Funny Sunday Headlines

Nothing better than potty humor from the newspapers to enliven a Sunday morning:

• From the Marin IJ: Teasing a story about a local female skier, editors on page 1 presented: “Armenian Team Taps Skier From Novato.”

This is one of those verb choices that, while tailor-made for tight-real estate newsprint, really should be stricken from the copy desk’s tool belt.

• From the New York Times, a photo caption accompanying the story "A Balance Between the Factory and the Local Farm" reads:

Pavle Milic decided to serve only Arizona wines at FnB, his Scottsdale restaurant. He says that in blind teste tests, people think that the wines come from famous wine regions.

I don't know about you, but a teste test sounds really unpalatable, until you discover that the singular of testes is testis.

Even so, don't look for Rocky Mountain Oysters for Mr. Milic's customers, it appears--test or no test.

Paging New York Times' Copy Chief

The headline on Billy Preston's obituary in the renowned New York Times:

Obituary: Billy Preston, 59, reknowned keyboardist

Yes, it seems we all knowed Billy Preston.

P.S. Preston died in 2006, and if memory serves, The Times hadn't gutten its staff just yet.

Eliot Spitzer and the language of shock

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York is in very hot water after the New York Times linked him to a high-priced prostitution ring. Keith L. T. Wright, a Democratic assemblyman from Harlem, said it most entertainingly when he tried to describe the news' affect on Albany:

“We’re at a total standstill. Everybody is stunned. Everybody is absolutely stunned.”

Unequivocally. Absolutely. Totally. Darn tootin'.

I hustled to the dictionary to understand the difference between a prostitute and a call girl, having come in contact with neither during my lifetime. (Honest). Prostitute is the umbrella term. It defines a woman who has sexual intercourse for money. Its root is the Latin prostituere, meaning to expose for sale. There's also the variant statuere, which is to cause to stand. And I'll let that stand right there.

A call girl is a prostitute with whom an appointment can be made by telephone. In America in the 1930s it was also used to describe a prostitute who could be called upon at a brothel, but that description has fallen out of favor. Today call girls are generally more expensive prostitutes favored by wealthy businessmen, athletes and, um, politicians who are trying to be discreet.
Doesn't always work out that way, however.

Death of a sesquipedalian writer

William F. Buckley Jr., who for decades warmed my father's heart and chilled the necks of liberals, died today at 82. Died at his desk. Died writing a column.
The New York Times' headline must have Buckley raising a heavenly martini in toast:

William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right

The Times indirectly defined that fabulous word we learned as kids when it made reference to Buckley's use of "ten-dollar words."

Safire On Language

Columnist William Safire is retired from the New York Times, although he continues to write "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine. Some years after I got the Edwin Newman books on language, someone gave me Safire's "On Language," which is and will be a classic. He had a chapter in there about whether to use "dived" or "dove" as the past tense. He weaved through arguments on both sides--arguing strongly, though, that "dived" is correct--until concluding that he wasn't sure it mattered.
"I'm not a hawk on dove," he wrote.
(His column today focuses on the word "change," beaten like an old horse in this year's presidential campaign.)