My Billings Gazette

This article, by author Ralph Keyes, has been bandied about in journalism circles for the past few days. Keyes' point, in a nutshell: Our insistence on dated pop-culture references is driving away young readers.

Keyes writes:

Retrotalk is ubiquitous among journalists of a certain age. By using it they set themselves apart from those born in the last three or four decades. On "Meet the Press," New York Times columnist David Brooks said about Hillary Clinton, “In the first debate she’s Emily Post, now she’s Howard Beale,” referring to the late etiquette maven and the angry protagonist of the 1976 movie "Network." In a recent column Brooks wrote, “And not to get Rod McKuen on you or anything …” Say what? Inquiring younger minds want to know.

Now, I hate to be a nattering nabob of negativism (a phrase coined used by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970, which predates my memory), but Keyes is flat wrong unless he includes two important adjectives to his proposed reining-in: "lazy" and "inappropriate." If that were the crux of Keyes' fight, I would stand with him. Few things come across as weakly as a poorly employed pop-culture reference.

Otherwise, I suspect that he isn't being intellectually honest about how these references foment and perpetuate. Kids who never saw "Happy Days" during its heyday nonetheless use a phrase inspired by the show, "jump the shark" -- or, at least, they did until the phrase itself jumped the shark.

A friend of mine, age 39, signs off on Facebook every night with "Goodnight, Gracie." The program that made it famous, "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show," went off the air 12 years before he was born.

These gems live on because they're passed down, from generation to generation, whether it's from parent to child or through the wonder of syndicated television. You didn't have to be alive during the original run of "Gilligan's Island" or "Leave it to Beaver" to get the references -- those shows are playing, somewhere, every day. In fact, I daresay that the greater risk lies in making reference to current pop culture, when we don't have the benefit of the years to know whether something is enduring or just a passing fad.

Wisteria Lane is now. Mayberry, as noted by one commenter, is eternal.

Back on the old blog, I wrote some months ago about Strunk and White and my general aversion to it.

Linguist Geoffrey Pulliam Pullum did no careful couching of his feelings in this essay, which carries the not-so-loving title "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice."

Pullum's take is brilliant, by the way.

As an editor, I often have difficulty finding common ground with linguists. Their job is to study how language is actually used. Mine is to round the written word into publishable shape. Their job tilts heavily toward descriptivism. Mine requires some degree of prescriptivism.

No such trouble here. Pullum dispatches "The Elements of Style" on the authors' terms, exhaustively detailing the many ways in which their little grammar-and-usage tome falls short of the mark.

Consider this passage:

"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.

We are told that the active clause "I will always remember my first trip to Boston" sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It sure does. But that's because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows "by").

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane. (I'm the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. "The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor" sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

And later:

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

• "There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

• "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

• "The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. "Become" doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)

These examples can be found all over the Web in study guides for freshman composition classes. (Try a Google search on "great number of dead leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn't say whether terrorists did it.)

I won't excerpt the whole thing (though I certainly could). It's long, but it's well worth your time if you, like so many, revere "The Elements of Style" to the point of endlessly parroting it, as so many writers and editors do.

Pullum presents a well-reasoned case for restraint.

I think we can all agree that a solid grounding in the principles of grammar is essential to good writing.

Still, one can never discount the effect of dialect, particularly in the cutthroat world of sales.

Consider this classified ad, which ran in The Billings Gazette this past week:

1990 Olds Delta 88 Royal. Grandma can't drive no more. 42,000 original miles. 3.8L Automatic. Cruise, Tilt, Nice, Nice Car. XXX-XXXX.*

Let me be the first to say that I'm sorry Grandma can't drive no more. I'm even more sorry that I'm not in the market for a car; Delta 88s are sweet rides. When I was 18, I drove one from North Richland Hills, Texas, to Kit Carson, Colo., and that's a long damned way.

* -- Phone number redacted to keep self-important grammar scolds from bothering grandma and the kinfolk.

Jim Thomsen of the Kitsap Sun, a devoted friend to this blog, e-mailed the following scrap of Associated Press copy under the subject heading of "Another cringe-inducing lede":

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) -- Bing Crosby, who grew up in Spokane, dreamed of a white Christmas. Now residents are getting a taste of a white April.

Up to seven inches of snow fell Thursday on parts of Spokane, pushing what was already a record snow total to nearly 100 inches for the winter.

This, friends, is Astoundingly Bad Writing. You take a bit of news (snowfall), add to it a lazy and unrelated local reference (Bing Crosby's Spokane roots), blend it with a bit of hackneyed pop culture ("White Christmas") and here's what you get: an insult to readers and a waste of their time.

It's not difficult to imagine a similar bit of dreck coming out of Billings:

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- Ernest Hemingway, who once recuperated in Billings after being injured in a car accident, wrote "A Farewell to Arms."
 
That's what a man must have been thinking Thursday after he fell asleep on the train tracks here and lost two limbs when a passing freight train cut them off.

Please, I implore you: Knock it off. If you have to strain for the cleverness, the high probability is that you're not being clever at all. Some stories need nothing more than a straight-ahead telling. I dare say that April snowfall in Spokane, no matter how unusual, is one such story.