsaka?" and "what did the candidate say?" And, yes, "spellcheck or die."

They do that not because the split infinitive is a sign manifest of Satan on earth, or because they want to throttle your last drop of creativity,* or because they want you to miss deadline, or because they had terrible childhoods and don't think you've suffered enough. They do it because it makes the product look competent and professional. No, really. Spending a few minutes combing out the kinks in the sort of stuff that news outlets throw online because everybody's in a hurry  has a positive and statistically significant effect on whether Real People think it's well-written, professional and worth paying for. (Come to Portland next week and hang around with a bunch of people who agree!)

My favorite part of that study -- OK, favorite except for the bits about what's worth paying for -- involves a variable called "media distance." It takes participants' rating of their own politics on a left-right scale and compares that with how they rate the politics of "the media," yielding an index of whether they see the media as off to their left, off to their right, or sort of in the same place. The only place where editing doesn't make a difference in perceptions of quality and value is that chunk in the middle. Whether you think the media are a left-wing plot or a tool of the corporate right, you can tell whether somebody inspected the product as it left the assembly line.

Should Fox News want a takeaway point (worth every cent they paid for it, by the way), I suggest this: Ideological purity will only get you so far. Readers who are involved enough to move the needle off center on that scale expect some quality for their buck, and simply reciting the party line isn't going to cut it.

* OK, maybe just a little bit on this one.

Expletive elated

What's up in Servergate today, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The tech company that managed the private email server that Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state says it has “no knowledge of the server being wiped,” which means some of her elated emails could be recovered, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

Things are a little more circumspecct at the Post:

The company that managed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server said it has “no knowledge of the server being wiped,” the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered.


Fox: Come for the race-baiting paranoia, stay for the autocorrect!

At the Fair 'n' Balanced spelling bee

Hey, kids! What's the one word you'd figure everybody at Fox has learned how to spell by now?

HANNITY: Pat, if you say in one speech corpse-man, it tells me you don't know what a Navy corpsman is. That's a lot worse than this.

OBAMA: Navy Corpse-man Christian Brossard.
OBAMA: Corpse-man Brossard.
OBAMA: Corpse-man Brossard.

HANNITY: ... The president in one speech multiple times, he doesn't know what a navy corpsman is. He said corpse man four or five times. He didn't get as much play as your 53 seconds or Herman Cain recently. He says, to all of you on this Memorial Day, and I see you out there, he doesn't know the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day. I have been to what, fifty seven states now?
 

Canon to right of them

A bad week in spelling -- more broadly, in "having somebody look at the stuff before you print it" -- is coming to a painful end downtown:

Tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, the 2014 artist-in-residence, exploded out of the gate as if shot out of a canon in his inaugural set at Cadillac Square in the heart of downtown.

OK, maybe everyone was blinded by the explosion of good writering, which only gets gooder as it proceeds:

Beyond the music tonight, there was a noticeable change in the city’s psyche. The last year has not been easy for Detroit. The city’s bankruptcy has produced a hornet’s nest of conflict and pain, creating a thick fog of civic angst that has sometimes made it hard to remember the undeniable seeds of the city’s rebirth.

... but enough evidence has piled up over the past few days to call for a reminder of the Basic Rule of spellering: If you don't know how to spell a word, look it up. If you think you do, look it up anyway. As in this from Thursday:

For millions of children across the country, walking alone to school is a right of passage.

Wrong write. You want a ritual of passage, not some sort of entitlement to passage. And the online hed is too good to overlook:

 

And there's this from a 1A feature on Monday -- now fixed online, though the transposition bumble in the second graf remains:

Sanders bounced back from near-oblivion to a become growing national player in desserts and candy.


The con- fectioner, also known for its ice cream and hot fudge topping, has seen double-digit sales growth over the last three years, fueled in part by native Michiganders buying the products they remember from their childhoods, said company President Ron Rapson, who said annual sales are about $25 million.

Pick on spelling with care; the only sure result of catching an error is committing one yourself in the booking process. But this much negligence in this many prominent places in a couple of days suggests a flaw in the machine. If you don't take the finished product seriously, you shouldn't expect your readers to.

Today in beachwear

OK, not really today, but part of the long holiday weekend -- what do you suppose Arthur was baring?

Just a reminder that our little friends at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network don't really do anything well, even when there's no Kenyan usurper to distract them. 

All you can eat

High on the list -- really, really high on the list -- of names you should be at pains to spell correctly would be, oh, the guy who's just bought your newspaper.* One gathers that the lesson has sunk in at Greensboro.**

Mr. Buffett is rich enough to have a sense of humor, I hope. Maybe this will bring home to him that in the Global War on Editing, you're either with us or you're with the tourists.

* First noted by Charles Apple over at the ACES mothership.
** I wouldn't have gone with "Buffett media" as shorthand for "BH Media Group," either. "Buffett group" would have been better. Hope they weren't arguing over that when the blunder sailed through.

Colege is good

For a lot of reasons, not least of which is Your Editor's own typographic ineptitude, this is an editing blog, not a catalog of typos and one-off misspellings. Still, the occasional isolated goof is highlighted, if only to remind copy editors: Please pay extra attention to spelling when Star Columnist is demanding that education be universally recognized as Job One.

