Yes, I'm the Moron

If you get the early edition of the Washington Post, the one marked REGIONAL, you may notice one or two embarrassing errors in today's front-page space-shuttle caption. Now, the Post, like any newspaper, makes its share of errors, and I make my share of those, but usually when somebody points out a Post misstep to me, as chance would have it, I'm not the responsible party. This time? All me. This can be a frustrating line of work.

Mapping the Oddities

Jackson Hole sure sounds cool, but there is no "Jackson Hole, Wyo."
-- the city that gives the area its name is simply Jackson. There's also no "La Jolla, Calif." -- La Jolla is a section of San Diego. I hope we all know that the Pentagon isn't in Washington, but what about all those casinos on the Las Vegas Strip? Not in Las Vegas; try unincorporated Clark County.

Whether to go all copy-editor on people's asses about such things is another question, of course. I think the Jackson fact is worth enforcing, but you could argue that La Jolla is grandfathered in, the same way "Hollywood, Calif." exists in spite of its nonexistence. I would argue back that we shouldn't say "La Jolla, Calif.," the same way we don't say "Georgetown, D.C." But I would let the Las Vegas casinos be Las Vegas casinos.

"Wimbledon, England" also gets the Hollywood exception, I think, even though technically it's more like "the Wimbledon village of London," but I don't favor rolling over so easily for other violations of the city-state and city-country syntax. Brooklyn, N.Y.? Oh, all right -- it once was a city. But there's no Queens, N.Y., or Bronx, N.Y., or Staten Island, N.Y., or Long Island, N.Y. Go ahead and use "Bayside, Queens" and "Sayville, Long Island" for New York street cred, but screw the stylebook and give readers a little credit when it comes time to choose between a simple "Queens" or "Bronx" and "the Queens (or Bronx) borough of New York City."

"Darfur, Sudan"? No. It's the Darfur region of Sudan.

In a related note, my expertise on Scotland is a little shaky, but the "Gleneagles, Scotland" we keep hearing about as the location of the Group of Eight meeting appears to be a resort, not a city. The actual place that merits the comma-Scotland treatment seems to be either Perthshire or Auchterarder.

What have I left out? (Or screwed up?)

A Strictly Hypothetical Note

"Jurist" comes in handy as a synonym for "judge," but keep in mind that many consider that a loose usage. The primary meaning is "legal expert or scholar." The distinction could become important if, say, a partisan hack with little knowledge of the law were up for a seat on the bench.

FYI

The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, not the Downing Street memo. Responsible users of abbreviations will recall a similar situation from earlier in the Iraq mess, namely that CPA is a certified public accountant, not a Coalition Provisional Authority.

D.C. bonus: AA is an organization for drunks, not a county in Maryland. (And I meant District of Columbia, not DaimlerChrysler.)

A Hard Problem to Lick

Did you hear the one about the giant popsicle that melted, sending New York pedestrians scurrying?

Only, wait -- Popsicle is a registered trademark. And this one was made of Snapple, so it wasn't a Popsicle-brand product. What will you do?

The evolution of the Associated Press story is instructive. First it was a "Popsicle." Then it was a "popsicle" (though the headline didn't get fixed), with the note "Eds: SUBS lead and 4th graf to substitute generic use of 'popsicle' sted trademark."

(Sure enough, Webster's New World says the word for "such a confection" can "also" be lowercased. You'll get letters from lawyers if you take this route -- that, I don't mind. What I do mind is that it's descriptivist nonsense.)

Finally, with no note to editors, AP did the right thing: "ice pop." Before I saw this I had come to the same conclusion for the Post's second edition, after a little Web surfing. For the first edition, unfortunately, all I could come up with was the dorky and unwieldy "Popsicle-style frozen treat."

For the third and final edition, I killed the item when I saw that it was also in the Style section. Sigh.