Virginia Tech unloads a small document dump spurred by a FOIA and the terms of the June 17 settlement that sheds light on what school officials were thinking in the wake of the school massacre. The Post discovers: school brass were concerned about their image!

The Post writes:

“Within a week of the incident, one memo shows, university officials had developed a media strategy that centered on three main messages: ‘We will not be defined by this event,’ ‘Invent the future’ and ‘Embrace the Virginia Tech Family.’”

School administrators handpicked sources for the media and coached them, and graded published stories from a rating ranging from positive to negative. None of this is much of a surprise. I was there covering the tragedy. If you wanted to get beyond the press conferences and well-staged interviews, it was easy. V-Tech is a huge campus with thousands of students and faculty. There were plenty of people willing to go off message. And the Post did amazing work according to our media critic. But I don’t blame the school for trying to manage the tragedy.

Still. This guy really is naive. The silliest suggestion came from an administrator who tried to get the school to coin its own tragedy phrase:

“A two-page memo from Chris Clough, who works in the University Relations office, is dedicated to the language choices the school had to make.

‘We likely will live with the label ‘Virginia Tech massacre,’ or ‘Virginia Tech tragedy’ for years to come in the media, however, we can use our own language in our own media to help prevent the event from defining us and may gain success in influencing history,’ he wrote.

Clough offered three suggestions on how to refer to the killings. The first is the ‘West AJ/Norris tragedy’ because it ‘confines the incident to specific locations within the university and doesn’t allow it to completely define the university,’ he wrote. Then there is the ‘Holocaust Day tragedy’ because the shooting fell on the same day as the Holocaust remembrance day Yom Hashoah. Finally, he suggests, the ‘Best and Brightest tragedy.’

Radar on the etymology of douchebag as a slang insult: might have started with Henry Miller, but also, it’s really fun to say. And like S.O.B., it’s a insult for men that “gets its sting” by referring to women.

I was at the Udvar-Hazy Center yesterday when I realized the peril of insult inflation. You know, how someone who a decade ago would be merely an asshole is now automatically a douchebag. Because when you see the real thing up close, words fail.

SO, walking into the Space Hanger, I am behind a young couple. She is in denim cutoffs and a white shirt; he is dressed in long shorts, a green T-shirt with Kevin Garnett’s name and number on the back, and a baseball hat.

They pass one of the many Lucite donation boxes in the museum, you know the ones that imply that museums are partnerships between us the museumgoers and the institutions themselves. They stop. Why, somebody’s donation is protruding ever so slightly from the slot! At first I think he’s just trying to push it down so he can make his own donation, but no: He’s fishing it out. And sticking it in his pocket. And then his girlfriend is rubbing his back and saying, “Yay!” and he’s grinning like all his Christmases just came at once.

Douchebag may be worth less than the dollar, but I’m thinking maggot still works in this case.

Photo by roboppy

I recently signed up for Spanish Conversation III at the USDA’s language school. There were plenty of reasons to plunk down the hefty price: $365! Speaking Spanish would be good for my career, might lend a little credibility to my last name and would come in handy when I move to my flat in Mexico City (ha). I’ve taken Spanish for years, starting in grade school and then on and off through high school and college. But it never stuck. I can sometimes stumble through more complicated restaurant orders, but anything higher-level causes mass confusion. Back in school, my problem was “oral proficiency,” I clammed up when it came time to ask my partner “Como se llama?” I was a shy kid, so my anxiety wasn’t anything unusual. Anyway, now I’m not exactly what you’d call shy. But two weeks into class, and I still got hot cheeks when it came time for show and tell. I brought my libreta de reportero (a?) and barely managed to speak for five minutes when the assignment was to talk for 10. I was so nervous. It got even worse when the professor came by. I was sure he would tell me I wasn’t good enough, or maybe just laugh and point at me. Instead, he gave me that lowered-eyelid “I’m watching you” look and walked away. Then I was totally showed up by the others at my table, including one guy who gave a report on “El Extranjero” by Albert Camus.