The land of strange corrections

Why do newspapers correct what they correct? Let's observe and speculate a little:

A review of the "Charlotte Squawks" prouduction* in Sunday's State&Local section gave an incorrect song lyric in a number mocking County Manager Harry Jones. The correct lyric was: "Harry makes the moolah rain."

OK, that's good to know. Glitch on a parody lyric in the yearly roast of local notables and you get a correction in your folder. Flatly misstate a contentious yet straightforward issue of foreign policy ("Obama endorses 1967 borders for Israel," say), and -- three weeks and counting?

But enough about the Fractious Near East. What are we correcting with the correction here: Noun? Verb? Party affiliation? Intonation? Let's see (the tune is "Jolly Holiday" from "Mary Poppins," if that helps):

Oh, it's a money giveaway with Harry;
Harry is the gravy train.
Tell him that your lawsuit will be scary,
Harry makes the mulah rain!

If you think it's nearly unheard-of for newspapers to correct spelling errors, take the square root of that and multiply it by "archaic slang terms with multiple recognized spellings" to get an approximate likelihood of this one.

So what's the point? Did somebody think the spelling as originally given meant -- God forbid -- "mullah" or something? As in Our Kids and Teens will be bowing toward Mecca any day now? Because it's totally going to spoil the joke if "mullah," dating to 1939, is among the OED's variations on "moolah."

Insights on how this correction came about, of course, are welcome.

* I don't want to get into the (sic) habit, but it's a correction, dammit. So (sic).

De all that you can de

A report last Sunday about the marriage of Carolina Ventura and Dr. Zoë Rosenbaum misspelled part of the Ms. Ventura’s middle name. She is Carolina De Los Angeles Ventura, not Be Los Angeles.

"How's it look, spellcheck?"

"Fine, sir!"

(Note also the suturing error in "the Ms. Ventura's middle name." That looks like someone -- writer or editor -- getting the old feet tangled up in one of those unwritten rules that make the Times sound like the Times. A similar topic was discussed at the Log last week while Your Editor was knee-deep in the seminar.)

Eye vs. brain vs. ear

Here's the mic/mike debate writ large -- or, at least, writ in big type at the top of the front page. I had to fumble with it for a minute or so, even though I could see the "SD" on the cap (and had deliberately opened the San Diego frontpage). That's because I read "Pads" as the word it already is -- since I don't have a phonetic alphabet, that's "pads" as in "fat dads" -- rather than a clipped version of "Padres," which I would think of as "pods."*

What does that have to do with mikes and mics? As with a lot of rules (so called) or laws or expectations of language, where you stand is often less interesting than how you got there -- how you derive "rules," how you put them into play, and how you inflict them on others, should you find yourself in charge of rules.

I never had much of a problem with the mike/mic thing, because I always thought the better choice was pretty self-evident. I had a bike, and a parental unit named Mike, and a reasonable pre-Sesame Street idea of what that "silent E" thing was up to. "Mike" seemed like the sensible way to shorten "microphone," partly because that's what grownups and experts did:

Mikes can be discussed or described in many ways. Here we will discuss them by microphone type, and their specific usage will be described in a later chapter.**

Announce microphones generally will be high-quality, unidirectional mikes (to control unwanted studio or audience noise) unless two performers are going to use the microphone at the same time, in which case a bi-directional mike is sometimes used.***

Derived forms work in the same way. Hunter Thompson wrote about bikers, not bicers. And how would you pronounce these gerunds?

Dicing the banjo requires a handsaw and a pair of metal shears.
Micing the banjo requires delicate professional skill.

The OED seems inclined toward my side; it dates "mike" to 1926, "mic" to 1961. So imagine my surprise, years later, to find out that I was apparently an irrational loony. "Open mike" means an Irishman in surgery!**** There's no "k" in "microphone"!***** Everybody knows the only proper spelling is "mic"!

Well, live and learn. I think this is partly generational; people my age and up seem to think "mike" is natural; people a decade and more younger seem to think "mic" is natural. The cool part is where rules come from: who makes them, what they say, how they're grounded, and how flexible or inflexible they are. If I was in charge of the how-to-spell-clippings rule, it'd look something like:

Most clippings are words on their own. Spell them the way you pronounce them. If a clipping resembles an existing word, you should expect people to read it that way. No, you don't need an apostrophe in 'phone. If in doubt, send me a note and I will issue a fiat. (not a Fiat, which is pronounced "tow truck").

Long story short, I probably wouldn't refer to the San Diego baseball team as the Pads, which sounds wrong, but I'd be wary of the Pods on "Body Snatchers" grounds (apparently this does have some journalistic currency, though). I'd suggest avoiding the issue in writing altogether.

Isn't spelling fun?

* I don't know if there's a written standard on this; observations from California readers are welcome.
** Oringel's "Audio Control Handbook," fourth edition, 1972
*** Stasheef et al., "The television program: Its direction and production," fifth edn, 1975. A couple of illustrations use "mic." -- with period --as the short form.
**** "WTF" barely begins to scratch the surface sometimes, doesn't it?
***** An orthographic feature shared with "bicycle" and "Michael," if you're scoring along at home.