Neil deMause: The Website

Dunno if the copyediting staff at the New York Times is all suffering from fruitcake hangovers or what, but today was not their brightest hour. First off, a headline on the front of the B section teasing a sports story about a stunt cyclist who’s found YouTube fame reads “Peddle Jumper.” Which would be a fine enough pun on “puddle jumper,” except that spelled that way I kept wondering what he was selling.

Then, columnist Clyde Haberman had this to say about the decade just ending:

But first, let us briefly look back on the ’00s, a decade that in one respect ends exactly as it began: without a consensus on what we should call it. Plenty of names have been suggested over the years. The Oughts, the Naughts, the Naughties, the Zips, the Preteens, the Ohs and the Oh-Ohs are among the more familiar.

Some more familiar than others, certainly. While “ought” is an acceptable variant spelling of “aught,” the latter is used far more frequently than the former. Haberman ought to be more careful.

From an article today on a Wall Street Journal blog reporting on a New York Times story on how the rushed condo developments in Williamsburg, Brooklyn are already starting to fall apart:

The article points out that condo owners have a three-year statue of limitations for suing the developer or contractors for negligence.

Unfortunately, the statue was built with faulty concrete.

And just to prove I’ll bite the hand that feeds me, City Limits reports on a troubled building in Bushwick:

Unremarkable from the outside, a passer-by would have no reason to look twice at the modest structure with a red brick facade.

Inside of a passerby, of course, it’s too dark to read.

From an ABC News report on theories regarding the death of Mozart:

Buried in an unmarked grave, without a casket or his widow at the funeral, historians don’t know exactly what killed the 35-year-old musical genius Dec. 5, 1791.

Tip to historians: You might have an easier time doing research if you got out of the grave first.

From today’s Miami Herald:

“Our main industry is tourism,” [Miami Beach Mayor Matti Herrera] Bower said. “We can’t lose site of what is the engine that brings the money in.”

Presumably Mayor Bower was talking about “losing sight” of the importance of tourism, not fearing the loss of land. They say the first thing to go is the copy editing…

Picking on Newsday again, but jeez, it’s in a freaking headline:

Isles game in KC doesn’t phase Hempstead’s Murray

Good thing, because if a town supervisor on Long Island possessed mutant superpowers, hardly anyone would be unfazed.

This week’s homonym-impaired media outlet: Crain’s New York Business, which reported on the release of a fake edition of the New York Times thusly:

Five years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the war in Iraq is over. At least that’s what some readers read Wednesday when they picked up a faux version of The New York Times.

Early Wednesday, a hoard of volunteers distributed free copies of a fake NYT, rife with headlines like “Iraq War Ends” and “Universities to Be Free” printed under the modified mantra “All The News We Hope to Print.”

Maybe that’s the problem: The fake Times publishers have been hoarding all the copy editors.

Headline from today’s New York Sun:

Cost of Tuition at Colleges Breasts $50,000 a Year

“Breast” (the verb) can mean to “overcome” (as in an obstacle), but not to surpass, which is what the Sun means here. Either some headline writer got lazy with the thesaurus, or this writing headlines to nab Google hits thing has gotten out of hand.

NBC’s Olympics coverage has generated an awful lot of laughably awkward prose - my favorite was the gymnastics commentator (not sure who - don’t think it was Al Trautwig) who remarked that “If the Chinese spell ‘history’ with a capital H, that goes double for their rivalry with Japan.”

At least TV commentators, though, can argue that they need to fill hours of broadcast time with no ability to go back and edit themselves. The New York Times doesn’t have that excuse for this line that appeared in an article today about one-legged Olympic swimmer Natalie du Toit:

Her right leg works overtime, cramping in long races. Exhaustion drops her hips low into the water. A chiropractor must balance her body, as if it were a checkbook.

If the New York Times is using chiropractors to balance its checkbook, that explains a lot.

From an article in amNewYork (Newsday’s free daily) on how European tourists don’t tip enough at New York restaurants:

Some restaurants have wizened up and now put gratuity right into the bill.

Unless they’re talking about really old restaurateurs, amNewYork’s editors need to wise up and get a dictionary. Not to mention an article for “gratuity,” which isn’t a collective noun like “coffee.” Two grammatical errors in one sentence - now that’s giving readers their money’s worth.

What is it about journalists and homonyms? From today’s Newsday story on the passport kerfuffle:

A Passportgate scandal swept the presidential campaign Friday as the State Department revealed it is investigating unauthorized peaks into the passport files of all three White House candidates.

No word on whether the files contained unauthorized valleys as well.