Southern Discomfort
By JAN HOFFMAN
Jenny Sanford, the first lady of South Carolina, is publishing her memoir and has filed for divorce from the governor, Mark Sanford, who ducked out of site for five days last June.
Puncicate: An Italian slang term for buttock stabbing – usually associatedThank you, Schott's Vocabulary. We'd say this vocabulary enhancement is a real shot in the arm, but, well, that might be missing the point.
with soccer fans in Rome.
There is one story I shall never forget; nor shall the others who heard it one evening in Chapel Hill, N.C., when my wife and I, my parents and her parents (cultivated, literate people) were having dinner in a restaurant. Because the restaurant was housed in a former railway car, the passage was narrow and the tables close together.
And recent surveys have shown that her popularity overall, while still strong, has begun to fade. In one, a Fox News-Opinion Dynamics poll, her net positive rating shrunk from 27 points in early September to 11 points a week ago. At the same time, the candidate has been widely perceived to have struggled through a pair of TV interviews, particularly the recent one with Katie Couric of CBS.
But toxic mortgage-backed securities were pedaled by plenty of foreign banks. And the decision to pour $85 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money into the rescue of American International Group (A.I.G.), the insurance giant, followed appeals from foreign finance ministers to Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, to save a global company. (See the whole column.)We believe the word the author intended was peddled. But some of these financial products were innovative, so who knows? Perhaps they had wheels.
Forget the midlife crisis. The problem we're having today in the New York Times is a midsentence crisis:
What is that semicolon doing there? We're sort of guessing, but we believe the author meant to stick it after the first her. Like this:It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
Or maybe the attribution got in the way:It was not that her husband no longer loved her; she said he told her he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
It was not that her husband no longer loved her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore.
“Maybe it’s a midlife crisis,” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.”
This year celebrities seemed incapable of limiting their misdeeds to isolated bad choices: a flop movie, a regrettable interview quote, an on-air feud with Rosie O’Donnell. At times, their behavior was flat-out abnormal. If you were hoping to see your least favorite Hollywood princess fall on her crown, 2007 provided a parade of tempestuous starlets shaving heads (Ms. Spears), crashing sports cars (Lindsay Lohan) and checking into rehab (Ms. Spears and Ms. Lohan) or prison (Paris Hilton).It's not just desserts. It's just deserts--as in, what you deserve. Which is probably not dessert, if you're a misbehaving celebrity.
If your taste in just desserts ran more esoteric, the displays of personal collapse available on the Internet were downright Dada-esque: you could watch the former television action hero David Hasselhoff splayed across the floor of his hotel room while eating a hamburger; see Vanessa Hudgens, the squeaky-clean star of “High School Musical 2,” posing in the nude; or hear Alec Baldwin haranguing his 11-year-old daughter in a profane voice mail message that could have come straight out of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Q. What's with all the grammatical errors in the Times? I grew up hearing that I should polish my English grammar by reading the Times, but over the past couple of years I've gotten the impression that many of your writers must not even have graduated from high school!
Particularly striking is the number of errors relating to agreement between noun and verb, i.e. number errors.
Tell me there is hope for The Times. The rest of the country is sliding back to grade school output.
— Peter Kurz
A. I get versions of this question all the time, and I'm sure I'll see more this week, so I may as well try to tackle it now.
Often, as with Mr. Kurz's note, the question includes some variation of the everything-was-better-long-ago theme. Many readers believe that there were fewer factual errors, fewer typos, fewer grammatical lapses in The Times back in the old days. I honestly don't know if this is true, though the perception worries me. I do take a bit of comfort in the fact that I've been hearing similar complaints for all of the 17 years I've been at The Times. Or maybe things really were better up until 17 years ago, when I was hired, and it's been straight down since then. Now that really is something to worry about.
