Hoo, Boy!

“Either I’ve been missing something or nothing has been going on.”

—Karen Elizabeth Gordon, author of comic handbooks on language, from “The New Well-tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed,” 1993.

• Editorial Comment: One way to stay sane in the world today.



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The HOT May Issue of Senior News Hits Newsstands Today

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Basic Truths

“In Green Bay, Wisconsin, the US president raged that journalists are ‘fakers,’ exulted in crowd chants of ‘CNN sucks!’ and lavished praise on Sarah Sanders, his press secretary caught by Mueller lying to the media.

“In Washington, [Ron] Chernow, biographer of founding father Alexander Hamilton and former president Ulysses S Grant, delivered an eloquent and erudite defence of the freedom of the press . . . .

“‘We now have to fight hard for basic truths that we once took for granted,’ said Chernow.” 

—David Smith, correspondent, “Trump is just one chapter of bad fiction in America's history, White House press dinner told,” The Guardian, April 28, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: I’m tired of this chapter. Turn the page.

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Holy Trinity Church, Trinidad, CA

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

The Oracle

 

“Warren Buffett, the man behind a print-media empire that includes the Buffalo News and Omaha World-Herald, doesn’t think most newspapers can be saved.

“The decline of advertising gradually turned the newspaper industry ‘from monopoly to franchise to competitive,’ [he] said. And now most newspapers are ‘toast.’

“Readers sought out newspapers when they were packed with ads about bargains, jobs and apartments, Buffett said. But Craigslist and other sites have taken over that role.

“‘It upsets the people in the newsroom to talk that way, but the ads were the most important editorial content from the standpoint of the reader,’ Buffett said.” 

—Catherine Chiglinsky and Gerry Smith, “Warren Buffett Sees Most Newspapers as ‘Toast’ After Ad Decline,” April 23, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: I hate toast.

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Hollyhock

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Good Name

 “On a U.S. lecture tour Winston Churchill in Cleveland once paid this compliment to that city’s oldest and richest newspaper: ‘I think,’ said he, ‘that by all odds the Plain Dealer has the best newspaper name of any in the world.’ He referred, of course, to the Plain Dealer’s name literally, not to its rating among world newspapers.”

—TIME magazine, 1942. Link.

 

• Editorial Comment: Well, yes, of course. Let’s not go overboard.

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Day’s End

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

In the Cloud

“Caro types the second draft triple-spaced, to leave room for further revision, using the same brand of pencil Newsday stocked in his day.

 

“He also makes copies. ‘I got enough carbon paper for the rest of my life,’ he says.

“The duplicates go home with him each evening, to be placed above the refrigerator, his version of the Cloud.”

—Karl Vick, reporter, “Biographer Robert Caro Pauses as He Prepares His Final Lyndon B. Johnson Volume,” TIME, April 4, 2019.

 

• Editorial Comment: When there’s a cloud above my fridge, it means the meat loaf’s gone bad.

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Orcas

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Small-Town Newspaperman

University of Maryland journalism Professor Sandra Banisky writes: 

“The publisher of my hometown paper, The Waterbury (Connecticut) Republican-American (winner of the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service 1939, still on its masthead), died over the weekend. He was 87 and at his desk until last month. This from his obit:

“His responses to readers, too, were legendary in both their manners and bluntness. ‘I am sorry to hear you are unhappy with our newspaper,’ Pape wrote to a reader who complained about too much negative news in 2017. ‘If the country is going to hell in a hand basket, I feel it is important that our readers know it.’” 

—From obituary by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, reporter, “William J. Pape II, editor and former publisher of the Republican-American, dies,” The Republican-American, April 20, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: That’s a public service.

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Pie Doodle

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Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

For Earth Day

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” 

—John Muir (1838-1914), “the Father of Our National Parks,” naturalist and author, “Our National Parks,” 1901.

• Editorial Comment: Get outside. Hug your mother.

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Big Trees

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Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Faint Praise

“Here is the seventh collection of essays by John McPhee, his 33rd book and perhaps his eleventy-billionth word of published prose. This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask the 87-year-old as a one-trick pony.

“In ‘The Patch,’ he again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them. 

“He’s been working this angle since the 1950s; it’s a good thing we’re finally onto him now.”

—Craig Taylor, book reviewer, “In These New Essays, John McPhee Finds Poetry in the Material at Hand,” New York Times Book Review, Dec. 17, 2018.

• Editorial Comment: Someday, when I write a book, that’s how I want the NYT to start my review.

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Hecklers

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

A Quiet Read

“In my chair, newspaper in hand, I rest unmolested. On my phone or my laptop, I am beckoned incessantly to click on one link or another or still another, boxes of irrelevant video appear and disappear, audio screeches out unbidden, ads scurry across the screen obstructing the paragraphs I’m trying to read. Mysterious algorithms known only to the gremlins of Silicon Valley push me toward stories that the gremlins reckon must be of related interest . . . My newspaper could never be so noisy or presumptuous. It holds still.” 

—Andrew Ferguson, staff writer, “There’s No Substitute for Print,” The Atlantic, April 10, 2019.

  

• Editorial Comment: “Holds still”? I thought the news never sleeps.

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Sluggish

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Hug an Editor

“I THINK, THEREFORE I EDIT.” 

—A popular pencil embosser at an editors conference, in Mary Norris, “Dropped Hyphens, Split Infinitives and Other Thrilling Moments at the 2019 American Copy Editors Society Conference,” The New Yorker, April 2, 2019.

• Editorial Comment: Stay sharp today.

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Good. Evening.

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard