But we do not personify or give gender to toasters, personal computers, nuclear reactors, cars (well, some of us do), or other objects. So let’s not do it to storms or ships, either.
Language Corner
06:50 AM - November 13, 2012
Of storms and ships at sea
Let’s not take them personally
‘See you on the other side’ - Meet Jessica Lum, a terminally ill 25-year-old who chose to spend what little time she had practicing journalism
#Realtalk: This is the best moment to be in journalism - The old stuff isn’t coming back, but that’s okay
Streams of consciousness - Millennials expect a steady diet of quick-hit, social-media-mediated bits and bytes. What does that mean for journalism?
Sticking with the truth - How ‘balanced’ coverage helped sustain the bogus claim that childhood vaccines can cause autism
An ink-stained stretch - Can Aaron Kushner save the Orange County Register—and the newspaper industry?
Josh Barro, the loneliest Republican
What to make of the 28-year-old columnist’s contempt for the GOP—and its would-be reformers
Dowd and Fournier and countless others who have launched similar complaints are asking, “Why aren’t we getting what we were promised?”
Elizabeth Spiers on launching media brands
What do news publications need to do to adapt to digital? Any publication you see doing it really well?
Wolf Blitzer and other journalists should leave God out of natural disasters
CJR's Guide to Online News Startups
Uptown Messenger – Hyperlocal news for a neighborhood in New Orleans
Who Owns What
The Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Questions and exercises for journalism students.
"Language Corner" is an obsolete column. It will not be possible for the writer to work out of the corner.
Here is some text from CJR: "Part of what makes journalism good is accountability; part of what makes it fail is clouded judgment and ill-judged reactions to external pressures. Creating a culture that supports both within a newsroom is not something easily imposed from outside."
I admit that I am so lazy as a reader that I did not even try to focus "both." What could it mean? Apparently it slipped in without consideration.
The goal of the writer of a language column should be to promote language sensitivity. The writer of the quoted matter could easily have made a mistake, but should have worked back over the text to make sure that it was coherent.
"Language Corner," just as "The Journalist's Rule of Thumb for News Coverage," is Stone Dead.
Teaching textual insensitivity is common in schools and colleges. A graduate of one got mixed up in a bad Random House mess. He wrote an essay in The New York Times Magazine in June based on his foreword to the 2012 Modern Library "Absalom, Absalom!" In 1993, Modern Library reset the 1986 Corrected Text without notifying the editor, Noel Polk, and made 20 major errors.
The 2012 "edition" is a botched reissue. John Jeremiah Sullivan, having been carefully nurtured in textual insensitivity, temporized, and then got angry, alluding to the bureaucracy of Random House, and throwing in a few insults.
Programming young people into insensitivity to language failed at the "On Language" column at The NYT because the silly thing collapsed.
"Language Corner," with its notes on usage, trivia, and minutiae passing for language knowledge among journalists, is not good enough. It is a category mistake.
When you are wrong, but you know that you are right, then there is no hope.
claytonburns@gmail.com
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Tue 13 Nov 2012 at 05:05 PM