I’ve thought about drinking to steal my nerves. But the last time I came to class drunk — in high school — didn’t turn out so well. I guess I might try practicing.

The University of Iowa’s Journalistic Reporting and Writing, Section A01, Spring 2008 class blog cites Jason Cherkis’ recent story about William Selepack as “classic alternative press writing - cuss words and everything. This is gritty writing full of punch and attitude.”

Cheers, University of Iowa’s Journalistic Reporting and Writing, Section A01, Spring 2008! But here’s the part that warmed my heart:

“But notice how closely it hews to AP style. And all the exact detail - addresses, etc. It’s all there.”

On behalf of the copy desk, I’d like to say thanks for noticing.

Lately, it’s seemed as if Entertainment Weekly has decided that since it couldn’t break celeb news faster than blogs, it would become a place where pop culture was chewed over, which would at least explain all those wretched how-I-grew-up-loving-James Bond-movies/The Big Lebowski/horror-films essays that have been polluting its pages of late.

But if there was one thing you could always count on in Time Inc. publications, it was superior copy-editing. Which is why I’m at a loss upon reading this, in Benjamin Svetkey’s Speed Racer article:

Judging from the advance footage, Speed Racer is a family film alright, but a family film that missed a couple of doses of Ritalin.

Forget the tortured simile. What made me vomit in my mouth a little bit was the spelling “alright.” Goddammit, that’s two words! ALL RIGHT! It’s in the bloody dictionary. Real dictionaries, not the fun little pretendy online ones where you can look up slang terms!

From Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition:

al•right (ôl rit) adj., adv., interj. disputed sp. of ALL RIGHT

That’s right, disputed! As in, the theory of evolution is disputed. BY DUMBASSES!

From Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition:

usage The one-word spelling alright appeared some 75 years after all right itself had reappeared from a 400-year-long absence. Since the early 20th century some critics have insisted alright is wrong, but it has its defenders and its users. It is less frequent than all right but remains in common use especially in journalistic and business publications. It is quite common in fictional dialogue, and is used occasionally in other writing <the first two years of medical school were alright— Gertrude Stein>.

“[I]t has its defenders”: They’re called ILLITERATES! Or British journalists, which is practically the same thing. The battle over this dumb usage has been lost in Blighty; I’ll be damned if I’m gonna cede the colonies without a fight. To quote Free: All right now!

I’ve done it. I’ve written the most cliché poem in the world. Waldo Jaquith, over on the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, tried to prove that writers of clichés don’t get published. He discovered the opposite. And in doing so, gave up a juicy list of 12 clichés rampant in (usually) bad, bad poetry. Put them all together, and you get the most publishable poem ever! The New Yorker, I’ll be waiting for your call:

In the water, there is death.
Blood stains a stone,
once the color of bone.
My poetry is dead as is my heart. Like that fish.
No more birth, only darkness,
its eyes the color of rust,
no longer fears the cat.

Use it whenever you want to point out the shortcomings of a writer. Replaces “a quick phone call” as the beginning of an excellent insult. For example:

1998 insult: “A quick phone call to ______’s campaign would have revealed that he was in Miami for most of that day…”

2008 insult: “Now, a simple Google search suggests that Obama spent most of the day in Miami…”

I’ll bet William Kristol is really beginning to hate the term “a simple Google search.”

The Library of Congress could have saved itself a heap of trouble by designating Scottish, English, and Welsh literature (I’m sure there’s Welsh literature) as simply “British”; calling it all “English” was boneheadedness of the first order. But it’s boneheadedness with a precedent; I’ve heard many educated Americans refer to the entirety of Great Britain (that’s England, Scotland, and Wales) as “England.”

The English, the Welsh, and the Scots are all properly “British,” and many people in Northern Ireland (the term “United Kingdom” refers to Great Britain and Northern Ireland) consider themselves to be British as well. Let’s use this opportunity to get this right going forward.

Incidentally, I can’t help wondering whether the Post’s headline for this story is an intentional reference to “Flower of Scotland,” the unofficial national anthem for Scotland, which refers to sending “proud Edward’s armies” home “tae think again.”