A while back I took a look at some of the words used and misused in local television newscasts. As anyone who’s a regular reader of this column knows, I can’t leave well enough alone, so this week I”ll bite the hand that feeds me and take a closer look at some of the words that have caught my attention while I perused this newspaper recently.
Not all of these words were misused — in fact some were downright impressive (and some I even had to look up). Some words are from local reporters’ stories while others come from state and national sources or even from some of the people quoted in those pieces. In other words, there’s plenty of blame (and credit) to go around.
First up I’ll address one of my pet peeves: the incorrect positioning of “only.” The first line of a paragraph read, “Maine only added 20 confirmed coronavirus cases. . . .” Maine only added them? It didn’t do anything else with them? Obviously the reporter should have written that Maine had “added only 20” confirmed cases. And to be completely impartial, should have left the word out.
A recent article that talked about the safeguards stores are taking to prevent the spread of coronavirus went on to say, “Hopefully, all these steps are helping.” “Hopefully” used to never be used as a sentence adverb because there was no one around to do the hoping. Word maven James J. Kilpatrick once admonished us that “hopefully” should be avoided unless you’re talking about “a whaler’s wife looking hopefully out over the horizon.” But times change, and so has the use of “hopefully.”
The writers of two recent pieces about the president and his administration were trying to make the same point, but one of them missed the mark. The first scribe wrote, “This administration, there’s a lot of disinterest and disrespect for science. . . .” In the other piece, Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post that the president knows only one dance “and seems uninterested in learning any other.”
Zakaria was on target; “uninterested” means “not interested,” while someone who’s disinterested is impartial or objective.
On the bright side, there’s a lot of clever writing to be found within the newspaper’s pages. For example, when Iran constructed a mock-up of an American aircraft carrier to shoot at, Jon Gambrell of the Associated Press called the ship a “faux foe.”
I also learned that those outdoor dining spaces that extend into on-street parking spaces are called “parklets,” and that a campaign that’s based on a social platform and requires very little effort of the participants is called “slacktivism.” Good stuff if you’re into recently minted words.
I’d like to finish with a little newspaper trivia that I believe is worth thinking about. According to Betteridge’s law, “Any headline ending in a question mark can be answered safely by ‘No.'” (See the headline of this column.)
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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