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TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2008 Numb Nuts: Newspapers Are Stupid I can't imagine what George Carlin is thinking today as he laughs down at us from heaven or up at us from heck. Oh, yeah, I used heck so as not to offend the readers of this Web site, especially the children who might stumble upon this post on their way to Romenesko. I guess old Carlin didn't know that nuts was one of those words you can't say on television or put in a newspaper. Gosh (euphemism for God), if you put nuts in the paper, people, especially young people, might stop reading it. I hope by now you get my drift. I agree wholeheartedly with Howard Kurtz that newspapers should have quoted Jesse Jackson in full when he whispered this about Barack Obama on a Fox open microphone: "See Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based. I wanna cut his nuts off. Barack, he's been talking down to black people."
When the controversy broke, I wondered, like most other folks, what Jackson said that was so offensive it could not be printed in the newspaper. In the early reports, I read phrases such as "crude remark" about doing something to Obama, or emasculate, and then finally castrate. Wow, I thought, castrate. I cannot speak for other men, but, to me, castrate is one of the worst words in the English language. It conjures everything from old cruel Italian efforts to preserve angelic voices in choir boys, to suggested punishments for child abusers, to the desires of scorned women like Lorena Bobbitt, to, most horrific, the punishment imposed by some slaveholders against uppity or rebellious slaves. It is in that context that Jackson's remarks are most remarkable: that he would not say that he'd like to knock down that kid a peg or two, or slap that arrogant grin off his face, or even kick his skinny ass to kingdom come. Instead, Jackson chose to appropriate the slaveholder's horrific threat against another black man. In offensive parlance I've learned from my African-American colleagues, it was as if Jackson were a plantation owner accusing Obama of being a "house nigger," a privileged black man who spoke down to other black people. But such argument is impossible UNLESS WE KNOW EXACTLY WHAT JACKSON SAID. I'll take my argument one step forward: By veiling Jackson's actual words, the news media may have created the impression that he said something worse. To say that you'd like to cut someone's nuts off is, among other things, what language experts call a dysphemism, a word or phrase that is harsher than your true meaning and intent. If I'm wrong about that, let's make sure we keep Jackson away from the cutlery. Dysphemisms often convey a sense that the speaker is exaggerating for effect. Castrate is meant to serve as a euphemism for nut cutting, the way the most proper prefer urinate to piss. As in: "That Jesse Jackson must have been really urinated off at Barack Obama to say such a thing." Alas, castrate contains none of the mitigating slang outrageousness of nuts, which means the news media managed to turn a euphemism into a dysphemism, a colossal act of linguistic incompetence. Shame. Posted at 6:07:01 PM E-mail this item | Add/View Feedback (1) | QuickLink this item: A146822
THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2008 Fragging Without Shame I sit at this moment in my doctor's office staring at my cholesterol numbers, and they are not good. Too much pizza and Pepsi, I guess. I look up and notice two pieces of office art: a scale model of the human heart and the head of a giant alligator. The gator looks like he is about to eat the heart. It is not a comforting image for a guy whose cholesterol numbers are 70 points higher than his I.Q. I avert my eyes, which now catch the cover of a recent issue of Time magazine. The headline reads: Why the Pope Loves America U.S. Catholics May Confound Him, but America Doesn't. On the Eve of His Papal Visit, a Look at How This Country Has Shaped Benedict XVI. It occurs to me that the first and last of those sentences are fragments, which means that only the middle one can stand independently as a complete thought: "U.S. Catholics may confound him, but America doesn't." Lots of meaning is packed into one complete sentence and two intentional fragments. The key word is intentional. A college student once told me she liked to use fragments in her writing, but that her composition teacher corrected her every time. "Would you let me use fragments?" she asked. I told her I'd feel better about giving her permission if I knew that she understood the difference between an intentional and unintentional fragment, that is, between a strategy and a mistake. A useful insight about language reveals that some words -- ones that would make a sentence complete -- are understood by the reader or listener, even if those words are missing from the text. If I should yell "Go to hell!" the subject is understood to be "you." But what if I said or wrote, "When hell freezes over!"? That clause has a subject and a verb, but cannot stand alone as a sentence. Yet its clarity and context keep it from being a mistake. The reader provides what is missing from information supplied earlier. "When hell freezes over!" can mean "I'll move to Florida when hell freezes over," or "I'll root for the Red Sox when hell freezes over." So. The intentional fragment. Not a mistake. No siree. More than that: The intentional fragment can carry several important strategic uses in a piece of writing.
