Here and There

I just thought of something while watching a clip of Bush speaking (I didn’t embed because, really, any old clip will do): His wife was a librarian.

His delivery reminds me a lot of those kids who, when they learn to read aloud, over-annunciate and basically mimc adults. Bush is one of those kids.

Seriously, I bet if we scoured talent-show reels from across the nation, we could pair them up with clips of the president, and the similarities would be eerie.

I wonder at which point in their courtship or marriage Laura taught little Georgie to read.

For me, anyway, and without consulting the dictionary:

• Inchoate
• Automaton
• Circuitous
• Parsimonious
• Perspicacious

Simple question. And I’m afraid I know the answer.

Getting really sick of these right-wing fucks* going around using the diminutive “Democrat Party.”

Now, I don’t necessarily expect the GOP to be educated enough to know the difference (they eschew learning, right?), but this is just fucking stupid and it needs to stop. NOW.

I could go on, but it would be a circular “those idiots” type of argument. I’d do better to step aside and let Rick Hertzberg work his magic. From 2006.

* Because I don’t like linking to sites that I don’t feel deserve my readers’ traffic, I link you instead to a Google News search of stories containing the phrase “Democrat Party.” Enjoy.

None other than the Orange County Register.

Thx: Bill Walsh.

Read this now. The newspaper in its printed form may be on a slow-bleed track to certain death, but the need for clean copy may never die.

Get ready for a fuckload of motherfucking headlines with tons of goddam cuss words in them today, tomorrow, and the coming days. Weeks, perhaps.

That’s all. Back to work.

As a current web-headline copy editor, and former headline writer at a newspaper, I cringe in sympathy at the following:

The story concerns a fundraiser for John McCain in Texas hosted by former gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams, who once infamously said that because rape was inevitable, perhaps we should sit back and enjoy it (paraphrase is mine).

I would’ve added a hyphen between rape and joker, or otherwise avoided that awkward construction.

I wish there was a word for the act of picking up a dictionary, and with the hand that lifts the book, using fingers to attempt to open it to exactly the word you’re about to look up.

For example, I just consulted the dictionary to see whether Englishman is one word. I picked it up with my right hand, and my fingers did their best to approximate opening the book to the E section. Lo and behold, the page I opened began with elephantiasis, and ended in else.

* According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third Edition, Englishman is, in fact, a word.

And my geekometer just shot off the charts.

We beat nytimes.com and Slate.com!

English-as-an-official-language protester misspells official on placard. Too Onion to be true.

Debuting a new feature today, one that I’ll try to keep doing fairly regularly, as it seems my readership is increasing slowly but steadily. I want to save new readers the trouble of wading back through the muck.

Here it is, from July 2007:

People often abbreviate “casual” and “usual,” but I still haven’t figured out to spell their shortened forms.

cazhe?
uzhe?
caszjhe?

Ideas, anyone?

I’d so quit my job and join this effort, if I didn’t have the best job in the world.

It was a coworker, after all, who pointed me to the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL). You’ve got my support, guys. Can we start a sister effort in which we hit menus, wedding programs, and all printed materials? Sign me up, please.

Thx: Dylan

A micro-argument erupted yesterday in my corner of the room at work. A writer who sits in front of me was filing a story, and perhaps it was a verbal thought, but he asked my immediate area, “When you use Google as a verb, is it capitalized?”

I gave it about 8.3 seconds of contemplation, and, just as others were chiming in, said, “No, not as a verb.”

I was drowned out by our managing editor, who said something to the effect of, “Yes, it’s a trademark, so of course you cap it.”

Here’s a brief summary of the conversation that ensued:

Me: “Yes, but when it’s made into a verb, it’s no longer a trademark. It’s become synonymous with search for.”
Man. Ed.: “But when people use it, they’re referring specifically to the search engine on Google.com.”
Me: “I’d guess that that’s what they mean a percentage of the time equal to how many people use Google versus other, lesser search engines.”
Man Ed: “No, if someone mentions Goolging something, you wouldn’t go to Yahoo.com and enter it.”
Me: “You might. But that’s beside the point. The speaker’s intent is for you to go to the internet [an interesting imperative in and of itself], visit a search engine, and search the internet for whatever it is they’re talking about.”
Man. Ed.: “It’s just absurd to think that’s it’s anything other than the trademarked term.”

I’m happy to say that our senior copy editor and the copy chief agreed with me. Wired.com may not be entirely consistent in this (we strive!), but in general, when a source uses google to mean search for, we lowercase it.

Some might (and have) argued that, because AP doesn’t weigh in on this specific example, we should follow similar examples, Xerox being the most noteworthy. But to my mind, this is a perfect example of a case where, because we copy editors are the arbiters of house style, we can do what we decide is best even if it flies in the face of the sacred AP Stylebook. Therefore, in quoted matter, I would lowercase xerox when used to mean make a copy. In prose, I would change to say copy or make a copy.

If google as a verb comes up in the prose of one of our writers, we should similarly replace it with search or search for.