Hasty edits and other offenses

The article in the weekend newspaper concerned those dramatic pictures of a statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled to the ground in wartime Baghdad, and how the scene had instantly taken its place in television’s archive of unforgettable news imagery.

An interesting story it was, made even more so by the time-honored newspaper practice of editing via meat cleaver. Toward the end of the piece, when there was too much copy and not enough space for the article that bled directly into a two-column display advertisement for World Over Imports, a decidedly nonsurgical cut after a paragraph that concluded with a colon (oops), produced this gem:

“Although Thompson was withholding judgment on whether the sight of Saddam’s symbolic fall is in the same league with that of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, ‘It’s a pretty good candidate,’ he said, adding:

“IF YOU DON’T FIND A BASKET YOU LIKE, WE’LL ASSUME YOU DON’T LIKE BASKETS!”

If newspapers were still functioning in the good old days of grizzled ink-stained wretches in back-shop composing rooms, my guess would be that the culprit was some ham-fisted journeyman printer who – up against a deadline and with no editor on the floor to make the proper edit – had taken matters into his own hands. With apologies to The New York Times and its trademark motto, this is known in the business as the “All-The-News-That-Fits, We-Print,” approach. But considering today’s computerized whiz-bang laser-guided untouched-by-human-hands doctrine of newspaper publishing, who’s to say that the glitch wasn’t engineered by some geeky teenage computer hacker down the street?

In any case, the result was good for a laugh, which is what matters most in these dark days when the nation’s pundits are heavily into their predictable doom-and-gloom mode following a war that didn’t turn out quite the way they had anticipated.

Picking nits from the newspaper and from the bill of fare offered up nightly by my television brethren is an avocation that, judging from my mail over the years, is shared by readers.

“Dear Old Dawg,” wrote Islesboro resident Marc Schnur some time ago. “I call your attention to a little article on the Hancock page of today’s BDN. It states, ‘A transient man has been arrested on charges of robbery and assault after he was caught stealing … two music compact discs and underwear from a High Street department store…’ This is a typical case of under-reporting, since it leaves more questions unanswered than it answers; prime among which is, ‘What kind of underwear does a transient man steal?”‘ Briefs?

My grossly outdated backlog of such memos includes one from Allan Kimball of Bar Harbor, who wrote that he’s been in the printing business since 1935 and does not recall ever having seen words employed quite the way we sometimes use them on the proofreader’s day off. An anonymous reader sent a plethora of obituaries containing some doozy typos and one death notice stating that a 102-year-old New Brunswick woman had “unexpectedly” died. “Unexpectedly? 102?,” was scrawled across the clipping. Good point.

I have, of course, plowed this ground before, with mixed results. After one such excursion, reader Tom Derby of Camden wrote to say “Right on, Big Guy,” and to disclose that the annoying tendency of sports broadcasters to use the future tense when talking about action that has already occurred drives him nuts, as does the use of the phrase “it would become” when writing about an event which happened many years ago.

But the tenses thing wasn’t what irked reader June Stitler of Sebec. “In my opinion, your paper has more important questions to be concerned about than the differences between ‘Downeast’ and ‘Down East,’ or ‘Okay’ and ‘OK,”‘ she lectured. Exhibit A was an attached clipping that contained this underlined grammatical clunker: “One of three grown children, Jones’ elderly parents live in Kennebunk.”

The lady informed me that she had been “shocked” – shocked, she said – to read that bungled sentence in a newspaper whose worker bees presumably should know better. I suppose so. But I’ll bet she’d have suffered greater shock and trauma had she read an even more flagrantly misplaced and badly mangled dangler that once ran in the Tillamook (Ore.) Headlight-Herald.

As cited by James Kilpatrick in his book, “The Writer’s Art,” this line was included in a story about a calf with eight teats that was born to a heifer owned by Glenn and Pat Gallatin: “Normally adorned with no more than four teats, the Gallatins didn’t have an explanation for the curious quirk…”

Nor do I. Some things are unexplainable. Especially to strict grammarians.

Kent Ward’s e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.