Grammar Creep

So . . . I was doing some construction work on my Web site (more on this below) and blog, and I found myself typing the words Web site in an Update to an old post (this one, if you must know). As I typed the words in the update, I wondered–because I often forget things like this–whether it was Web site or web site. I googled the term, and among other things, I found this, a post by the Grammarist:

A few editorially conservative publications still use the two-word Web site, but this relic of the 1990s has fallen out of favor throughout the English-speaking world. The one-word, uncapitalized website now prevails by an overwhelming margin.

Now, given that I’d just been updating my own post about checking sources, I decided to check the Grammarist’s claims–he or she didn’t give any sources, though s/he did give some examples, all of which date from 2011 to 2012. (Based on this, I assume the undated post also dates to 2012.)

I have a favorite place to go to do this kind of thing: The Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA. Unfortunately, I just realized, apparently COCA’s database only includes words through 2012; as a result, it’s difficult to test the Grammarist’s claim about what’s happening right “now.” Today. 2014. That said, I could test his/her claim as of 2012. Drum roll . . .

And the winner is! . . . . Web site or web site at 15,245 hits–my COCA search returned both versions in one batch. (A quick and very unscientific scan of the results tells me that it’s about 2/3rds to 1/3rd Web site to web site.) The one-word version, website, comes in at about half that, 7,318.

The Grammarist was correct about The New York Times. It’s Web site all the way, but so is The Washington Post–again, that’s as of 2012. (Though I did a search of The Washington Post’s Web site–web site, website, who can keep track–and discovered The Post must be of two minds in 2014 since I found instances of both the two-word, capitalized version and the one-word version. Oh well.)

Me? I’m in a quandary. Is mine an “editorially conservative” blog much like the politically liberal Times? Or should I position myself on the vanguard of the one-word, uncapitalized movement? I think I’ll stick with The New York Times on this one. Though I’m no prescriptionist, I do tend to move slowly when it comes to the English language. The AP Style Guide disagrees with me, The Times, and The (bi-polar) Post, by the way.

 

Critically Thinking About Ferguson and Other News Stories

Diane Rhem did a piece today titled Judging The Credibility Of News In The Digital Age. It was quite good. Because I’m preparing to teach this fall–I teach writing–a comment by Tom Rosenstiel caught my attention. Rosenstiel is the executive director of the American Press Institute and co-author of Blur: How to Know What to Believe in the Age of Information Overload. He suggested that people generally and young people in particular need to think more critically about the news.

To illustrate how to do this, he mentioned a checklist of questions, part of a larger article, that you can find on the American Press Institute’s website. To anyone familiar with critical thinking, the list of questions contains no surprises. To those who aren’t, it should prove helpful. In brief, the list contains six questions we should ask ourselves as we read:

1. Type: What kind of content is this?

2. Source: Who and what are the sources cited and why should I believe them?

3. Evidence: What’s the evidence and how was it vetted?

4. Interpretation: Is the main point of the piece proven by the evidence?

5. Completeness: What’s missing?

6. Knowledge: Am I learning every day what I need?

You should read the entire piece because Rosentiel discusses each point in much greater detail. The additional flesh on those six bones will help you better negotiate all the information you consume daily.

Question 5 proved particularly interesting when, later in the show, Diane fielded e-mail questions from the listening audience. One listener praised the advent of live streaming video, which enabled him or her to view what was going on in Ferguson firsthand and draw her/his own conclusions.

Adam Miller, another guest on the show, responded that people need to be careful because even live coverage doesn’t capture the whole picture. To illustrate, he said that the other night he was following fiver or six different live streams simultaneously. On one stream, he saw the police responding somewhat violently to what appeared to be peaceful protestors. Then he looked at another stream that showed another view of the scene, and he noticed some people throwing molotav cocktails. Suddenly, the actions of the police made more sense–in that instance, at least.

