GON OUT. BACKSON. BISY.*

I wanted to finish at least one post before the month was over, but it hasn't quite happened. For the best of reasons, though: My daughter had twins this month, and that exciting event (along with the usual November distractions) has sucked up all my time and energy. I've taken to Twitter for the duration, since 140 characters is about the length of my average thought nowadays: @Jan__Freeman, if you're Twitter-tolerant. If not, I plan to be back here very soon. Hope you will be too!

*From "The House at Pooh Corner," because it seemed appropriate ...

Making stuff up (headline department)

I generally don't click on "partner content" no matter how reputable the website I'm on, but I couldn't resist a link at boston.com (site of my longtime employer, the Boston Globe). I really wanted to know which way I was meant to read the headline on a video link:

Doctor Honored at Hospital After Passing Away During Surgery 

Was the doctor performing surgery (which would make the story almost weird enough for "Grey's Anatomy") or undergoing surgery (not so much)? The subhed didn't do much to enlighten readers: "Young doctor honored with a plaque after passing away during surgery."

So I watched the video, an interview with the plaque-honored man's daughter first aired by WNBC-TV in New York. And which reading was correct? Well, neither, it turned out. The subject of the hed, the late Murray Yanowitz, was in fact: 

--not a doctor but an auditor who worked for Long Island College Hospital
--not "young" but 52 years old when he died (in 1979!)
--neither performing nor undergoing surgery when he died (he was seeing his cardiologist) 

It is true that he was "honored" with a plaque at the hospital, which his daughter hopes to reclaim now that the building is being demolished. (Her quest for the now-missing plaque is the excuse for the story; "Daughter Seeks Dad's Plaque at Doomed Hospital" is the kind of hed it needs.)

It's not unusual for a hed to be slightly (or more) off kilter -- Fred Vultee is on the case, night and day, at Headsup: The Blog -- but what could account for this degree of misreading? Is it an outsourcing case, with copy editing and headline writing done in a faraway country by editors with an insufficient grasp of American (medical) English? Whatever the excuse, it's not a performance to inspire confidence in the "curating" allegedly going on at supposedly respectable news sites like the Globe's.

Taboo avoidance by typo

Everyone has seen at least one dirty-joke typo, if only the frequent misspelling of public as pubic ("in the pubic interest," "pubic relations," et al.). But I don't think I'd ever heard of a typo that accidentally cleaned up language meant to be rude. That is, until my daughter spotted one in the Wall Street Journal last week, when she picked up the print edition and started reading a report on the return of the grunge-style sweater. It began:

KURT COBAIN HADN'T been famous long before the world became aware of his penchant for fuzzy, defiantly unpolished sweaters of the thrift-shop variety. ... On the cover of Rolling Stone's "New Faces of Rock" issue, he wore his beloved green cardigan over a DIY T-shirt that brattily declared "corporate magazines still stuck."

"Wait a minute," said my daughter. "That has to be 'corporate magazines still suck,' right?" Right, of course, and the online version of the story now quotes Cobain correctly. (The bowdlerized version is still on view at a different WSJ site.)

I assume this is the author's mistake, both because the preceding "still" might prompt the erroneous "stuck," and because an editor wouldn't change "suck" to "stuck" without a query. But it's interesting that an editor would accept the misquoted version as an example of countercultural protest. Maybe, at the WSJ, "corporate magazines still stuck" qualifies as a bratty sentiment. 

Haplologizing the peeververein

Catching up with the well-deserved praise for John McIntyre posted at Barrie England's Caxton blog, I noticed a tiny and (to me) very interesting slip. England wrote:

The peeverein should read [McIntyre's post], but of course they won’t. I recommend it in its entirety (it isn’t long), but here are his trenchant comments on some of the tired old grumbles.

Now, peeververein, with four syllables, is John's own coinage, as far as I know; it's a bastard German word meaning "band of peevers" or "society of peevers." I admired it when it debuted, but I also wondered if it wasn't a good candidate for haplology, the excision of one of those nearly identical syllables. Why not just make it peeverein? And that's what Barrie England has done.

It's true that it's not a perfect haplology if you're approximating a German verein, pronouncing the ver more or less like "fair." (At least that's my distant memory.) But if we can haplologize odoriferous to odiferous (as many do), surely we could handle peeverein for peeververein? I eagerly await the response of the esteemed neologist himself ...