It's possible that there really are more mistakes now than there were 20 or 30 years ago. If so, I truly don't believe it's because today's writers or editors are less talented or conscientious than our predecessors. But I do think The Times today tries to do more than it did years ago. There is more late-breaking news, more variety of sections, topics and stories — and now, of course, there's the Web site, with constant updating of news and a whole new range of offerings. We also have more people handling all these tasks, but it may be that our effort to give readers more means that we fall short of perfection even more often than we once did.
Still, I'm not sure. I also think it's possible that we're making, on average, just about the same number of dumb mistakes we've always made, but that we all have a tendency to think that things were better way back when.
In any case, one thing is clear: we make a lot of mistakes. We make factual errors, which we try rigorously to correct in print and online. We misspell words, we have typos, and yes, sometimes our grammar is just awful. Some such mistakes are inevitable as we handle many tens of thousands of words every day, mostly on tight deadlines. But they should be rare, much rarer than they are. We're trying.
And believe it or not, we're happy to have readers who are sophisticated enough to notice when we slip, and who care enough to let us know.
What does CA-MRSA look like?
CA-MRSA is primarily a skin infection. It often resembles a pimple, boil or spider bite, but it quickly worsens into an abscess or puss-filled blister or sore. Patients who have sores that won’t heal or are filled with pus should see a doctor and ask to be tested for staph infection. They should not squeeze the sore or try to drain it — that can spread the infection to other parts of the skin or deeper into the body.
What can I do to lower my risk of contracting MRSA?
Bathing regularly and washing hands before meals is just a start. Wash your hands often or use an antibacterial sanitizer after you’ve been in public places or have touched handrails and other highly trafficked surfaces. Make sure cuts and scrapes are bandaged until they heal. Wash towels and sheets regularly, preferably in hot water, and leave clothes in the dryer until they are completely dry. “Staph is a pretty hearty organism,’’ said Dr. Gerba.
In 1953, she was married to Joe Lubin, an executive in his parents’ dying and finishing company.Oh, wait... perhaps that's a dyeing and finishing company. Yes, that would make more sense. It would also be a legal enterprise. Our apologies for the confusion.
An article in some copies on Wednesday about Congressional efforts to pass legislation to expand the government's electronic wiretapping powers misspelled -- yet again -- the surname of the attorney general of the United States, in three of four references. He is Alberto R. Gonzales, not Gonzalez. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Gonzales's name in at least 14 articles dating to 2001 when he became White House counsel. This year alone Mr. Gonzales's name has been misspelled in February and March, and in two articles in April.)
An article on the Street Scene page in Business Day on Friday, about the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore's entry into bankruptcy law practice, misspelled the name of another law firm that recently lost a bankruptcy specialist. It is Willkie Farr & Gallagher, not Wilkie. (The Times has misspelled the firm's name in at least 50 articles since 1958. The "Willkie" comes from Wendell L. Willkie, who joined the firm shortly after losing the 1940 presidential election to Franklin D. Roosevelt and remained there until his death in October 1944.)
A credit for pictures last Monday with an article about a reunion of the comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall misspelled the given name of the photographer. He is Yannick Grandmont, not Jannick.
An obituary on July 21 of Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, who marketed memorabilia and toys based on A. A. Milne's children's books about Winnie the Pooh, misspelled the name of the department store that agreed to let her set up Pooh Corners for children. It is Neiman Marcus, not Nieman Marcus. (The Times has misspelled the company's name in at least 195 articles since 1930.)
The long dining room table is set with pink porcelain plates, a few of which have been over-set with paper plates. Lunch is Louisiana takeout: boudin sausage, pecan pie, a local desert called ooey gooey. The talk is of a portrait, just hung, of Catherine of Aragon.
Cohen also knows how to rig an unfair fight, and to then ring maximum humiliation and humor out of each situation. The core of his movie is that he and his audience know he is playing a role, and this gives him, and them, power over the less sophisticated stooges who don’t.He's confusing "ring" with its homonym "wring." The latter means "to extract." The former is the sound those clue bells ought to make when he reads his error in print.
