Linguistic Pet Peeves

Everyone has words, phrases, or expressions that can be called pet peeves. I have two of them. The first pet peeve is one you often see printed in newspaper obituaries: "So-and-so died surrounded by family and friends." It irks me because, one, it probably isn't true, and two, it makes those who knew the person sound like a bunch of vultures eagerly waiting for death to come so they can begin the reading of the will or to grab as many family heirlooms as they can. Plus, how would they know the exact moment of death? Was a doctor or undertaker present at the bedside beforehand?

The second pet peeve is "So-and-so is 95 years young." If you're 95, you're not young. Saying someone is 95 years young, instead of 95 years old, stigmatizes old age and is another example of ageism.

Printing Mishaps

In my many years as a freelance journalist I have experienced several printing errors that have appeared in articles I've written for newspapers.

Aside from the occasional misspelled word or factual error, or God forbid, the complete rewriting of an article by an imperious editor, I have experienced such mishaps as a mangled or missing byline, jumbled paragraphs (something that happened in a syndicated article I wrote about Spike Lee's Malcolm X movie), and the use of my words about the famed Cotton Club in someone else's article without attribution (otherwise known as plagiarism). The latter mishap would  have been hard for me to prove since the offending party would probably claim that the lack of attribution and quotation marks was a printer's error and not a deliberate theft from my article syndicated by the Los Angeles Times.

But the one thing that has not happened to me, and I pray it never does, is something I saw while going through an old issue of one of New York's daily newspapers. The whole bottom half of the page was so ink smeared, it was impossible to read what was printed. I felt sorry for the writers to whom this happened. I can only hope that the paper corrected the problem in later editions.