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Not Your Father’s Cliché
Are you weary of headlines or ledes that include some variation of “Once an X, always an X,” “My big fat X,” or “To X or not to X?”
If so, you’re being snowed under by snowclones — a category of fill-in-the-blank cliché identified by linguists. Coined by Glen Whitman in 2004, the term “snowclone” was inspired by the frequently repeated yet myth-based formula, “If Eskimos have N words for snow, then X have Y words for Z.” A typical snowclone is “not your father’s X,” and a quick LexisNexis search shows journalists have filled in this blank with, among other things, “governor general,” “lackey,” “Operational Data Store,” “cup of sake,” “retirement home,” “moon buggy,” and “SWAT team.”
Snowclone collecting is a popular sport on the Web in places like Language Log, where Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist at the University of California-Santa Cruz, pithily defines snowclones as “some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists.”
But laziness isn’t the whole story, says Nathan Bierma, the Chicago Tribune’s “On Language” columnist. Deadlines may play a role, too. “Clichés and snowclones are so frequent in part because they’re the first things that pop into your mind when you want to articulate something. Sometimes, especially for newspaper and broadcast media on urgent deadlines, that first thing that comes to your mind is all you have time for.”
Then again, a thoughtfully used snowclone isn’t necessarily a groaner. Arnold Zwicky, a Stanford University linguist, says snowclones and similar wordplay are examples of “poetic, rather than literal and pedestrian, language, so they add some interest and verve to writing and speech.” Bierma mentioned a popular snowclone — “X is the new Y” — which in his view “is a tidy and catchy way of conveying an increase, or change in nature, or change in function — or all three — of X. Overuse of that formula certainly tries our patience, but it’s overused because it’s useful — or once was.”
— Mark Peters
Sound Bite
‘All that chatter, all that blogging — it’s people writing about what other people have reported. We can wrap our hands around the throat of the beast, find out what happened, and give that to readers. It’s fun. It’s a kick-ass way to make a living. We have found a way for all the troublemakers at the back of the school bus to make a living. You want to sit in your room and ruminate? Not on my nickel.’
— Michael Lacey, the executive editor of Village Voice Media, who wants the staff of New York’s Village Voice to do more reporting and less punditry or else “they’ll have to find employment elsewhere.”
A Hearing Aid for the Supremes
To cover the U.S. Supreme Court is to step back in time. Government lawyers wear formal morning coats when they argue cases, quill pens sit on the counsel tables, and members of the press corps cover proceedings with pen and paper, unable to rely on the technology to which they’ve become accustomed. No tape recorders, televised proceedings, or timely transcripts.
The Court is famously resistant to change, a stance that contributes to its charm and mystique, as well as to the frustration of the journalists who cover it. In a recent letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, the press corps highlighted the unfortunate consequences of the Court’s retrograde media policies.
“Although many of us compare notes with one another after hearings, the fast pace of arguments inevitably means inaccuracies, notwithstanding our combined efforts,” wrote Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr in a letter signed by most of the Court’s regular reporters, including those from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, NBC, ABC, and NPR.
“In addition,” Stohr wrote, “we often can include only a short snippet from a question or comment, rather than a longer quote that would give more context. Our readers, listeners and viewers … get at best an imperfect picture of what transpired.”
It’s true. The justices are misquoted more often than they might think. Consider these inaccurate reproductions of a statement Justice David Souter made about polluters during a recent argument on the Clean Water Act, all three of which appeared in the press:
■ “All people have to do is go far enough up the tributary and dump anything they want and it would be OK. I don’t think Congress intended that at all.”
■ All a polluter needs to do is “get far enough upstream, and then Congress couldn’t do anything about it.”
■ “All the evil polluters have to do is get far enough upstream to dump and Congress can’t do anything.”
Now, the Court’s press corps is lobbying Roberts for quick transcripts.
Some lawmakers would like to take it a step further, mandating TV cameras and microphones in the courtroom — a proposal that hasn’t sat well with the justices.
Another possibility? The Court could release same-day audio feeds, a step it has taken on rare occasions.
Progress has come slowly to the Court that time forgot. It released the audio for three cases this term, which is three more than in the term before.