The Shotgun Blast
A fragment can explode upon the reader's sensibility to bring a shocking truth into sharp relief. Consider this passage from Mark Haddon's novel "A Spot of Bother": He had removed his trousers and was putting on the bottom half of the suit when he noticed a small oval of puffed flesh on his hip, darker than the surrounding skin and flaking slightly. His stomach rose and he was forced to swallow a small amount of vomit which appeared at the back of his mouth.
Cancer.
That fragment -- serving as word, sentence, and paragraph -- hits the reader like a shotgun blast.
The Rest Period
The fragment can offer relief, usually in the form of a resolution to a problem. Used as a single paragraph, the fragment offers a pause, especially when it follows a long sentence. Here Haddon describes a man waking from a nightmare: He fixed his eyes on the tasseled lampshade above his head and waited for his heart to slow down, like a man pulled from a burning building, still not quite able to believe that he is safe.
Six o'clock.
He slid out of bed and went downstairs ...
The Inventory A series of short fragments helps the writer build a body of evidence for the reader, especially in a form that reads less like a list and more like details from a narrative. Consider this paragraph from an essay by Wright Thompson on the rise and fall of baseball slugger Mark McGwire: Only ghosts remain at McGwire's boyhood home in Claremont, California. Bits and pieces of a former life, things left behind. The pink and white chairs in the living room. The white wraparound couch. The blue wallpaper upstairs.
The IntensifierMy friend Jennifer 8. Lee, a former member of Poynter's National Advisory Board, uses few fragments in her entertaining book, "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles." When she does reach for one, it always intensifies the effect she is trying to achieve. In this passage, she describes the search for a certain Chinese restaurant in Omaha, Neb.: I looked up the number online and dialed. A woman picked up.
I started out by introducing myself in Mandarin Chinese.
I received the telephone equivalent of a blank stare.
I switched to basic Cantonese.
More blankness.
I tried English.
The woman cut me off. "We're Korean," she said in a thick accent. Then she hung up.
Notice how that single fragment, "More blankness," helps Lee build the tension toward that delicious punch line. Turn to the back cover and you'll discover that those trying to sell the book understand the intensifying power of the intentional fragment: One woman.
One great mystery.
One consuming obsession.
Forty thousand restaurants.
Striving for Informality
You are unlikely to find many fragments in works of philosophy. That is because the fragment almost always expresses a degree of informality, except, perhaps, in works of poetry or oratory. But even in the most serious works of literature, the fragment is an irreplaceable building block of dialogue. "Why not?" "Because." "Because of the sex?" "Not just that." "Then what?" "Because of your mother." I just made that up, but something tells me I've read a dozen scenes like it in novels or screenplays.
The Objective CorrelativeT.S. Eliot argued that the poet is always in search of the object that correlated to a feeling or emotion the poet wants to express, hence the literary jargon: objective correlative. Watch how Jacqui Banaszynski uses the fragment to fulfill this purpose in an article she once wrote about Turkish refugees: Toothpaste. And toothbrushes. Ten of them. One for himself, his wife and each of their eight children. Is that so much to ask? The man who calls himself Ali Ahmet wants to know.
"They are trivial things, but they are important," Ahmet says. "When I was in my home, I cleaned my teeth, and my children cleaned, at least three times a day. Since one month, since I left my home, we have not cleaned. And please, tell the world we have not enough soap."
