If you’re Huntington West Virginia’s attorney, and you have to write a piece in the local press defending the city against charges that its inept appeals board let a pretty obvious criminal open a bar where a mass shooting gained national attention, you need to know how to write English. You need to know how to write what writing instructors like SOS call a persuasive essay.

In the case of this obviously botched process, you need to begin by conceding that the city could have done better; after that, you can go to town defending Huntington as having done not that badly, or whatever.

Huntington’s attorney has instead produced a miserable mess, a blahblah brew that (as comments on the article suggest) only confirms everyone’s prejudice that lawyers are people who produce double talk and bullshit on request. On the simplest level of word meaning, this writer fails.

The frightening prospect of a dispute resulting in the shooting of several people that occurred between the prosperous downtown area and Marshall University warrants our collective focus and resolution that no similar event can occur here again.

Put aside the indecipherable wordy weirdness of the sentence altogether – the redundancy of the passive, ugly “occur,” the bizarre placement of the shooting’s location not at the Kulture Hookah bar but I dunno somewhere between the prosperous (why is prosperous relevant?) downtown (you don’t need area, unless your goal is to lard and muddy and fog and vagueify and pass the buck and pretend what happened didn’t sorta actually happen), the tea party word dispute instead of fight… Seven people aren’t left crawling among broken beer bottles inside and bullet casings outside after a dispute. Put all of that aside and notice that the writer thinks prospect means fact.

This event wasn’t in some cloudy future, much as the writer clearly wants it to be; it happened. Hence the word he ‘s looking for is fact, or event, or episode, or incident.

Of course, if he knew how to write he would have avoided this problem altogether: The frightening shootout at Kulture Hookah can never happen again. That’s all the poor man needed, not all those other words. But writing like that communicates an open straightforward grounding in reality, which is the last thing this guy wants, has, or is capable of expressing.

The rest of the opinion piece dances around the failure of the city to check the bar owner’s heroin distribution background before granting her a permit.

The writer ends in this way:

Every person who had a hand in addressing the matter performed his or her job with competence. The shooting occurred because of unpredictable criminal behavior…

Nothing to see here! We concede nothing! Absolutely everyone who runs the second largest city in a state with the highest opioid death rate in the United States is doing a great job!

… Rehoboth Beach is Delaware’s most overrated destination mainly due to the cost of parking and its exuberant enforcement of parking meters.  

At least they ticket joyfully.

Mr. Grigolo also cultivated a rebellious image — “The Bad Boy of Opera” was the name of a short film Bruce Weber made about him for Italian Vanity Fair, and he was known to race motorcycles and drive sports cars offstage.

SOS, over breakfast, said it was unnecessary. Mr UD disagreed: “The word clarifies that he’s not a really, really bad boy. He keeps his sports car driving offstage.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Even at the highest levels, editors sometimes mistake plain and plane. In a column about Michelle Obama, Charles Blow writes:

[Racists have always believed black people lack] the morality and character to exist on the same plain as white people.

It’s an understandable error, since it sort of makes sense to say someone deserves to exist in the same geographical location as other people; but the actual idea is that they are on the same level. SOS is going to guess that an editor will soon correct it.

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Editors have now corrected it.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm howled with laughter through this wonderful essay. But she’s a mere sixty-six. Your mileage may differ.

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But this, by Roger Angell, is even better. I’ve mulled over this paragraph for years.

“My list of names [of dead friends] is banal but astounding, and it’s barely a fraction, the ones that slip into view in the first minute or two. Anyone over sixty knows this; my list is only longer. I don’t go there often, but, once I start, the battalion of the dead is on duty, alertly waiting. Why do they sustain me so, cheer me up, remind me of life? I don’t understand this. Why am I not endlessly grieving?”

Now that he’s gleefully invoked an oncoming civil war, the leader of the free world has inspired a tsunami of some of Scathing Online Schoolmarm‘s favorite words — from Republicans as much as Democrats. These are strong, uncompromising words; these are words that do not mince words. These are not words like inappropriate, questionable, offensive; they are words like disgusting, repellent, and repulsive. Vile, abhorrent, contemptible. Ghastly, loathsome, fetid.

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And about that civil war…

Also pear of legs and currant of electricity.

Swimming is so good for you that researchers share it may even reduce your risk of death.

Silly British tabloid thinks we’re a monarchy too.

In court, one of the College’s attorneys, Rachelle Zidar, argued that the College and [the dean of students] did not seek to injure [Gibson’s Bakery] but rather the pause [in their business relationship] was meant to diffuse tensions that had built within the student body.

… Duke officials said that the university was settling [a lawsuit] only to avoid the costs and incoveience of literation.

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It’s been corrected.

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UD thanks Jeremy.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm appreciates the fine Italian hand of this NYT writer, who weaves a subtle tapestry of aesthetics and larceny in this article.

Go ahead and signal your attitude toward your subject with a wittle bitty simile at the end of your opening paragraph:

“One thing that’s always been true in New York,” says Dan Doctoroff, “is that if you build it, they will come.” He is referring to Hudson Yards, the $25bn, 28-acre, mega-project that he had a critical hand in originating while he was deputy mayor of the city under Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000s. He can now look down on his co-creation every day from his new office in one of the development’s towers and see hundreds of people climbing up and down Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel sculpture, like tiny maggots crawling all over a rotting doner kebab.

LOL.

Windswept wastes do bewail, they say; but SOS hears hymns of joy in the windy waste material wafting out of architect-whores when they defend lucrative massive destructive projects. Oscar Wilde called fox hunting “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible;” mega-mansioning is the unspeakable in pursuit of hilariously haughty vacuity.

Architect Thomas Hickey of GRADE New York, who has designed the vast home, admitted it is one not commonly found in the region. He described the style as “transitional” in a neo-Tudor style with modern details…

“We are not building history, instead a translation of history,” he said.

The psychotic billionaire from whom we got mucho bucks to build this thinks he is a Tudor king – a big fat bastard who rules the world, like Henry VIII – and his castle will certainly not “commonly” be “found in the region” (sniff) because it is a castle, see.

Cues were taken from the surrounding vernacular styles and paired down to create a modern design. 

Wouldn’t want to spend any of that money on spelling.

In response to student demand that a Sarah Lawrence professor be detenured by a committee made up of students with complaints against him plus faculty of color (the professor wrote a couple of op/eds about the liberal-leaning academy in The New York Times), the school’s president wove an exceptionally long strand of dithery platitudes. Or, as SOS calls them, dithertudes.

The aims of today’s students are not dissimilar to those who made their voices heard 30 and 50 years ago: they seek to ensure a truly inclusive environment of respect and support at Sarah Lawrence, especially for students of color and low-income students… [The complainants bring to the] fore many pressing issues that students at Sarah Lawrence face, especially students of color, low-income students, first-generation students, LGBTQ+ students and others, and I am grateful for the willingness of our students to share their concerns with me and the campus community… [Collaboration from] all parties is the best means to move these efforts forward, and this will require us to develop the most effective process for working with students as well as faculty and staff…

A little throat-clearing followed, in which the president suggested that forming a tribunal to drive out a conservative professor isn’t “appropriate.” But this woman’s creative energy overwhelmingly directs itself to thanking the students for showing everyone what a show trial looks like; for being “not dissimilar” to ‘sixties free speech advocates even though they are their absolute and exact opposite; and for being open to the sort of “collaboration” to which they are utterly opposed.