A WordGazing Holiday

Today is National Proofreading Day, which seems an appropriate time to post this ad I noticed in the New Yorker:


Look closely at the first line of reverse type. Some would roll their eyes or mutter a “Geeze.”

Me? It just makes me sad.

WordGazing: Finally, Justice Will Be Served

I WAS A DRUM MAJOR FOR JUSTICE
PEACE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

The text above is on the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in D.C. Not only is it carved without punctuation, it’s also paraphrased.

Yup. Not really a quote. And not even the gist of the original utterance, which is:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.”

What’s more, when you think about the abundance of material the highly quotable Dr. King provided us, why in the world was this chosen in the first place?

The truncation was a “design change” according to Ed Jackson Jr., the executive architect. He ran it by the oversight body, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and they didn’t have a problem with it. Neither did the Council of Historians.

Shame, shame, shame. If space was really an issue, then the solution was not to abbreviate but to choose different material. A quote that’s paraphrased isn’t a quote. Period. PERIOD, screams the editor in me.

I don’t expect architects to understand the problem with this kind of language bastardization, but I certainly expected more from the historians who approved it.

The good news today is that the stone-chiseled text is going to be fixed. Not sure how, but I’m glad someone in D.C. finally saw the light.

Here’s a King quote that speaks to me, that reminds me how to live my life:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

WordGazing: You Say “To-may-toz,” and I’ll Say…

I wasn’t looking for typos on a recent Saturday afternoon, but this banner jumped out at me.

I suppose the perpetrator could argue that the punctuation mark is a stand-in for the omitted e. To which I’d rebut, “Why not just slip the e in there? There’s plenty of space for it.”

But more than likely, the perpetrator also has trouble distinguishing its from it’s and boys from boy’s. More than likely, possessives, conjunctions, and plurals blend together with all the other foggy memories of grade school in the perpetrator’s gray matter.

Sigh.

WordGazing: Let’s Hope the Gov Sings

aw this on a major news outlet’s Web site about important legislation that the governor should (in my estimation*) uphold:

“The governor said it is his policy not to say if he will sing or veto anything during the session … .”

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple switch of two letters can alter the meaning of a sentence? Heck, this transposition alters legislative procedures.

* Turns out the governor exercised his veto power on the referendum. Too bad he couldn’t sing.

[Art from Jessica Hische.]

WordGazing: Derby Tip for Grammarians

If you’re still looking for a pony to bet on in today’s Run for the Roses, put your money toward the only one with a connection to punctuation: Comma to the Top. It’s a Southern expression for apostrophe.


I read an uptight blogger’s rant about how ridiculous it is to use a four-word euphemism in place of apostrophe. I don’t know the etymology behind it, but it works—descriptively speaking. And if it helps some folks use a “comma to the top” properly (we already know how many folks can’t master the apostrophe), then what’s to complain about?

WordGazing: Weather Worries

At the bottom of the television screen last night, I saw this:

Flood warning…don’t drown.

Well, thanks for the encouragement, I thought. I wasn’t planning to.

But then I saw the warning in its entirety. In the case of rising waters, viewers were told to seek higher ground. Otherwise…

“If traveling, remember turn around, don’t drown.”

Could this be the newsroom’s nod to Poetry Month?

[Pic from LEX18.com.]

WordGazing: In Which Lill Adjusts Her Freudian Slip

It's time to come clean:

While applying for a job this afternoon, I suddenly worried that I'd written a word on Lull that merely rhymed with the word I'd intended to write. I'd intended to say "The First Great Recession of the 21st Century," but instead wrote "The First Great Repression of the 21st Century."

Oops!

Frankly, I think either one works from the perspective of the jobless. But I wasn't trying to be clever. And I hate making mistakes, so I've replaced the two errant consonants.

WordGazing: It's Only A Letter

Years ago, I had a publishing client whose boss—the owner of the publishing company, no less—thought proofreaders unnecessary. As a former journalist, he believed writers should be held accountable for their writing mistakes; that is, writers shouldn't make any mistakes. Hence the reason this publisher had no staff proofreaders.

What the owner failed to consider, aside from the fact that precious few writers are perfect, were the myriad goofs and glitches that can occur over the course of production: Copy moves, falls away, gets rekeyed by designers, changes fonts—you name it, I've seen it happen.

This all came back to me this morning when I opened an old issue of ARTnews magazine. Staring at me was this ad copy:

If the world tresures it, Huntington T. Block insures it.

The company was announcing its six new staff members—most of them vice presidents, none of them proofreaders. The copy is Block's slogan and is probably on all of the company's marketing materials.

Now most of us can be forgiving and see the typo for what it is: a mistake. After all, only one little letter dropped out, and a fairly useless one, at that (Andrew Carnegie would have been proud). We can still comprehend the meaning of the sentence.

However, there will be others who take the typo as a sign of how their art might get treated by Block: carelessly. The insurer will never know how much potential business it lost from this one omission.

Clearly, details matter. I bet no one at Huntington T. Block would dare suggest that proofreaders are unnecessary.


[Black Iris II by Georgia O'Keeffe.]

WordGazing: When Politeness Collides with Meaning

s I walked across a local park recently, I saw a large wooden sign that gave me pause. I had to read it twice to make certain I was reading it correctly. Here's what it said:

To aid your enjoyment
please eliminate
ball playing
dogs
litter

Besides the obvious lack of punctuation, the word eliminate confused me about the message. Had the writer of this warning used a dictionary, s/he would have discovered these definitions for eliminate: to put an end to, to get rid of, to expel (to force to leave)—none of which convey the real meaning of the sign.

It's not a mandate to rid the park of things (ball players, dogs, litter) that are already there. Nor is it suggesting that people would enjoy their park visits more if they eliminated one or more of the items listed. It's a plea to park users to prevent any of these things from being in the park in the first place. People aren't being given permission to "put an end" to dogs; they're being asked to NOT play with or walk their dogs within the park's boundaries.

Sometimes when we search for a way to say something politely or to say it without ruffling anyone's feathers, we get trapped in a world of euphemisms and synonyms and quickly digress from our original intent. Sometimes the best way to say something is the most straightforward way:

So everyone may enjoy this park,
the following are prohibited:
ball playing
dogs
litter