I'm not sure why Michael Miner, who writes for the ChicagoReader on the local press scene, decided to dredge up the brouhaha over the recently closed-down listServ JournoList. I mean, it's been all over teh Internets™ for weeks now and doesn't really seem to have much to do with Chicago.
Nevertheless, I immensely appreciated Miner's shameless use of the word 'listServ' in such sentences as:
The Daily Caller exposé of the JournoList listserv [emphasis added] was a parody of a modern major newspaper investigation....
Miner then proceeds to quote fellow journalist Chris Hayes who -- sacré bleu! -- also uses the term.
Then what should I come upon but a post by James Fallows in the Atlantic (no less) where he commits the same crime, using 'listServ' four times! Unfortunately in this case, the language pedants must have gotten to Fallows since he quickly follows up with an apology saying he didn't realize the term was 'trade-marked'.
My reaction was, here you have three extremely articulate language professionals using this word in precisely the way most people understand it -- and yet one of them has to apologize because it's trade-marked by some company that neither they nor probably the rest of the English-speaking world has ever heard of.
Does this make sense? By the same reasoning, 'scotch-tape' should only be used when referring to products from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
In any case, Fallows later emailed me saying his apology was only partly serious (which reading between the lines of his post you could kind of tell).
We used to just call it 'online'.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Thu, 10/22/2009 - 12:54am.
What he said:
"I did have a conversation with an airline employee, but it was certainly not like this silly gossip column made it out to be."
What really happened,
"[Sen. David Vitter] ... joined what we've dubbed the 'Mile-Low Club' by going ballistic on an airline worker after missing a flight from Washington’s Dulles airport to New Orleans."
-- Brought to you by the Fake Empathy Liberation Front.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 2:32pm.
The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook has just come out. The Chronicle of Higher Education points to the considerable effort the publishers have made to give this "bible of the undergraduate paper-writing process" a substantial web component. They have a password-protected website that contains the full text of the manual along with a whole ton of support material.
Good for them! It's great they're making such an effort. But what I want to know is why they still refuse to acknowledge that 'website' consists of only one word. Doing so would be a sign of true progress.
Not to be too political here (I really try not to be) but I was reminded by a segment on NPR's Weekend Edition, that the original opening line of Hillary Clinton's campaign was the almost unbearable cliche:
"Let the Conversation Begin"
It's interesting to read in most analyses of her loss to Sen. Obama (here's one), that it was specifically a lack of imagination, flexibility, and attention to detail that proved her undoing.
Perhaps the two are related...
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sat, 06/07/2008 - 10:07am.
Max Kalehoff has joined the League. Jake McKee is still on the fence.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Tue, 10/09/2007 - 2:51pm.
First, Hillary Clinton begins her campaign for the presidency with the incredibly vapid statement:
Let the Conversation Begin
Then, the Washington Post counters in defense of a completely silly column on her anatomy:
Let the Cleavage Conversation Begin
Now Sam Boyd from Tapped has had enough. He writes:
Can We Not Let the Cleavage Conversation Begin
My suggestion is, maybe we can stop the Conversation long enough to actually say something. I mean, is there anyone who can still use this word with a straight face?
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Mon, 07/30/2007 - 8:32am.
It had to happen. The long-reigning champ of "Uber Platitude" may be about to cede its title to a brawney new upstart.
Long a favorite on the Sincerity Circuit, the "Conversation Schtick" received a blow to its mid-drifts after trend-setting The Onion declared: "Let the conversation end."
This set the stage for a possible upset in the "Platitude Sweepstakes" with new-comer "Disruptive innovation" (child of plain old Innovation) about to gain the upper-hand.
Its use among geek commentators to indicate innovation that changes everything (as opposed to innovation that leaves everything exactly the same), is growing so disruptively that it looks set to overtake rival "Conversation" in no time.
Is it me or does the use of the word, 'conversation' for just about any communication between human beings cause others to cringe as well?
First, the guy on our local NPR Station talked of having some politician in for a "conversation" back in March; then Hillary Clinton runs on a platform called "Let the Conversation Begin". Now, a report just out on social networks in libraries is called, "Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation". It concludes (not surprisingly): "...[T]here is now a need to broaden both the scope and scale of the conversation."
Is there no end to this? It's like using 'luxury' to describe condo units. The word begins to lose all meaning -- or even worse begins to take on the opposite of what's intended -- simply because it's used so much.
When I hear 'conversation', increasingly I think: 'insincere attempt to get my attention for trivial, banal or commercial purposes'. Sorry, but I'm just conversation'ed out.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Sun, 02/04/2007 - 4:14pm.
