Testy Copy Editors on whether the twain should meet. The post I most agree with: It seems a better way of looking at headlines is not to say, “Heads are like poetry” but to say, “Heads are like prose,” by…
Author: tom
The Plimpton charm
From the New York Observer He triumphed uniquely in this because his career was founded on the expectation that he was not in the end going to win. He did hard work and made it look easy. He had the…
‘100 Worst Groaners’
Courtesy of newswriting.com. Example: Flurry Of Activity – Not unless you?re the weathercaster, and it?s beginning to snow. There are plenty of less stuffy ways to say someone?s busy. Incidentally, these were intended for TV news people but it’s remarkable…
Encyclopedia of Television
Yes, such a thing exists. Did you know, for instance, that “Sale of the Century” was the most popular Australian game show? Or that a show called “Z Cars” had the most episodes (667) of any weekly British crime drama?…
Because finding fault is what we do
Check out the Top 25 slip-ups at slip-up.com Choice tidbit: In the 1631 edition printing of the King James Bible, in Exodus 20:14, a very small word was forgotten by the printers. The word “not”. This changed the 7th commandment…
The Deep Throat pioneers
How the New York Times got the inside skinny on emerging porn.
Strunk & White greatest hits
Misused expressions. An excerpt: Certainly. Used indiscriminately by some speakers, much as others use very, to intensify any and every statement. A mannerism of this kind, bad in speech, is even worse in writing.
Urban legends of Baghdad
AJR asks, are we to blame because so many Americans are such morons?
Stuck at work…
… which means I’ll have to do some actual newspapering for the next eight hours or so (Thanks, CCI, you bring so much meaning to my life). After that I’ll probably need major couch time, so this could be the…
What we can learn from the Peoria Pundit
Here’s a guy who is the only blogger covering the media in my hometown, a metro area of some 300,000 (Bill will know precisely, he’s good about that stuff). His current blog archives date to January 2002, so plenty of…