The Kingpin of Fracas Hits a Logjam

Quote of the day:
“Washington is largely indifferent to truth. Truth has been reduced to a conflict of press releases and a contest of handlers. Truth is judged not by evidence, but by theatrical performances. Truth is fear, fear of opinion polls, fear of special interests, fear of judging others for fear of being judged, fear of losing power and prestige. Truth has become the acceptance of untruths.”
--Leslie Gelb, “New York Times," October 27, 1991.

Continuing in the realm of mangling, yesterday John pointed out the ever-present new-cue-ler. I’m a bit of a pronunciation snob, and I blame it on my days as a classical-music announcer.

If you’re feeling lonely and want someone to call you, the very best thing you can do is mispronounce Mozart or Wagner on the air. You will hear from the language police. Four or five dozen of them.

Of course, I should talk about the language police. Here I am complaining about nuclear and realtor. And I’m not done.

The other day I mentioned a San Diego condo complex that was called “La Boheme.” Once I was auditioning an announcer for a classical-music program and he pronounced it “La Bo-hee-mee.” It was very hard not to grin.

On a related topic, when was the last time you used any of the following words in everyday conversation: “fracas,” “woes,” “logjam” or “kingpin”?

My guess is somewhere between never and 1981. And if you used “kingpin” in 1981, you were probably bowling at the time.

Even though we never use these words, I challenge you to get through a newspaper or newscast without hearing or reading at least one of them. They are examples of overused, cliched journalistic jargon.

I’ve touched on this before, and have also ranted at length about the three S’s and two P’s. In news coverage almost every up trend is called “soaring,” “skyrocketing,” or “spiking.” And downtrends are called “plummeting” or “plunging.”

If your child goes from a B to an A in a class, do you say his grade is “skyrocketing”? Or, if it goes from A to B, is it “plummeting”? Yet economic trends of similar magnitude are routinely labeled with these words.

If excess “quotation marks” bug you, there’s a fun blog at quotation-marks.blogspot.com.