Copy Editor Market Crashing Too, Apparently
Wall Street's in turmoil! Shareholder value is evaporating like sweat on Ben Bernanke's pillow. And over at the Washington Post, those buyouts and departures that thinned the ranks of its elite corps of copy editors are having an effect. How else to explain this boner in Glenn Kessler and David S. Hilzenrath's story about the death of the American economy?
Wait, did the spelling "alright" make it into the pages of the Washington Post?
No! Maybe that buyout and departures that thinned the ranks of the Post's elite corps of copy editors only affected the Web, where we all know it's OK to spell things wrong, as long as you're first. Here's a scan of today's paper.
Convergence!
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11:25 am
Because there's never been one typo in the WCP, right?
Remember when you guys called Lloyd Rose a man in a 2007 cover story? In the lead, no less.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=1057
11:41 am
Today's print WSJ had the same paragraph appear twice in a row. Guess they had bigger problems to worry about than editorial perfection.
11:54 am
There's still a problem with this sentence! What's with the double "to"? "Seemed to generally to function all right."
12:08 pm
Yes, the double "to" is the problem. I don't understand the obsessive opposition to "alright". Fortunately similar obsessions didn't prevent us from getting useful words like "altogether", "almighty", "already", which developed in exactly the same way. "His answers are alright" means something different from "His answers are all right." Just let it go!
2:08 pm
Remember the City Paper's recent college newspaper issue and its reference to the wrong Deborah Solomon as a GW Hatchet alumni (something a quick Google search would show was wrong)?
Yeah, it's fun snarking at others for screwups.
2:10 pm
KC, in honor of our dearly departed DFW, I direct you to one of his greatest essays to see just what is wrong with words like alright, or at least what is wrong with Descriptivism generally.
And of course, you'll also see what an awful loss we just took.
2:29 pm
And I direct you to an alternative view of the essay. Being a good novelist doesn't mean your an expert on other things.
How can the added distinction between "alright" and "all right" be a loss to the language? "The Kids Are All Right" would have been just plain wrong.
2:30 pm
Oh, great. "Your" should of course be "you're" (so feel free to gloat over the typo, if you think it's meaningful).
2:49 pm
Well frankly, I'm certainly no hard core Prescriptivist myself, I just dislike unmoored Descriptivism. I think it's important for language to change, but I think that at any one point it's equally important for it to appear not to change. It should be like a glacier, not a puddle. And changes should enhance the language, not contract it. For instance, the use of "begs the question" to mean "raises a question" is a serious loss. "Begs the question", when used correctly, is an enormously efficient and artful phrase that communicates a relatively complex concept (or at least a non-simple concept). If it becomes only "raises a question", then we've lost something valuable.
Besides, with "alright" you're talking about slang, not formal written English. In formal writing, for sentences that you believe are better served with "alright" instead of "all right", I suspect that "acceptable" would have been even better. And it wouldn't make certain readers claw at their eyes either.
3:05 pm
Reid, I don't think we're that far apart, especially since you use "logical" order of punctuation with quotation marks. My initial comment was really just about why this particular word has become such a focus of fury. A lot of prescriptivism seems to be someone's random pet peeve that got spread around and has little to do with logic, actual usage, or clarity.
6:46 pm
Oh for fuck's sake, the Lloyd Rose thing comes up again? A dumb mistake, to be sure, but it's not a copy error! Blame the dumbass author of the story, not the noble, hardworking men and women of the WCP copy desk.