Awww

A Plug for Brand X

The delightful Merrill Perlman, who runs the copy-desk world at the New York Times, is answering reader questions this week. Lots of good stuff, including a nice description of what exactly copy editors do.

One Count of Stupid Shorthand

The Justice Department did not fire a bunch of "attorneys." OK, they were attorneys, if you accept the tarted-up term as a synonym for lawyers, but to use it as an all-purpose shorthand for U.S. attorneys makes about as much sense as using it to describe Supreme Court justices.

The generic term for those who hold the title U.S. attorney is federal prosecutor, or simply prosecutor. In fact, it's a good idea to work prosecutor into any story on the matter even if U.S. attorney isn't too long for the headline specs or too frequently mentioned as to become monotonous: There are bound to be readers out there without a firm grasp of what exactly a U.S. attorney does.

The Oughties' Newest Wrinkle

We never did decide what to call this decade, did we? The 2010s will make things a little easier, but wait . . .

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, veteran Republican fundraiser Richard Viguerie said he is not optimistic about a GOP presidential victory in 2008. "I think it will be '012 or '016," he said.

That sure looks odd in print, but people do talk that way, don't they? Though the 0 in '07 most assuredly stands for the third digit in the year, not the second and third digits, "in '12 or in '16" just doesn't roll off the tongue the way "in '68 or '72" did. I let the quote run in the Post for one edition before it occurred to me that the apostrophe was required. That makes it look at least a little less queer.

(And I decided that CPAC would be the Conservative Political Action Conference, taking a cue from the event's Web site, though one could argue that CPAC is still the Conservative Political Action Committee and that this is the CPAC conference.)

Wait, Who's Abusing the Dog Paths?

I'm sure the New York Times improved this Page One headline for subsequent editions, but on my early peek I saw this:



In addition to its being, finally, one iffy headline that I won't get yelled at about, it illustrates one of the many problems we face as headline writers: the possibility that nouns will be read as verbs and vice versa. It took me about half a dozen readings before I realized that Abuses was not a subjectless verb but rather a plural noun, making Dog not a noun or a noun adjunct describing Paths but rather a verb. Nobody's abusing any dog paths, but abuses are dogging these crews' paths.

The plausibility of "dog paths" as something that could indeed exist and be written about compounds the "noun or verb?" problem, and even if you get a glimmer of the story's real subject, noun dogs could still conceivably be involved (as a colleague of mine said, "At least it isn't what I feared -- a story about how these salespeople are often attacked by dogs").

The headline isn't helped by the quotation marks, justified as they may be, on "Crews," or by the fleeting appearance that we're talking about a young magazine, not young people making up these "crews." Too many distractions.

I've certainly looked the other way at one or two of these issues when I couldn't think of a better alternative, but a headline can survive only so many potential distractions. (And the Times is consistently excellent at avoiding such problems, which is why this example stood out for me.)