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Copy Editors to the World: Teehee!

So. A brief vocabulary lesson. A dingleberry, for those of you who didn’t grow up on a farm, is–and I quote the OED–“dried faecal matter attached...
November 21, 2008

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So. A brief vocabulary lesson. A dingleberry, for those of you who didn’t grow up on a farm, is–and I quote the OED–“dried faecal matter attached to the hair around the anus,” usually (one hopes) in reference to animals. (Other, less common uses, per the same: “a fool, a stupid person (slang)”; “the female breasts (slang)”; and “a cranberry, Vaccinium erythrocarpum, of the south-eastern U.S.”) The term, save for the cranberry species–and it should probably go without saying–tends to be used pejoratively.

With all that said: below are some of the headlines announcing the ouster of House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, yesterday morning, in favor of the committee’s second-ranking member, Henry Waxman–a move that, as Roll Call has it, “marks a stunning rebuke of the seniority system that Democrats have honored for decades.”

Slate: “Dingell Buried”
Grist: “Dingell, Buried”
NBC Chicago: “Dingell Buried by Waxman”
MSNBC’s First Read: “Dingell gets buried”

Hilarious, guys! You. Are. All. So. Clever!

Now, I’m all for cheesy puns, and everything. But, you know, come on.

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Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.