Monthly Archives: March 2010

Jan Freeman has a good column in tomorrow’s Boston Globe about the argument over whether everyone’s favorite all-purpose binder started out as duck tape or duct tape. The answer is inconclusive, but there is a lot of interesting information.

And now, a nerdy interlude. I usually like the webcomic xkcd, but I LOVED the most recent one. I had to share it.

I had been using the AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox for years to keep advertising off of the Web sites I visit. AdBlock was always one of the first things I grabbed when doing a new installation. I never thought much of it, thinking that since I never click on ads anyway, it wasn’t hurting the Web sites I visit because they got paid by the click.

It turns out that’s not the case, as I learned from an Ars Technica article the other day:

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue.

As someone who works for a newspaper with a Web site that has a lot of advertising, this immediately hit home. Web advertising doesn’t bring in nearly enough revenue to support a newspaper staff, but with how bad things have gotten, we need every penny we can get.

So do all of the Web sites we visit every day, from niche blogs to The New York Times. As someone who hopes to make a lifelong career in journalism, I know that online advertising will always be a part of where my salary comes from, be it a large part or a small part. So please, if you do want to keep seeing quality content on your favorite Web sites, please read the article, and please consider turning off your ad blocker.

Whatever you think about the war in Iraq, it’s hard not to admire the courage of Iraqis yesterday as they “defied a barrage of mortars, rockets and other bombs to show up to the polls in strength,” according to an article in today’s New York Times. There were three quotes in the story that I wanted to highlight:

The deadliest single attack occurred when what the police said was a Katyusha rocket collapsed an apartment building, located in the Ur neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad. The Interior Ministry said 25 were killed.

Mr. Bedawi, who witnessed the carnage, said the attack hardened the resolve of Iraqis to vote. “Everyone went,” he said. “They were defiant about what happened. Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.”

This one was a sad testament to what the country has been through in the past 100 years:

“We have experienced three wars before,” Ahmed Ali, a supporter of Mr. Maliki, said in Ur, “so it was just the play of children that we heard.”

And this made me smile:

“Don’t be afraid of those cowards,” a police officer shouted from a rooftop to passers-by.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve never gotten into National Grammar Day, which is today. So I don’t really have anything to say about it.

But John McIntyre has a good list of constructive ways to recognize it over at You Don’t Say, including “Hire an editor” and “Get yourself some good advice.” You can also check out the blogs on the right side of this page, and there’s a more extensive list on the National Grammar Day site.

I was never much for The Killers when they became popular in 2004. But I decided to give their first album, Hot Fuss, a listen or three last week. It was better than I had remembered, though I don’t think they’ll make it into my regular rotation.

In one song, “All These Things That I’ve Done,” the line “I got soul, but I’m not a soldier,” is repeated several times. That caught the ear of my inner word nerd, and I wondered if soul and soldier had a common etymology that the Killers were cleverly using to express their angst.

Nope.

Here are the etymologies, from Webster’s New World:

• Soul: From the Middle English soule, from the Old English sawol, akin to the German seele and the Gothic saiwala, from the Germanic saiwalo,* literally that belonging to the sea (from saiwa-, meaning sea): from the early Germanic belief that souls originate in and return to the sea. (*The etymology notes that the Germanic part is unverified, but I thought it was interesting.)
• Soldier: from the Middle English soldiour, from the Old French soldier, from solde, meaning coin, pay, from the Late Latin solidus, literally meaning solid and figuratively meaning coin.

(Despite today’s discovery that I have access to the OED again, its etymologies in these cases were needlessly complex for my purposes.)

This really has nothing to do with words, it’s just a really cool music video by OK Go, which is known for their cool music videos:

Wired has a story about the making of the video.

Apparently, I can get into the OED through the Louisville library Web site again. All praise to the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

That is all.

(Obviously, this will contain some language.)

Generally, newspapers have a policy against printing profanity, with the exception of a quote that is exceptionally newsworthy. (Usually a public figure cursing at someone else in public, such as Dick Cheney’s famous “Go fuck yourself” to Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate.)

Although I think these rules tend to err of the stodgy side, in a publication intended for a mass audience, I understand the need to be as inoffensive as possible so as not to lose readers.

Usually, if a quote contains profanity but the reporter wants to use it, the profanity will be replaced with some sort of typographical fix. So when Cheney said “Go fuck yourself,” some newspapers reported it with something like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go … yourself,” he said.

Or like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go — yourself,” he said.

I don’t quite get this. If you think it is important enough to say that the person cursed at someone, then why don’t you think it is important enough to report what they said? The reader is left to guess about the degree of the obscenity and is probably left playing fill in the blank. (It’s fairly obvious in this quote, but what about something like “That’s … ridiculous.” Lots of naughty words fit there.)

But sometimes, newspapers print something stupid like this:

Cheney replied with a profanity.

“Go f–k yourself,” he said.

I saw an example of  this in a newspaper recently (different profanity and context, but it was a quote of one elected official speaking to another in public), and I literally said, “Come on!” loud enough to draw attention from those around me at the breakfast place I was eating at.

This is the worst way to handle profanity. You are trying to act like you care about your readers’ sensitivities, but really, you’re just insulting their intelligence. The argument I have heard for “f–k” or “s–t” or whatever is that it is to protect kids. But readers don’t sit around discussing newspaper ethics or policies or reading our handbooks. They don’t know why you just took out the middle letters, and they’ll probably think the newspaper thinks they are too dumb to figure out what the word is.

And even if the policy is understood — and even if a child young enough to protect from swearing is actually reading an article about politics — all this will do is make the kid go to his parents and ask what it means.

Leaving aside whether or not kids need to be protected from cursing, I think that a kid reading something like that gives a parent the opportunity to talk about what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, whether you are a 10-year-old or a vice president.

Quoting a powerful figure telling another powerful figure to go fuck himself is not gratuitous use of profanity. It’s just news.

But if your policy is to not print profanity except in extreme cases, and you judge that something is not extreme, then leave it out entirely, or at worst, take the word out using ellipses or dashes or whatever. Don’t just take out the middle letters. It’s a gutless way to deal with the issue.