A fragment is a rare way to begin a newspaper story, but in this case the power of that first word toothpaste serves as the physical manifestation of a man's search for dignity for his family. Posted at 6:44:40 PM E-mail this item | Add/View Feedback (2) | QuickLink this item: A146573
WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2008 Good Semicolons Make Good Neighbors My wife Karen worked with cancer patients for many years and taught me that an essential part of recovery is a good sense of humor. So when our great pastor, Father Robert Gibbons, announced to the congregation that he'd need surgery for colon cancer, I rushed up to him after Mass with this happy thought: "Father, by the time they're finished with you, you may be the only man in American who knows how to use a semicolon." The joke had the desired effect on the brainy cleric: It made him laugh. Come to think of it, the semicolon does look a little like a colon with a polyp. In truth, it is probably used more often these days in winking emoticons ;-) than as an alternative to the period or the comma. Maybe because it looks like a period sitting atop a comma, it sends off an aura of "neither here nor there," threatening me with its indifference. I assure you that I'm not a punctuation iconoclast; I know the correct uses of the semicolon. I just don't like the way it looks on the page, like an ink smudge on a new white carpet. Whenever I'm having unsettled thoughts about punctuation, I turn to Tom Wolfe. It was in the 1960s, after all, when Wolfe and his buddies began to bust the boundaries of conventional journalism. Among those innovations was a tendency to use punctuation like hot spice on a Cajun stew. A little this! ... A little that!*! ... Bada boom!!! So, on a whim, I pulled out a copy of Wolfe's 1998 novel, "A Man in Full," and thumbed through it until my eye caught this passage on page 262: Outside, Conrad threw the newspaper away in a receptacle on the corner. He now had two twenty-dollar bills, a five, a one, two quarters, a dime, and a nickel. He started walking again. Over there -- a telephone. He deposited a quarter. Nothing; dead; it was out of order; he couldn't get the quarter back; he jiggled the lever; he pounded the machine with the heel of his hand. A panic rose up in him, and now his extremities seemed to shrink and grow cold. He walked all the way back to the first telephone he had found. His heart was beating much too fast. Gingerly he deposited his last quarter -- and placed another collect call to Jill -- and told her the whole sad story.
I love this paragraph for many reasons, but especially for the ambitious varieties of punctuation, including 10 periods, eight commas, five semicolons, and three dashes. I am especially intrigued by the unusual use of the semicolon in that central sentence: "Nothing; dead; it was out of order; he couldn't get the quarter back; he jiggled the lever; he pounded the machine with the heel of his hand." I must admit that I would have been tempted to replace each semicolon with a period. In its current form, the sentence seems unparallel and out of joint. But, then, isn't that the point of the sentence? In a panic, a man -- in the days before the cell phone -- needs coins and a working pay phone to make an important human connection. By means of those semicolons, Wolfe describes a frantic series of actions that proceed in chronological order and together form a single sentence, a complete thought. Abandoning Wolfe, I went from author to author looking for semicolons and was surprised to see the radically different preferences of writers, scholars, and critics. A collection of essays by 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt produced very few among hundreds of pages, while cultural critic Greil Marcus relies upon them again and again, especially when he is trying to divide/connect two short important points: "Innocence is the colorless stain on the national tapestry," he writes in "The Shape of Things to Come." "It violates the landscape; the only way to kill it is to cut it out." Or "Alone, Madison plays a third video that has turned up. Like the first two, it opens in black and white; then in color it shows him kneeling on his bedroom floor." Or "In his cell Madison has a vision of a house on stilts set in sand, burning; then the smoke and fire are sucked back into the house with a snap." What strikes me about these uses of the semicolon is their arbitrariness, as if the semicolon were a mark of choice rather than rule. Let me demonstrate the array of choices inspired by this Marcus sentence: "The Swede is the good son; Jerry is the bad son." But why not: "The Swede is the good son. Jerry is the bad son." Or: "The Swede is the good son, but Jerry is the bad son." Or: "The Swede is the good son, Jerry the bad son." Or with some subordination: "While the Swede is the good son, Jerry is the bad son." So if none of those choices is grammatically incorrect, then what impulse governs the writer? It sounds to me as if the writer is left with a musical decision. To the ear of Marcus, the semicolon without conjunction creates a balance achieved by simultaneous connection and separation. What kind of object connects and separates at the same time? I suppose there are a number of correct answers, including the Wonder Bra; but I'm thinking more of the swinging gate. That's how I see the semicolon in my own writing, as a gate that stands between two thoughts, a barrier that forces separation but invites you to pass through to the other side. So when would I use the semicolon in my own writing? My choices are governed more by sight than sound, especially on those occasions when the flow of the sentence threatens to overflow the banks established by weaker forms of punctuation. Consider this autobiographical sentence: Growing up a baseball fan in New York in the 1950s was to be engaged in a endless debate with neighbors on who was baseball's greatest center fielder: Duke Snider of the Dodgers, who was a sturdy defender and one of the most reliable sluggers in the league; or Willie Mays of the Giants, one of baseball's first great black superstars, a man who on any given day could astonish you with his bat or his glove; or my idol, Mickey Mantle, the Yankee heir to the crown of Joe DiMaggio, who, when he was healthy, could run faster and hit the ball farther than anyone who ever played the game.
