Here and There

I can’t believe I ever liked a single thing about this dumb-ass douche:

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.

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?

The other day, I was out walking in my neighborhood after work when I spied a bumper sticker on a sedan. What did it say?

“Hillary for president.”

I’ve seen lots of people claim that referring to Hillary Clinton by only her first name is sexist. We call John McCain “McCain” and Barack Obama “Obama,” right?

Well, there are a few complicating factors. For one thing, if we called Hillary “Clinton,” it would be ambiguous, because we’ve already had one major political leader called “Clinton,” so in most people’s mind, the moniker already belongs to Bill. (In fact, in the newspaper business, our convention is to refer to people by last name only after we’ve given their full names, and the only exception is when we’re referring to two people with the same last name, in which case we use their first name on subsequent reference.)

And, another thing, Hillary is tacitly sanctioning the first-name convention by putting it on her bumper stickers and campaign materials!

I’m all in favor of calling out discrimination when and where it exists, but in this instance, it just seems ridiculous. Even without all the factors I’ve just mentioned, nobody calls it sexist when we in California call Arnold Schwarzenegger by his first name, do they?

- Beth W.

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.

Ran across an item in the news yesterday, a study showing that the number one state in the US where languages go to die is Oklahoma. At first, I thought, Well, wow. If we needed proof that that part of the country was a cultural vacuum, now we have it.

But on second thought, the distinction is a rather dubious one.

Here’s what I mean: In order for a culture (or parts therein) to completely absorb those that would attempt to assimilate with it, it must be powerful. For Oklahoma and Oklahomans to be better at killing off languages other than “Oklahoman English,” they must kick a lot of language ass. Hats off, Okies.

Super-ultra-uber-cool stuff about a primitive form of communication, from The New York Times.