Monthly Archives: February 2004

My favorite train wreck tale

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From Tom Barber:

Ever notice that when a tornado strikes, “tossing mobile homes
about like children’s toys,” a witness inevitably is able to
buttonhole a wire service reporter within moments of emerging from
his storm cellar to announce, “It sounded like a freight train!”

My freight train file was swelling impressively when a prized catch
came in an AP second lede writethru from Motley, Minn., where a bumbling
dispatcher had sent two Burlington Northern coal trains down the same
track to a head-on crash 200 yards from Andrew Paife’s home. “Paife
captured the moment for reporter Karren Mills, volunteering:

‘It sounded like a tornado.’ “

A heartbreaking work of staggering cleanup

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From Stephen Mcilwaine:

In natural-disaster-prone Australia (“I love a sunburnt country
…” is our national poem) we can rely on at least one TV reporter
per bushfire or flood telling us, “Now begins the heartbreaking
task of cleaning up.”

Dig those coffers, man

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From Gene McCarthy:

One very overworked pet peeve-word I’ve always had was “coffers” and people, usually municipal/government officials, “digging deep” into them to pay somebody or something. In a day when cash is becoming obsolete and funds are whizzed around the world in
a millisecond, isn’t it a bit ridiculous to continue to use a term
which Webster’s New World dictionary says was a “chest for holding
money or valuables?” Maybe just plain old “accounts”
would more than suffice.

A scrambled egg

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From Tim Christie:

When I worked at the Yakima (Wash.) Herald-Republic in Eastern Washington, and one of the big city papers would come into town to write about a local issue, you could count on one of the many small towns in the Yakima Valley described as a “hard scrabble hamlet.”

Which always made me think of a hard-scrambled omelet.

Perfect perfection

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From Greg Newell:

My pet peeve as a sports writer/editor is the dreaded reference
to a PERFECT 18-0 record or a PERFECT 9-0 or perfect any record that includes only wins. There is no such thing as an IMPERFECT 18-0,
is there?

Oh, those evil geniuses

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From Bill Case:

I’ve noticed a tad bit of grade-inflation in the use of the word
“mastermind” in describing criminals. One local broadcast
this week used the term to describe a teenage lout who convinced two
of his peers to rob a drugstore (actually THE drugstore) in a small
town in rural West Virginia. Since everybody knows everybody else
in this particular town — and the trio of louts left a clear trail
of footprints in the snow — all were apprehended shortly after the
fact. I think we need some kind of minimum level of competence for
criminal masterminds.

Leaf it to us

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Adam M. Gaffin has had it with:

“Leafy suburb” and “gritty former mill
town.” Sometimes when reading the Boston Globe, you get the
idea that those are the only two types of communities in eastern Massachusetts.

Scrambling on the battle lines

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From Ian Trontz:

  • “Battle lines were drawn” to describe any controversy
    (sometimes preceded by “Tempers flared”).
  • “Where (insert dominant local livestock here)
    outnumber humans” to describe any rural area.
  • “Scrambling.” About half the nation’s newspapers
    must have run stories following the aborted American Airlines strike
    that read, “leaving the airline scrambling.” That would
    cause a disaster the likes of which the NTSB has never seen. The word
    never again should appear outside of a football story.

    • Thoughts of brainchildren

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    Sharyn Wizda proffers these peeves:

  • Describing any profile subject as “the thinking man’s (or
    woman’s) sex symbol    .”
  • Describing somebody’s new product as his or her “brainchild.”
  • Describing any Rocky Mountain town smaller than Denver as “nestled
    at the foot of snow-capped peaks    .”
  • In any crime story: “This close-knit community has been
    shaken by the tragedy    ….”

    • Range radar

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    Ron Landfried requests an end to range roving;
    to wit:

  • I’m tired of writers who use the shorthand “ranging from” or “everything from …. to…… ” to describe a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. Unless you’re talking about numbers
    ranging from one to 10, no one knows what’s between the two extremes,
    including the writers.

    • Here are the greatest hits from the Landfried Collection

    • Dec. 17

      New York Times: How could it be otherwise in a society that blatantly
      uses sex to sell everything from sneakers to beer?

    • Jan. 6

      Herald-Sun: The board went over a raft of proposals that covered
      everything from library funding to tax-collection rate accounting
      methods.

    • Feb. 12

      Chapel Hill Herald: Efthimios “Tommy” Mariakakis served
      up everything from hot dogs to stuffed grape leaves in more than 50
      years of running restaurants here.

    (editor’s note: I believe these dates are 1996-97).