: The choice is theirs…Error of their ways…
Thanks to Ken at Lying in Ponds for pointing me to this recent “On the Media” transcript from NPR. John Solomon considers errors in newspapers in light of a poll, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, that shows a majority of Americans think newspaper articles are usually inaccurate.
What does it mean to be inaccurate? I ask that question because I would assert that a deliberate fabrication and a misspelled name are both inaccuracies, but these are hardly alike in the degree of error.
Certainly, reporters and editors should be ever vigilant in finding and eradicating the kind of errors that plague all who write. We might place them under the general category of “typos.” And, just as certainly, journalists should be ever on guard against more serious inaccuracies.
That said, there are two things I find darkly amusing about usage errors.
First, I’m always surprised how many people get upset about them (and write letters to the editor), until I remember that we continue to teach the dialect of “standard” academic or American English as the only “correct” form of the language. So there are many people in our society who suffer under the delusion that a missed subject-verb agreement is proof of stupidity. And we shor doesnt wanna listen to no stupid peoples.
Second, journalists buy into this nonsense. Far too many of them think good writing (smart thinking) conforms to some concept of correct usage. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Just ask William Shakespeare who wrote at a time when there were very few codified conventions of English usage. Hmmmm…how did he do it without “rules”?
(BTW, the stylebooks used by journalists differ from other academic grammar texts in many areas of usage. Hmmmm…if there’s one correct English, how could this be? Geez…even Fowler and Follett don’t agree.)
Here’s why all of this is a problem for me: People who focus on the usage errors may be missing, or blind to, far greater errors, e.g. the Jayson Blairs, simplistic caricatures, faulty statistics, or genuine cases of lazy or politically useless reporting.
yowrritetheirRnoroolsovinglishyousaj. yew idyut!
Did I say there were NO rules? Every dialect of English has “rules” in the sense that all dialects of English operate on the same basic grammar. To understand that assertion, one must know the difference between conventions of usage and grammar.
Your comment, BTW, is structurally “correct” English. Do you know why?