If I used only commas in that rambling and energetic sentence, there would be 10 of them, too many to help the reader keep track of its parts. When I substitute semi-colons, the parts became clear. You can see them with your eye: A topic clause, followed by one part Duke, one part Willie, one part the Mick. So there remains a place for the semicolon even at a time, according to English professor Jennifer DeVere Brody, when the misunderstood mark "suffers nightmares from its precarious position" between the period and the comma. Perhaps it will be saved by the likes of author Maurya Simon, who has her own peculiar dreams about punctuation: The semicolon is Like a sperm forever frozen in its yearning towards an ovum, like a tadpole swimming upstream to rouse the moon's dropped coin, like an ooze of oil spilt from an inky bubble, the semicolon signifies both motion and stillness, an undulant pause, a moment's stalled momentum. Exactly, Ms. Simon, like an inkblot on a white carpet; and I notice that you did not use a single semicolon in this passage! Posted at 10:31:12 AM E-mail this item | Add/View Feedback (10) | QuickLink this item: A146360
WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2008 How I Wrote 'Father Tim' -- and Why I hope you get a chance to read my essay "Father Tim: Irish Catholicism and American Journalism." Unlike most of my work for this Web site, this essay is not about writing, reporting, editing or language. Instead, it is a reflection upon religion and culture, as expressed in the passing of an important figure in politics and journalism. The responses to the essay -- online and in private -- have been most encouraging. I tell you that because when I began to write "Father Tim" I was not sure what I wanted to say. The word essay comes from a French word meaning "to try or attempt." In other words, I often revert to the essay when I am trying to figure out something that is happening to me or to the world. I don't wait until an idea arrives fully formed. Instead, I sit down, get my hands moving, and see where they lead me. One question I often get about "Writing Tools" goes like this: "Before you sit down to write, do you think about which tools you are going to use?" The best answer is "No." I turn to a tool when I need it. I use the tools, they don't use me. What happens more often is that when I reflect upon a finished piece of my own writing, I recognize the use of strategies I don't recall putting into action. So here are some of the things I learned about my writing from working on "Father Tim." 1. Good writing ideas are often born out of frustration. I am a skeptic, not a cynic, so I imagine that most of the wonderful things said about Russert have a basis in truth. But even the Catholic Church appoints a "devil's advocate" to prosecute claims of sainthood. It occurred to me that there was greater complexity about the man than was apparent in the coverage. 2. Please speak ill of the dead. Writers are often called upon to deliver eulogies for friends and family members, and I am no exception. I've learned in the process the importance of violating common advice that one should not speak ill of the dead. I've found that when I speak honestly of the generally acknowledged flaws of a "loved one," it grants me the authority and credibility to offer genuine praise. I'm not kidding about this. I said about my late father-in-law: "When it came to fatherhood, he was more meat cleaver than Ward Cleaver." That honest humor cleared the air and gave me the chance to describe his hidden strengths. There's something important that we should know about Russert that we don't know because of the loving inhibitions of his friends and colleagues. 3. Build a scaffold. Tear it down. This trick I learned from writing coach Donald Murray. To build an argument, you may have to erect a structure that you then disassemble. In the case of "Father Tim," my earliest drafts contained much more about my personal experiences growing up in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood and going to an Irish-Catholic school. Because I am not Irish, I wanted to establish my "street credibility" as someone who understand the culture in which Russert lived and died. But in the end, those passages seemed too self-referential. I needed them to get to Russert, but when I found what I wanted to say, it was easy to take it down. 4. Conceptual scoops are cool. News scoops are still cool, but in an age of so much fragmented information, conceptual scoops are cooler. In short, a conceptual scoop is a new way of looking at an event or a topic that lends greater insight along with a language to describe it. Think soccer mom. Or NASCAR dad. Think post-partisan president. The most interesting idea, for me, in "Father Tim" was the idea that his Irish Catholic upbringing had shaped him to believe that accountability was a crucial virtue. I could even argue that Russert had one trick as a journalist: Researching the words and the records of public figures and holding them accountable for what they said and did. 5. Zag when they zig. This is old Philly Inquirer wisdom. When all the feelings, all the ideas, all the conversation, all the reporting is headed in one direction, look another way. If you live in Florida long enough and watch enough sunsets on the Gulf of Mexico, you learn an important trick. When the sun sets and all the tourists get up to leave, stop and look to the east behind you. If you are lucky, great clusters of cumulus clouds will reflect light from the sun below the horizon, often setting off explosions of color. When the tourists zig, I zag. Posted at 11:34:24 AM E-mail this item | Add/View Feedback (4) | QuickLink this item: A146216
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