Monthly Archives: July 2008

Vladimir Putin, the ex-president and current prime minister of Russia certainly has a way with words, according to a New York Times story today:

Speaking at an industry conference this week, Mr. Putin, the former president and now prime minister, spoke five sentences critical of a Russian steel company, Mechel, and its billionaire chief executive, Igor Zyuzin.

In a sign of Mr. Putin’s enduring power, the criticism cost shareholders about $1.2 billion a sentence.

Such is the power of Mr. Putin’s words — even after “stepping down” to prime minister in May — that shares in Mechel, a coal mining and steel company, plunged almost 38 percent on the New York Stock Exchange after Mr. Putin complained that the company was charging domestic customers more than its foreign ones.

In a New York Times’ story yesterday about Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book, This Land is Their Land:

Ms. Ehrenreich has long been a happy warrior sallying forth against what she regards as the Big Lie about equal opportunity in our society. She unhoods the wink, you might say.

Awesome.

I just changed the design of the site (via a new theme) because there were some things I didn’t like about my old theme, including the grayed-out quoted text in the posts and the comments getting shoved way below the posts. I’m not head over heels for this one, either, but I think it’s an improvement.

A New York Times story today about Barack Obama’s trip to Europe included this:

But he was vague on crucial issues of trade, defense and foreign policy that currently divide Washington from Europe and are likely to continue to do so even if he becomes president — issues ranging from Russia, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan to new refueling tankers and chlorinated chickens, the focus of an 11-year European ban on American poultry imports.

Say wha’? You don’t usually see chlorinated and chickens side-by-side. Later, the story explains:

The United States complains that the European ban on American poultry costs American farmers about $200 million a year. The Europeans do not like the chlorine bath Americans use to disinfect their chickens, an argument that is less about safety than about taste.

Oh, OK. That makes me feel a little better. I think.

And no, this post isn’t exactly about words, but the tag line up there does say “and other oddities.” I think this qualifies.

John McIntyre, the copy-desk chief at The Baltimore Sun and proprietor of You Don’t Say, and Arnold Zwicky, a linguist who contributes to The Language Log, had a pair of entries on the declining use of whom at VisualThesaurus.com. Pretty interesting.

John McIntyre’s entry.

Arnold Zwicky’s entry.

My wife and I went out to eat last night. (It was delicious. Thanks for asking.) Anyway, I was just looking at our receipt. At the bottom, it said:

An optional 18% gratuity will be added to parties of 8 or more.

Doesn’t sound very optional to me. It was the Olive Garden. Maybe English isn’t its first language.

I tried to take a picture of the receipt, but my little digital camera couldn’t focus on it.

Wow. Eleven days without a post. I am lame. One is on the way.

I wrote a few days ago about the New York Times’ and other American papers’ obfuscation about what Jesse Jackson said about Barack Obama. (“I want to cut his nuts off.”)

In a Washington Post chat today, the Post’s media critic had this to say, which echoes my earlier comments:

Falls Church, Va.: Any thoughts on The Post’s decision to show a squeamishness about Jesse Jackson’s crude remarks that it did not about Dick Cheney’s?

Howard Kurtz: An absolute mistake, especially from the newspaper that ran Dick Cheney’s F-word blast against Pat Leahy. Why dance around it? Why devote a whole story to the political fallout without telling your readers what the offending line is? (Emphasis added.) After all, most people saw it a few dozen times on TV. It’s not even obscene — I use “nuts” all the time, though not in that context — though it was definitely crude. Sometimes I think we go so far in “protecting” readers that we just look out of it.

The New York Times was even more vague than The Post, which drew criticism yesterday from the paper’s ombudsman. The Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times published the exact quote. And then there was Tribune columnist Clarence Page, who referred to Obama’s “twin objects of male anatomy.” I asked him about that on “Reliable Sources,” and he confessed: “I’m just an old prude.”

So I was wrong that no American papers printed it. (The Post printed “that he wanted to castrate the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.’) My apologies for that.

Here’s what the Times’ ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, had this to say:

Paul Winfield, news editor at The Times, said he and Chuck Strum, an associate managing editor, made the call to, effectively, bleep Jackson’s comments. Winfield said the remark about talking down to black people was what seemed newsworthy to him, while the vulgarity did not seem important enough to make an exception to stringent Times standards. Neither Bill Keller, the executive editor, nor Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, was consulted, and Abramson said they might have found an alternative way to deal with Jackson’s quote.

I would have just used it.

This seems odd. If Jackson had simply said Obama was talking down to black people, it still would have been news, but not the big deal that it was. It was the “cut his nuts off” that made it a big story.

Hoyt also shares a reader’s comment:

Steve Sanger, a reader from Bellingham, Wash., said he sometimes wonders if The Times is edited by “prudish kindergarten teachers.” He said: “It is not good when a NY Times reader is forced to wonder what actually the fuss is about and then must start looking at other newspapers to find out.”

Hoyt’s column is a very good discussion of the reasons that newspapers generally do not print crude and obscene words. And though I was a bit flip about it in my previous post, it’s a policy I generally agree with. I do not think every news article should be filled with cursing and vulgarity. But if it’s important enough to write an article about a public figure saying those words, you owe it to the readers to tell them what those words are.

There’s a tempest in a presidential-campaign teapot brewing over The New Yorker’s cover this week, which “depicts Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in a turban, fist-bumping his gun-slinging wife,” according to Politico:

The New Yorker says it’s satire. It certainly will be candy for cable news.

The Obama campaign quickly condemned the rendering. Spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement: “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

So the dispute here is if this is satire. What is satire? According to my Webster’s New World Dictionary:

sat*ire: (sa’ tīr’) n. 1 a) a literary work in which vices, follies, stupidities, abuses, etc. are held up to ridicule or contempt b) such literary works collectively, or the art of writing them 2 the use of ridicule, sarcasm, irony, etc. to expose, attack, or deride vices, follies, etc.

So, if you think that the art meets the standard set in 1a and 2, then this is satire. (Although the word is being used wrong here at least according to the definition, since satire applies to a literary work, not art. But I think satire easily extends to expression beyond the written word.)

I think the complete over-the-topness of the image makes it clear that this is ridicule and sarcasm that is being used to attack the stupidities and abuses of the false claims being made about Obama. And given The New Yorker’s mostly very liberal audience, I think most people who get the magazine will be in on the joke. Know your customer, right? Of course, this is going to be splashed across the news channels, so it’s going to get far wider exposure.

There’s a cool story on the front page of today’s Washington Post about a guy who showed up at the Folger Shakespeare Library in D.C. with a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio that was stolen from an English university 10 years ago. He asked the library to authenticate it. As the Post writers put it:

The Folger’s sleuthing determined that the old book was genuine all right — and as hot as a pawned diamond tiara.

Love that turn of phrase. It’s a cool story about an odd mystery that the police are just now starting to sort out. The cops have arrested someone …

The (suspect) lives in a modest brick two-bedroom house in a working-class neighborhood of Washington, England — the ancestral town of George Washington‘s family, about a 15-minute drive from the university where the folio was stolen.

According to police, there was a silver Ferrari in his driveway and Armani suits in the closets. The man lived there with his mother, who is in her 80s. The home was crammed with antique books.

… but won’t say if it’s the same guy who showed up at the library.