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Wednesday, April 18, 2012

News Morning News: Everything Is the Worst

Posted by Anna Minard on Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:25 AM

American Troops Pose for Picture with Dead Afghans: A soldier has released to the Los Angeles Times a series of 18 photographs taken in Afghanistan of soldiers and corpses. Do read the whole article if you have a chance—the LA Times editor talks about their decision to publish; the source talks about the reasons behind the photos. (Warning: Images probably NSFB [Not Safe for Breakfast].)

It's a Tie! Obama and Romney now in a dead heat, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll.

Secret Service Scandal: US investigators are in Cartagena, Colombia, looking to interview "women who are said to have accompanied 11 agents—including snipers and explosives experts—to their hotel rooms after a night of heavy drinking."

Let's See How Many Layers of Fucked Up This Story Can Manage: King County prosecutors allege a SeaTac man pimped out a developmentally disabled woman online while the state was paying him to be her caretaker. They further claim he was using the same computer to collect child pornography, he allegedly obtained fraudulent payday loans under the woman's name, and it sounds like she thought they were dating. "She didn't tell anyone because she didn't want him to carry out his threats to dump her," a detective reports in court documents.

Worst Hashtag Ever: A cell-phone video of a sexual assault "said to have gone viral among school kids in the township south of Johannesburg" causes "#rapevideo" to trend on Twitter in South Africa.

Have You Been Waiting for a 520 Toll Bill? It'll be arriving in a plain envelope with "no marking that says a toll bill is inside or that it's from the Washington state Department of Transportation," causing some people to throw them out.

Mariners Give Away Free Tickets: Because you had to stand in a really long line for hot dogs.

Weird Fact of the Day: Las Vegas has more single fathers per capita than any other US city. The BBC reports (but they don't report very hard). "My fat fingers don't do the ponytail thing very well," says one such dad.

Hardcore Word Nerdery Alert: The AP Stylebook approves a new (actually very common) definition of "hopefully." I would be in heaven if stories about word usage and grammar were always reported with such style!

The barbarians have done it, finally infiltrated a remaining bastion of order in a linguistic wasteland. They had already taken the Oxford English Dictionary; they had stormed the gates of Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. They had pummeled American Heritage into submission, though she fought valiantly—she continues to fight!—by including a cautionary italics phrase, “usage problem,” next to the heretical definition.

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Hopefully, now we'll have less arguments over this.

Posted by Note To Self on April 18, 2012 at 9:36 AM

Fuck the AP most hopefully.

Posted by gloomy gus on April 18, 2012 at 9:41 AM

I don't get it. What was the old definition of hopefully? And what is the newly accepted one?

Posted by drivel on April 18, 2012 at 9:42 AM

So it looks like this Secret Service busyness is gonna be a thing?

This just in: Men like to boink prostitutes. Also, rain falls down from the sky and the Earth revolves around the Sun. Stay tuned for further shocking revelations.

Posted by Original Andrew on April 18, 2012 at 9:45 AM

The hooker scandal link goes into a little bit of the part about a disputed payment. According to Talking Points Memo last night, here's what happened.

Two agents got services from the same woman and refused to pay for both of them--in other words, they wanted a buy-one-get-one-free deal. The woman got mad and complained to local cops in the lobby, who came up and banged on the doors. When the agents refused to open, the cops contacted the US Embassy, and then the shit hit the fan. All this over, I think, a $50 payment.

Is it assuming too much to say that the agents probably didn't give a tip? If only they read Dan Savage!

(To be fair, I guess even with the pretty decent salaries that Secret Service agents get, if hiring sex workers is a significant part of your personal expenses, maybe it makes sense to try to save fifty bucks--or twenty-five if you split it two ways--every now and then.)

Posted by seatackled on April 18, 2012 at 9:48 AM

@3
correctish: "he looked at her hopefully"
incorrect, but common and now accepted: "We'll be leaving soon, hopefully."

I am still upset about losing empathic to empathetic.

Posted by Allyn on April 18, 2012 at 9:50 AM

Read all the comments on the LA Times story if you want to waste your morning.

Posted by stinkbug on April 18, 2012 at 9:51 AM

This does beg the question of why hopefully was allowed access. (Was there a hooker involved in a blackmail scheme?)

Posted by seatackled on April 18, 2012 at 9:51 AM

@6 At least you still have it for describing betazoids.

Posted by OuterCow on April 18, 2012 at 10:01 AM

@7 I got through three and had to close it.

Posted by GlamB0t on April 18, 2012 at 10:12 AM

re "hopefully" -- "Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense." -- Strunk and White

Posted by pfffter on April 18, 2012 at 10:22 AM

@ 11, the latter part of your quote probably describes every person who wanted to preserve language in amber rather than let it evolve.