 

Look (and Be) Smart by Doing Smart: The Power of Good Sources

This morning I checked out The Corner at National Review Online and found a post by John Fund titled Setting the Record Straight on Jim Crow. Fund is an experienced and well-respected political journalist, who, by the way, leans to the Right. In Setting the Record Straight, Fund links to and essentially summarizes a 41-page booklet on the Jim Crow South published by the American Civil Rights Union, an organization he characterizes as “a conservative group” led by form attorney general Ed Meese and former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell.

In short, both Fund’s piece and the ACRU’s booklet claim that the Jim Crow South was a horrible place, blacks there–and elsewhere–suffered horrible atrocities, and the Democrats were in charge and obstructed Republican efforts to bring about changes through various civil rights bills. The bills either never got out of Congress or were not signed by whatever Democrat held the presidency at the time.

Now, I have little problem with that narrative. I am no expert on the post-Civil War South up through 1964, but I have read quite a bit about it, and Fund’s and the ACRU’s essential narrative holds true based on what I’ve read. I’m confident some on the left will disagree. That’s fine. I’m not here to debate the finer points of the history of civil rights. No, I want to pick a bone with the ACRU’s booklet. Let’s begin (and end) with the 72 footnotes or sources the booklet relies on to back up its version of that history.

First, I must admit I haven’t checked most of the sources the ACRU cites. Instead, I want to focus on just one of them, the last one, number 72, the source for the LBJ quote on page 34 of the booklet:

I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic Party for the next 200 years.

That’s an explosive quote with an ugly word, supposedly from the mouth of a president of the United States no less. The quote begs for good sourcing. And what do we get?

Ronald Rohlfing, citing Ronald Kessler, “Inside the White House” (http://www. canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/40889)

Hells Bells! This source is twice removed from the actual source, Robert M. MacMillan, a former steward on Air Force One, at least according to Kessler, whose book Inside the White House was not well received by some critics. Could the quote be accurate? Could LBJ have said something so scurrilous? Certainly, if you believe Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of LBJ. Caro’s four (soon to be five) volume work on the late president is full of stories that will open your eyes to what a vulgar, ruthless man LBJ could be (to be fair, he was also a hard-working friend of the poor–in other words a complex man).  But did he really say THAT?

A word search of Caro’s books on Amazon didn’t turn up that quote. A Google search of reviews of Kessler’s book returned many people disputing the story. Had the ACRU done just the minimal search that I just did, they would have discovered that. Instead, they decided to end their booklet with that disturbing quote based not even on the second-hand source who actually quoted MacMillan. Instead, they quoted a third-hand source, some obscure blogger on an obscure Web site. That is shoddy scholarship, scholarship that unnecessarily casts the rest of the booklet in a bad light, scholarship not worthy of a college freshman. Why?

And that’s not all, at least 8 of the 72 footnotes for the piece are to Web sites or authors whose business is conservative polemics. Ann Coulter, James Taranto, FreeRepublic.com, and the like. Do these people tell the truth? Yes, quite often. I particularly enjoy reading Taranto. But they are not strong sources unless you’re preaching to the Republican choir, and they are easy targets for those whose primary business it is to shoot the messenger, so nobody pays attention to the message–even when it’s accurate.  Don’t believe me? Google the LBJ quote and watch the left attack Mr. Kessler.

As if to make the point I’m trying to make above, Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute posted a video today about a Verizon ad that has gone viral. Watch it below and see if she doesn’t say essentially the same thing I just said, but on another subject. You might also find Ann Althouse’s take on the video/controversy interesting. In fact, why not watch the two videos–the Verizon one and Sommers’s response–on Althouse’s Web site, one following immediately after the first one. Enjoy.

Update: In the course of doing some work on my blog and Website, I watched the following YouTube video again and discovered that instead of just one video, the YouTube link leads to an ever increasing number of videos by Christine Hoff Sommers–aka the Factual Feminist. Thus, I thought it wise to point out that though I find her interesting and informative, I neither posted the link as an advertisement for her YouTube channel, nor should you assume that I endorse everything she says. (Given that the number of videos appears to increase almost daily, that would be stupid.) I do endorse her overall message, however: check your facts, not your privilege.

 

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