I never

Should you be wondering, no. You can't get there from here:

"In 49 years I've never seen anything like it," the Tigers manager said.

War on eagles!

First the freedom-hating Kenyan came for the sparrows, and I said nothing, for I had better things to do than hop around under the feeder and wait for the cardinals to drop some seeds.

Then he came for the bald eagle, which looks like it's ready to defend itself. Is there a message there for all freedom-loving Americans?!?!?!?!?!

As usual, this installment is brought to you by the Washington Free Beacon through The Fox Nation, neither of which is much help in slogging through the Federal Register to see how much this outbreak differs from the (ahem) 2007-2009 War on Eagles. .

Today in quantitative methods

In case you haven't been keeping up with the Breitbart empire since the great man died, here's today's entry from "The Vetting" (the definite article, not the pale imitation on the Hannity program):

President Barack Obama is hailed by his supporters and the mainstream media as one of the most brilliant men ever to hold the office. However, his refusal to release his academic records, his admitted deficiencies as a student, and his frequent factual errors--even in his chosen field of constitutional law--have cast doubt upon his supposed genius. Now, Breitbart News has established that Obama's grades and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores may have been even lower than those of his supposedly less capable predecessor, George W. Bush.

And how did we establish that one number "may" be lower than another number (thus enabling The Fox Nation's question at right)?

Breitbart News has learned that the transfer class that entered Columbia College in the fall of 1981 with Obama was one of the worst in recent memory, according to Columbia officials at the time.

Do tell!

A Nov. 18, 1981 article in the Columbia Spectator, “Tight Housing Discourages Transfer Applications to CC,” written by student Jeremy Feldman and quoting admissions officials, reported: “On paper at least, the quality of the students accepted [as transfers] has declined along with the number of applicants, the officials say.”
Read more »

Never forget

It's not really surprising when a Date Which Will Live In Infamy gets an extra decade tacked on. The surprise is that it doesn't happen more often.

It's impossible to tell from the armchair here whether this is a reporter or editor error. Sometimes reporters do silly stuff because they think they'll be whacked on the wrist if they don't. Sometimes editors think they haven't done enough, so they look for extra things to improve. Either way, it's unnecessary. If you want to call them "the 9/11 attacks" or "the 2001 terrorist attacks," that's fine. Some part of the public might scratch its head in puzzlement, but some part of the public is always going to answer "never heard of him" when asked if they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the president. But "the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks" is overstyling.

I do think we can conclude one thing it isn't: a style-checking program gone feral. Style wouldn't add "2011" to "Sept. 11" here, because dates within a year of publication wouldn't ger the year anyway.

One born every minute

Further evidence that cluelessness afflicts the newsroom as well as the public at large:

Lottery players at Tuzzo's Circle News in Hollywood think today's their day. So do those at a Pembroke Pines Publix and others at Government Discount in Miami.

At least, the numbers are on their side. Those South Florida retailers rank high among venues that have sold tickets awarding $600 or more, according to a Sun Sentinel analysis of Florida Lottery winnings since 1993.

(Visit SunSentinel.com/lotterydata to see where lottery tickets with payouts of $600 or more have been sold since 1993.)

Sigh. Yes, it's generally true that many lottery players, wherever they are, "think today's their day." Whether players at these three venues are more likely to hold that view than others isn't the sort of question you can answer with a feature story. Whether "the numbers are on their side" is a bit simpler: No. They aren't.

It's a free country, and Congress shall make no law abridging, &c &c &c, so you're perfectly entitled to do whatever you want with your "analysis" time and your frontpage space. In some cosmic sense, sharing popular delusions about the lottery isn't any worse than publishing the horoscopes. But if you'd like to be taken seriously when you proclaim "study says" or "poll reveals," you need to run a disclaimer with your "want to hit the lottery" tales:

On the other hand, you might as well go ahead and play your mom's birthday. It has the same predictive value as this analysis: None.

There's a reason it's called the stupidity tax, you know.

He has a rebel

I appreciate the stylebook's patience, but don't you wish -- just once or twice -- it would be a little blunter* with the questions that arrive at "Ask the Stylebook"?

Dear Bethesda:

No.

Love,
The stylebook

Contractions aren't a "grammar" issue. They're primarily a register issue, and in some cases you can fashion a pretty spectacular ambiguity issue from them, but you can't roll them up and hit your colleagues upside the head with them in the name of "grammar."

Contracted forms of "have" lie on a scale of cluefulness from "fine" to "gah." At the one end, there's no question that I've got a secret and I have got a secret are the same clause. The second is more formal, but formality isn't a function of grammar. Toward the middle, we sometimes vary by region: American English is pretty casual about shortening auxiliary "has," as in He's got an idea, but less so than our transmarine friends in shortening the main verb: I've an idea. 

Out at the far end is grammar: not a lack of it, but too much of it about too many things. Heather is a camera could become Heather's a camera with no problem, but Heather has two Uzis is not the same thing as Heather's two Uzis. (One's a clause, one is a noun phrase.) So much as I might prefer the shorter answer, the longer one is something like:

Dear Bethesda:

's is a perfectly grammatical shortening of has. In some cases, it may annoy your supervisor, so you should memorize those cases and be prepared to recite some swill about the evils of contractions that has nothing to do with "grammar." In others, the contraction might be grammatical, but since it's "grammatical" about some meaning other than the one you want, you should avoid it.

If you can't already tell the difference at better than chance levels, you should consider changing majors very soon.

Love,
The stylebook
 
* Bethesda, Bethesda, you have no complaint
You are what you are and you ain't what you ain't
... sorry

Missed it by that much

Just a few questions:

If you've said "nearly worthy of Hollywood," haven't you covered all the ground that "dramatic" covers?

What made the sting fall short of Hollywood-worthy? How about a little help here for all those frustrated colleagues with a screenplay in the desk drawer who want to get it right the first time?

If you have to proclaim the Hollywood-worthiness, shouldn't you set it off with commas?

As with the comma case discussed below, this one doesn't call for enforcement of a prescriptive rule just for the same of rulemaking. But it does support a sense of wariness toward reporters' value judgments: not that they're wrong in all cases, but that left on their own, they'll do the darndest things.