Not Laying Down -- Grammar Outrages Continued

Dear Richard Morgan of the  New York Post,

If you're going to make grammatical mistakes in a newspaper,  don't make them in inch-high headlines!

And if you really don't know the difference between ""lying" and "laying", please refer to my essay on the Huffington Post of April 4, 2013, called "The Last Surviving Grouchy Grammar Nut.",
which received 728 comments last time I looked.

Sincerely,

A Rolling Crone



 

Why I’m Going to Miss Newspapers

I’ve said it before:  my favorite time is when I sit down in the morning with my first cup of coffee and start to read the three newspapers that I devour every day.

One reason this is such a guilty pleasure is the contrast to my first job, in public relations at Lever Brothers in New York, when I had to walk into an empty office at 8 a.m. carrying five newspapers, then read and summarize all the business news of interest to the company’s executives, who would get a mimeographed newsletter from me when they drifted in around 10 a.m.  Now, of course, all executives can get their own news summary on their I-phones right in the taxi or commuter train on the way to work.

The paper that I read first with my coffee is the local paper—the Worcester (MA) Telegram & Gazette.  I need the comfortable perspective of the T&G before I tackle the increasingly depressing first page of The New York Times.

 The T&G on Monday, March 11, for example, devoted much of the front page to Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade-- photos and the title “Smilin’ Skies” with two subtitles “Sun Shines on St. Pat’s Parade” and “One band finds itself out of step.” Inside on page three was a feel-good story and photo about how the library in Hardwick is sponsoring a seed exchange, lending seeds as well as books to its patrons, who are expected to bring seeds back from their crop for the next year’s sowing.  That’s the kind of uplifting local story that I like.

While The New York Times likes to lead with photos of mass graves and starving refugee children, the T& G has featured page-one photos of firemen rescuing a cat from a telephone pole.  When I’ve finished the T&G and checked to see if anyone I know has died or been arrested, I go through The New York Times methodically, section by section.  Often the obituaries of fascinating people I’d never heard of are my favorite part.

 I need a second cup of coffee before I tackle The Times, and when I’m through, I go about my chores. But sometime during the day I go out and track down a copy of the New York Post, which is famous for its lurid headlines like “Headless Body in Topless Bar” (that one was voted a readers favorite.  Here are some more below.) 

 People often ask me “Why on earth would YOU read the Post every day?” (Meaning—since I’m an educated professional with presumably better taste.)  But I reply truthfully that I need my daily gossip fix, and often I find my New York friends and acquaintances and their misadventures chronicled on Page Six.  Where else but in the Post would I find articles like the one last Monday about: “Why does everyone hate Anne Hathaway?” 

 My kids and their friends get all their news on line.  And I understand and respect their reasons why I shouldn’t read the print version: it kills trees, it gets your hands and furniture dirty, and by the time the paper appears in the driveway at 6:30 a.m. (usually in a plastic bag landing in the snow), it’s already out of date.

But I love handling the newspapers; the smell of the ink that smudges my hands.  I love being able to tag with post-it notes and later cut out articles I think would be of interest to my kids.  I regularly send them clippings, which I suspect they never read (but if I forward the article by e-mail I sometimes get a comment back.)

Today we get breaking news via internet the instant it happens—and we also get all the confusion and fear and wrong information gleaned by bystanders.  Think about the Newtown massacre and how many wrong “facts” were reported until, by the afternoon, the terrible truth was pinned down and rendered into print for the next day’s papers.

I graduated with a master’s degree from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and I realize the serious dangers of broadcasting breaking news while it’s still rumor. I understand how easy it would be to cause mass hysteria , serious injury and even death using no more than your Twitter or Facebook account.   Look what Orson Welles did with “War of the Worlds” on the radio in 1938, before the days of television.

The ability of bystanders to report the news on line is also a good thing—it can uncover and document police abuse, domestic abuse, all kinds of criminal acts. But I still prefer my news on paper, evaluated and fact-checked by the reporters of the Great Gray Lady presenting “all the news that’s fit to print.” 

I know we’re approaching the end of the road for print media. Newsweek is gone, except for on-line. The Boston Phoenix just folded after 47 years. The New York Times, suffering financially like everyone else, is trying to find someone to buy the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. One day soon there won’t be any more news delivery people or any more newspapers landing in the snowdrift at the end of our driveway.  And millions of trees will have been saved.

When I was born on Feb. 4, 1941, my parents saved the entire Milwaukee Journal: (“Score Hurt as Big Locomotive Explodes in Streets of Denver”.)  In September of 1970 I cut our wedding announcement out of The New York Times and put it in an album. Like everyone else, I saved the paper from Nov. 23, 1963, about Kennedy’s assassination.  That was the first time the nation pulled together to mourn a tragedy as it was taking place on television, but, still in grad school, I didn’t have access to a television, but stood over the teletype machine in Columbia J School’s newsroom as crumbs of information were typed out at an agonizingly slow pace.

When all the newspapers are gone and news comes beeping through our phones and computers all day long, my first cup of coffee in the morning won’t taste the same.  And as one friend asked, what are we going to use to pack up the china and line the birdcage?

Reporting the death of Whatshisname

As a (retired) journalist, I spent much of Thursday watching internet news with fascination as reports of the violent death of Moamar Gaddafi leaked out.  I watched the national news at six thirty and kept checking on line, and by the time I went to bed I still didn’t know exactly who killed him.  Still don't.

This kind of story is a nightmare for a working journalist who has to report from the middle of a violent, hysterical and dangerous crowd and has no way of checking the facts he is told.  Everyone has his own version of what happened.  And imagine how much more complicated things are today, when every terrorist, tourist, rebel, protester and cop has his or her own cell phone recording what’s happening.  (This is both a good thing and a bad thing for the general populace, because we get the news immediately as it’s happening, thanks to Steve Jobs and the internet, but we  may very well get a slanted or staged version of the event.)

Another difficult aspect of this story—for journalists and especially editors—is what to do about the gruesome images of Gaddafi both before and after he was dead.  All the TV reports warned viewers that they were about to view graphic images.

I was eager to see yesterday (Friday) how the story would be handled by the three papers I read every day:  the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, the New York Times and the New York Post.

Not surprisingly, the Worcester T&G headlined, in the biggest typeface they could find, “Libya’s new era”.  Under that in smaller type was “Joyous celebration, giddy disbelief over death of Gadhafi”.  The main photo was of euphoric fighters, all smiles.  There was no bloody corpse in sight.  And that made sense, because the T&G readers in Worcester, MA are quick to write angry letters every time the paper shows something like a fatal auto crash or any image that would be too hard to take over breakfast.        

The New York Times also handled the news with restraint, but a little grimmer tone:  “QADDAFI, SEIZED BY FOES, MEETS A VIOLENT END”—was the main headline stretched across the entire width of the front page. The subhead was: “Fighters Mob the Fallen Dictator After His Failed Effort to Flee”.  The main photo on the front page showed euphoric fighters waving their guns and shouting in victory. Much smaller and lower on the page was a blurry image with the caption “This still image from a video apparently shows a bloodied Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi after his capture by government fighters.

I knew the NYTimes would be restrained in coverage—she is after all the “Great Gray Lady”  with “all the news that’s fit to print.”  When I attended Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1963-64, to get my master’s degree, we eighty students, sitting behind our massive manual typewriters in the news room, were taught New York Times style.  There were many rules.  A man, for instance, was always referred to as “Mr.” until he was convicted of a crime.  Women were “Mrs.” or “Miss” (“Ms.” wasn’t yet born.)  The word “rape” never appeared—it was “sexually assaulted.”  Everything in the Times had to be restrained, calm, factual and backed up by at least two independent sources.

The New York Post, as I expected, on Friday ran full page the goriest bloody corpse photo it could find, along with an inset of a young man brandishing a gold pistol that he claimed belonged to the dead “mad dog of the Middle East” as Reagan called him.  The boy was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap which inspired the New York Post ‘s headlines to trumpet in giant letters 1.5 inches high: “ KHADAFY KILLED BY YANKEE FAN”.

If there was a prize awarded for the best headline of the day, I’m sure the Post’s chauvinist take on the story would win hands down.  Oh, and the Post’s subhead read:  “Gunman had more hits than A-Rod.”  The Post’s story may not have been accurate, but you have to admit it made you smile, unlike all the other front-page reports.

After comparing the approach of my three regular papers, and then scanning other front pages from around the world (collected on Yahoo under the title  “Has the media gone too far?…” I suddenly realized  that EVERY PAPER WAS SPELLING THE MAN’S NAME A DIFFERENT WAY!  You’d think, since the New York Times owns the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, that those two papers would both spell it “Qaddafi”—Times’ style-- but no, the T&G calls him Gadhafi.  If you go to Google, as I did, you’ll find there are more than 100 ways to spell this colorful madman’s name and there are a lot of newspaper editors on line defending their own version of the spelling. 

The problem is--you’re starting with a name in a different alphabet (Arabic) and trying to spell it phonetically with our Latin alphabet.  There’s a similar problem with spelling our last name--Gage-- to a Greek in a language that has a different alphabet and no hard “G”.  (It’s “Gamma, kappa, alpha, iota, tau, zita.”  Which comes out GKAITZ.  This is why a Greek TV reporter interviewing daughter Eleni in Greek reported that she was the daughter of Bill Gates.)

Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t have to cover a slippery story like the death of the Colonel, especially in an era when every man in the crowd is reporting it too.  And I say "kudos!" to the young journalists who did it at the risk of their lives.  (Now if they’d just learn the correct usages of  “lie” and “lay” and  “its” & “it’s).

Michelle Obama, the Grammar Police & a Cranky Crone

Today I read in all the news media about Michelle Obama’s surprise visit to Haiti during her first official solo trip abroad.

I applaud her for her compassion and for bringing public attention to the devastating needs that still have to be met, especially for the Haitian children.

I’m a huge fan of Michelle’s and admire her more than any first lady since, say, Eleanor Roosevelt. But I did wince when I read the statement that she made to the press about her trip. Her insight was perfect but her grammar was not.

“I think it was important for Jill and I to come now because we’re at the point where the relief efforts are under way but the attention of the world starts to wane a bit, ” she said.

What’s wrong with that? Take out Jill and you have “I think it’s important for I to come now.” It’s supposed to be: “It was important for Jill and ME.”

I admit I’m cranky, crochety and over-sensitive about bad grammar. I spent so many years getting a degree in English Literature and then a master’s degree at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Back in the old days, a brilliant editor of The New York Times named Theodore M. Bernstein was also a professor at Columbia J School. After he died in 1979, Time Magazine noted, “Theodore M. Bernstein, 74…served as the paper‘s prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism…In a witty Times house organ called ‘Winners and Sinners’, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act.”

(Note to Time Magazine, I got a memo from Ted Bernstein, who was spinning in his grave. The memo reads: “ ‘Author’ is not a verb.”)

At Columbia J School we often saw Bernstein’s “Winners and Sinners” newsletter. (It was printed on paper, children, not sent via the internet.) Somewhat like the judges on American Idol, Ted Bernstein would periodically praise a brilliant headline or turn of phrase in the NYT and chide and make fun of grammatical and syntactical lapses.

It used to be that The New York Times was the last bastion of proper grammar, usage and correct spelling. The rules we were taught at Columbia were strict and thorough.

But today even the Times’ reporters, misspell, manhandle the language and misuse verbs like “lie” and “lay” until I wince and fume every morning reading my three newspapers.

I sometimes think I’m the last reporter alive who cares about “lie” and “lay.” (And I think Bob Dylan, who is exactly my age and, like me, from Minnesota, is much to blame for his song “Lay Lady, Lay (across my big brass bed.)”

Here’s the 411: “Lie” is an active verb – as in “When the police came, they found the body lying in the street.” “I’m going to lie down.” It’s “lie”, even if it’s an object: “The police arrived to find the bomb lying in the street.”

“Lay” is when something is laid down by someone else. “The crowd watched the police lay the victim on a stretcher.” “Now I lay ME down to sleep.” Not “Now I lay down to sleep.” That’s wrong! But in past time – “Yesterday I lay down to sleep at nine p.m.” That’s correct. “Lay” is the past tense of “lie”.

Okay, it’s complicated. But somebody has to know.

And don’t even start me on “its” versus “it’s.” And “to”, “too” and “two.”

Today, after tsk-tsking about Michelle’s misuse of “I” and “me”, I turned to the New York Post which I read daily for the gossip and drama. (That’s what tabloids are for.)

Within the first few pages I was faced with two more grave grammatical slips. The defense of the reporter in both cases would probably be, “But I only quoted what he said.” And that’s valid. When you’re quoting someone, even if she’s the first lady, you can’t go around correcting her/his verbal errors.

On page three of the Post, is a sad story of a “Terrified Tot Abandoned on Day-Care Bus” under the title “HE SOBBED ALONE”. The piece ended “SUNY Downstate spokesman Ron Najman said nothing like that had never happened before in the program’s 23 years.”

Maybe all the Post’s copy editors had been fired or were on coffee break yesterday, or working on the Chinese earthquake.

On page six of the Post, (not the famous Page Six, which actually started on page 12), a shaken member of the Los Angeles Angels , star outfielder Torii Hunter, described seeing a “gruesome suicide leap from the luxury hotel” where they were staying. He said, “We just saw the body just laying there. It’s terrible.”

You don’t expect perfect grammar from a baseball player (or from Bob Dylan) but maybe you do from a First Lady who’s a lawyer, educated at Princeton and Harvard.

Kids acquire an ear for correct grammar by hearing it spoken by the adults around them; their parents and their role models. But now that young people mainly communicate by texting in a phonetic code, both spelling and grammar are becoming as antiquated as the Model T.

It’s great that Michelle Obama is encouraging kids to eat smart and get out there and exercise, but let’s encourage them to mind their P’s and Q’s and their prepositions, nouns, verbs and grammar as well.