Posted by Matt from Denver on April 18, 2012 at 10:29 AM

Obama and the Naked Swap

I agree with everything President Obama says about oil speculation --- but I disagree and despise his actions in support of massive speculation.

President Obama reappointed the author of much of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Neal Wolin, and two major supporters of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Gary Gensler to the CFTC and Larry Summers, who is no longer with his administration.

President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Geithner, and his treasury department, strongly supported keeping naked swaps --- the most valuable tool in large-scale commodities speculation.

To date, all actions of the Obama administration have allowed and encouraged the very speculation he denounces!

Much of the entire speculation spectrum: (1) unlimited number of credit default swaps allowed against bonds, etc. (naked swaps); (2) unlimited number of commodity futures contracts allowed against specific commodities or categories; (3) unlimited number of investors allowed per hedge fund; and (4) naked short selling via DTCC’s Stock Borrow Program, were realized during the Clinton administration, and expanded under the Bush and Obama administrations!

I am a lifelong democrat --- I would love to support Obama, but Obama, Biden, and both Clintons are simply just some more neocons.

Posted by sgt_doom on April 18, 2012 at 10:30 AM

@12 I know. What a couple of fuddy-duddies. Although, I have to give credit to Strunk and White for helping me clean up my prose back in the day. They're like the grammer version of Statler and Waldorf. I find their aspersions toward certain turns of phrase very amusing.

Posted by pfffter on April 18, 2012 at 10:37 AM

*grammar!

Posted by pfffter on April 18, 2012 at 10:38 AM

@13: then you better get on Friedman's Bloomberg train! it's leaving the station! toot toot!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/opinio…

Posted by Max Solomon on April 18, 2012 at 10:39 AM

White did write about a preserving a pig in amber. Though I guess the message is mixed because he let the spider "evolve."

Posted by seatackled on April 18, 2012 at 10:57 AM

In regards to the soldiers, I was incredibly happy to learn that the corpses were of suicide bombers, and not innocent civilians, although I really wish our soldiers would wisen up enough to stop posing for the fucking pictures.

But you send a guy on six combat tours, and can you really expect him to still live by the social mores of civilized life when he is in a war zone? Watch body parts fly around for ten years, I suppose it just becomes kind of normal after awhile. Sadly.

Posted by Theodore Gorath on April 18, 2012 at 10:58 AM

@11, The Elements of Style was published ninety-four years ago.

Posted by Fnarf

on April 18, 2012 at 10:58 AM

I wonder if they'll change other misused words or phrases which the public have, for all intensive purposes, corrupted?

Posted by Cracker Jack on April 18, 2012 at 11:05 AM

#4

You were saying:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NH5yK3ZN…

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on April 18, 2012 at 11:06 AM

Hopefully the people at AP have read this article:

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of…

Posted by Unregistered User on April 18, 2012 at 11:11 AM

Hopefully the AP is enjoying their new Pulitzer and will publish A. Birch Steen's obituary post haste.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on April 18, 2012 at 11:11 AM

Dick Clark died. I had him on my dead pool list but was expecting Robin Gibb.

Posted by Keister Button on April 18, 2012 at 1:31 PM

#20 - for all intents and purposes, not "intensive purposes"

Posted by catsnbanjos on April 18, 2012 at 2:38 PM

@25,

I think (or hope) that #20 was making a funny.

Posted by keshmeshi on April 18, 2012 at 2:56 PM

Preventative is the word that chaps my ass. The best remedy when someone uses it in lieu of the simple, correct, and perfectly adequate preventive is to slip preventational or preventatative into your reply.

Posted by PCM on April 18, 2012 at 6:18 PM

Get over it, prescriptivists. You lost. People have figured out that language is, always has been, and always will be a living thing that changes and evolves, and that efforts to define a single form of a language as the one and only "correct" one are both inherently elitist and doomed to failure. People want dictionaries to tell them what words actually mean, not what some anal-retentive busybody thinks they ought to mean. And they don't want words omitted just because someone thinks it's not a "real word" despite the fact that it is used as a word by plenty of people. Just because a word is new and/or didn't come from a person of high social status doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, a word. Get over yourselves, already.

Posted by I have always been... east coaster on April 18, 2012 at 10:35 PM

@28- I reserve the right to continue to look down my nose at people who use Bushisms unironically. Also, bootylicious is still not a word.

For the rest: Sure, sounds great.

Posted by Christampa on April 19, 2012 at 2:16 AM

@29 I'm all for drawing a distinction between formal and informal speech, and agree that "bootylicious" is not an appropriate word to use in formal contexts. An informal word is, however, still a word. People use it as a word and they know what it means, therefore, it's a word.

Posted by I have always been... east coaster on April 19, 2012 at 3:03 PM