“Houellebecq’s treatment of Islam is now far more nuanced, even admiring,” writes Robert Zaretsky in a Foreign Policy essay about contemporary France.
Six paragraphs later, he writes: “Houellebecq’s perspective has grown more nuanced, even admiring.”
It’s not a big deal that Zaretsky didn’t catch it, but where are FP’s editors?
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
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Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
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[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
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[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
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Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
January 19th, 2015 at 12:05PM
This is just an infelicitous repetition. But broadening out far beyond it and Foreign Policy, the question “where are the editors these days?” presses. An even better question might be who are the editors (even of the NYT) these days; what do they learn in school and just by reading for pleasure and interest. For example, when I do a flyover of writing , Preposition Mountain seems to have been nuked, people and things no longer are possessive about their gerunds, and to “beg” a question becomes merely to raise it. The latter is a significant and complex idea that has lost its easy expression.The generally intelligent Seth Meyers flattens this all the time. Think of all the words now needed to argue that someone is begging a question in the old sense. To take another example, if “elope” were lost, it would take a lot of words to express that idea.
I’m all for playing with language, in a fully conscious way, and broadening it e.g.. from Shakespeare through Stoppard to Hip Hop. But language seems to be flattening is some respects, while getting enriched in others.
Is a law of conservation of expressibility operating here. Perhaps David Byrne would say “same as it ever was.”I do admit that getting the right critical perspective is difficult, given what language is. Do you know John McWhorter’s books?
January 19th, 2015 at 1:54PM
Bad enough that editors don’t correct mistakes these days, but it can be worse. I recently wrote about some students who made up a group I advised and it appeared in print as students who “comprised” the group. Even if it weren’t incorrect, I’d object to replacing my two sturdy Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.
January 19th, 2015 at 3:02PM
Foreign Policy is presumably caught up in the general ethos of online publishing, which seems to be get content as cheaply as possible — preferably for free — and publish it as quickly as possible. This is hardly conducive to good editing, which takes time and costs money.
January 19th, 2015 at 3:06PM
P –
Yep the whole does all of the work of comprising; the parts just stand around and get lassoed by it. But who knows that now?
A colleague of mine once jointly wrote a book with another colleague. Let’s say “Jerry Jones and Sam Smith: Law and the Cosmic Vacuum: Nothing from Nothing Leaves Something.” That’s the way they sent it in to a supposedly respectable publishing house. Their editor turned that into “Jerry Jones, and Sam Smith. When they objected to the comma, the editor required proof that they were right. I might have cited Occam’s Razor and just clammed up. Doesn’t the Hypocratic Oath apply to editors? For months afterwards, I sent Sam email with the strangest use of punctuation you can imagine,#!.
As for long and short words, I agree that often, style-wise, the short germanic ones often are better, but I favor a mix backed by some understanding as to why longer is better in the circumstances and in the whole array of words.
I think Wallace Stevens once said “a change of style is a change of subject.”
G