..jpg)
On this official start of our annual year-end festival of overindulgence, the WORD offers perspectives on turkeys. As anyone in business, academe or who reads Dilbert knows, that’s an impossibly wide opening. Which I (uncharacteristically) decline to open very wide.
Our neighbor up the hill, Allyson, complained the other day about the turkeys cleaning out her bird feeders. I suggested the time-honored turkey repellent: A few cans of cranberry sauce (whole berry works better than the jelly).
• “The best way to thaw a frozen turkey? Blow in its ear.”—Johnny Carson 
[From The New York Times]: “In early September, [Iran’s] Brig. Gen. Muhammad Bagher-Zolghadr, the former deputy chief of the Revolutionary Guards, outlined the ‘soft war’ concept in a speech: ‘In a hard war, the line between you and the enemy is clear, but in a soft war there is nothing so solid. The enemy is everywhere.’ General Zolghadr said that a soft war was fought in large part through the media, and that the West was ‘better equipped’ to fight it than Iran.
“Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss. In the face of potential ruin, journalists have been forced to reach accommodations with themselves: New strictures, new styles, new protocols, new limitations on what is possible are now meekly swallowed. In the frantic scramble for new ‘revenue streams,’ ethical boundaries are more likely to be pushed than is the proverbial envelope. Some of all this has leached out into the product. We all feel it. You do, too.”
“As partisan outlets proliferate, students raised on faux news will enter our classrooms cocooned in their own biases and conditioned to mistake ridicule for engaged contention. By creating an appetite for critical engagement, universities will challenge those insular tendencies. Drawing on their experience in our classrooms, labs, and libraries, and mining the rich resources of the Web, our students will become citizen-journalists. In that role they will sort fact from fabulation and unmask abuses of power and the public trust.”
“The people formerly known as the audience [are] too busy making content to consume much of it.... The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.”
“I think what I do is better than inflicting such assaults on the English language as ‘ROFL’ (Rolling On Floor Laughing) or ‘BBFN’ (Bye Bye For Now) or ‘DMFYLOCIAIM’ (Delete Me From Your List Of Contacts, I’m An Illiterate Moron). Still, language is in a constant state of evolution. Perhaps text speak will seem perfectly normal in 50 years’ time. Perhaps there’ll be a 21st-century edition of Shakespeare’s collected works featuring ‘2B/not 2B,’ and the Oxford English Dictionary will define ‘2thless’ and ‘1derment.’
©Nate Pratt, The Word 2009
• • •
“I think a certain commitment to the public good has vanished in the race for circulation. I think that is accentuated when you get newspapers taken over, as you have across America, by people who either borrow extensively to buy the paper, or never had any interest in
.
Cookie Dough:
Invasive Surgery:
.
“Back when I got into journalism, the idea that a fistfight in a newsroom would turn into a news story was unthinkable. The guys in the sports department at the New York Daily News, they had so many, you wouldn’t even look up.”
“America lacks a language dictator like the Académie Française . . . The closest thing here might be the copydesk of the New York Times. . . . As a handy form of address, Ms. found a foothold in the 1952 guidelines of the National Office Management Association; they suggested using it to avoid any confusion over a woman’s marital state. Twenty years later, when Ms. was born, the editors explained, ‘Ms. is being adopted as a standard form of address by women who want to be recognized as individuals, rather than by their relationship with a man.’ . . .