— Brent Kendall
Close to the Bone
In 2003, The Seattle Times hired a contract writer, the former Wall Street Journal reporter Bill Richards, to cover its dispute over the joint operating agreement with its rival, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Under the JOA, the family-owned Times handles advertising, marketing, production, and distribution for both papers, while the newsrooms remain separate. In April 2003, the Times told the Hearst-owned P-I that because of three consecutive years of losses it wanted to terminate the JOA. Hearst sued to block the move. Richards wrote sixty-seven articles about the dispute, and in 2004 the Times nominated his coverage for a Pulitzer. At the end of 2005, as the papers headed toward arbitration, Richards was notified that his contract would not be renewed. Instead, the Times assigned the job to a staff writer. Richards spoke to Rachel Templeton in May.
Both papers have been accused of trying to run the other out of business. What’s going on?
The Times has made no secret of its desire to get rid of the opposition. The interesting thing here is that during the three years that this has been going on, the newspaper business has changed significantly. The online presence is emerging as the newspaper of the future. Under the JOA, if Hearst lost and shut down the P-I, it could continue to publish the P-I online. So you could conceivably have at the end of this arbitration two news sources, but not two newspapers.
Who edited you?
The Times established a kind of wall above the managing editor where the senior editors and company officials did not see my copy. The deal was the managing editor would edit the copy, but not make substantive changes without discussing it with me. If we disagreed we would talk about that. If we couldn’t work it out, we had a provision where we could go to The Poynter Institute and Jim Naughton, at the time the head of Poynter, would be an arbitrator. [Richards says no dispute reached the Naughton level.]
Any conflicts?
I spent a fair amount of time going through the court data and analyzing what the Times was doing. The dispute opened up a window into the Times, and I’m not sure that they really liked someone poking through their laundry basket. Some of the things I found contradicted some of the things they were saying. So they were in the awkward position of basically running stories that may have contradicted their own positions. But to their credit there was no story that I wanted to do, or did, that they did not run.
Why wasn’t your contract renewed?
I think that [managing editor] David Boardman felt I wanted to push into places they weren’t interested in having me go. They are now going into a union negotiation and this certainly would have overlapped with the JOA stories. I don’t think they wanted me poking around in that particular pile.
Editors’ Note: Boardman says that Richards’s contract was not renewed because it had served its purpose, namely to establish “a sense with the public that we were not afraid to cover ourselves aggressively.”
Language Corner: Bureaucratic Referral
A database search confirms the impression that the unattractive use of “reference” as a verb has grown exponentially in recent years.
The verb is solidly established in the phrase “cross reference,” and it has some specialized applications of its own (a textbook that is well referenced, for instance). But mostly it’s legal and business jargon — you know, the above-referenced quadruple ax murder — and should be shunned by English-speakers. It was painful to read:
■ that a governor wrote his legislators “a letter referencing the Rolling Stones”
■ that a speaker “referenced the old parable: pride goes before the fall.”
■ about “communal tables referencing a monastery or a refectory.”
“Reference” probably showed up in those passages for two reasons, neither happy. First, its very sloppiness makes it handy: we don’t have to search for anything that really fits because “reference” fits all. Second, like others of its tin-eared ilk, “reference” apparently seems fashionable; somehow, bureaucratese invites imitation.
But in fact “reference” is a poor substitute for the many words and phrases that do fit. The governor invoked; the speaker quoted; those tables evoked. Cite, suggest, speak of, call to mind, allude, mention — all put “reference” to shame. Not to mention little old “refer.”
— Evan Jenkins
A lot more about writing is in Language Corner at CJR’s Web site, www.cjr.org, under “Journalism Tools.”
Hard Numbers
260: Number of stores from which Canada’s largest bookstore chain, Indigo, pulled the June issue of Harper’s, claiming an article by Art Spiegelman that rated the offensiveness of twelve cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammed could foment protests like those that occurred after the cartoons were first published by a Danish newspaper.
11: Percent of the magazine’s retail distribution in Canada this represents.
77: Minimum number of TV stations that aired Video News Releases, or VNRs, without disclosing their corporate or government source between June 2005 and March 2006.
$32,500: Maximum fine, per violation, that could be levied by the FCC, which is investigating the stations.
0: Number of times, to date, the commission has fined TV stations for hiding the provenance of VNRs.
5, 56, 10: Number by which the death toll of journalists in Iraq (73 as of June) surpasses those of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam respectively.
60: Percent Iraq coverage by the three major TV networks has decreased since 2003.
3: Consecutive years in which the Office of the Vice President has refused to disclose information on its classification and declassification activity.
3: Years since President Bush signed an executive order stating that every government agency that handles classified information must report its statistics annually.
Sources: Globe and Mail; Center for Media and Democracy; CPJ; L.A. Times; Federation of American Scientists; CJR research
To read the articles in the July/August 2006 issue, click here.
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