Congratulations, Washington Post copy desk jerk who wasted god knows how many years at an expensive university to wind up fixing typos while waiting for a layoff notice: You managed to ruin a pretty interesting story about the president’s nightly habit of reading 10 letters from regular Americans sent to the White House. How did you accomplish this low-grade dick move? You put a [sic] in Barack Obama’s handwritten note to a lady struggling with debt, joblessness and cancer. You showed the few people who bother to slog through a WaPo news-feature that you can correct the president’s grammar. How did that idiot Obama not write “gives” instead of “give,” anyway? Impeach?
It’s an interesting article, if melodramatic in that old 1980s’ “Let’s win a newspaper-industry award” style. People write letters and send emails to the White House. Some are angry, some are sad, some are saying “High Five,” others are in despair. There’s a backstory with the unknown office building full of secret staffers sorting the mail, and the other backstory with the sad lady getting cancer and being pregnant and having the credit-card debt and not being able to pay for child care with a $7-an-hour warehouse-store job.
But fuck all that, right? Some tight-ass on the copy desk finally got a chance to put [sic] in the transcription of a handwritten note from the president:
Only while the president presses pen to paper do the messages remain private and belong exclusively to him.
“Thanks for the very kind and inspiring letter,” he wrote to Cline. “I know times are tough, but knowing there are folks out there like you and your husband give [sic] me confidence that things will keep getting better!”
THIS IS OUR WATERGATE BECAUSE COME ON, “KNOWING … (10 more words) GIVE?” HA HA GODDAMNED IDIOT, “KNOWING … GIVES ME CONFIDENCE,” UGH THIS GUY, TREASON? [Washington Post]
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{ 79 comments }
Fuck grammar nazis, they are insufferable. Whats strange is, most of them are outright proud of being assholes.
I think this means the SC can overturn Obama’s confidence
It’s a greater crime to fuck up one’s grammer (SIC), but I think the greater crime is employing pathetic people who should spent their last days eating tapioca and pooping into a sack like grumpy gumpy gramps and world’s biggest chickenshit, Dickey Cohen.
enforcement of grammar rules is often self-congratulatory
Our president has such pretty handwriting. Why is there nothing about that in the right wing mainstream media? They’ve buried the led. It should be “president has excellent handwriting skills”.
Can we send this grammar nazi to a teabagger rally? He can get [sic] everywhere!
Yes, he’s a spectacular failure because at the end of a grueling 10-hour workday with the weight of the world on his shoulders he left out an “s”! On the bright side, your average teabagger will think our Hopey is somehow ill.
/Snark off
Yes, it’s a dick move. BUT the letter is also proof that Obama is writing such things in the moment, without planning his way into some politic reflection on what will be the best thing to say. What happens in his letter is a classic example of a drifting antecedent. The grammar of the sentence tells us that his knowing gives him hope, but the nouns immediately preceding the verb are you and your husband and, before that, folks, both of which would take the plural verb. What Obama is doing is thinking about these people, not about his knowing, at least for the amount of time it takes him to write this letter. It’s nice.
/Snark on
I don’t remember the Post ever correcting Duhbya’s grammar. Oh right, he was known for speaking and writing perfectly.
a cleer sine of socilism frum hour prezudint
You know who else had some difficulty with conjugating the simple indicative present tense form of English verbs? HITLER!
A [sic] isn’t NECESSARILY bitchy, y’all. If it’s marking off an actual error, it’s doing its job of clearing up typo ambiguity. If they’d skipped it, wouldn’t you wonder if this was their typo or his charming authenticity or whatever?
Not surprising, if you’ve ever flipped through the psychobilly/oi! ‘zine Barry used to edit.
Oh, God. When I was too young to know better, I tried out for what was supposed to be a one-week trial as a copy editor at a large, well-respected paper. I left after two days because they literally gave me a pain in the neck with their endless 45-minute arguments over conjunctives and comma splices and such, which they enjoyed way too much. And as someone said days ago, I know what literally means. (I figured if it took three copy editors 45 minutes to reach a decision, most readers wouldn’t freaking know the goddammed difference.)
Who give a shit what wingnut rag haz to say?
They want you to be able to tell the difference between Barry’s typos and their own.
Probably wrote it while smoking a Newport with his negro feet on some desk also!
Leaving aside the point the being a grammar nazis is a surer indicator of small penis size than Porsche ownership, it seems ridiculous to whine about what was an obvious typo, rather than a failure to understand English grammar. This is particularly galling douchiness given that the media pretends that Palin’s word-salad is not diagnostic of mental illness or retardation. Oh right, and we just spent 8 years pretending that the “free world” (whatever that is supposed to mean) was not being lead by an illiterate half-wit.
[re=546589]llemma[/re]: Yes, you’re right. But. The copy editor, or another editor, could have overruled that instinct and realized it would be a dick move, and instead preceded the letter with a simple, “The following transcript reprints the president’s letter as it was written,” or something like that. See? Less dickish, tastes great.
Sigh, this will be the new “teleprompter” by the end of the day. I can’t wait to try to translate the inevitable Teabag sign that will try to bash Obama about his horrible grammar.
Isn’t this the newspaper that got rid of all its copy editors and now ends articles in the middle of sentences at times?
Fucking gerunds. I have always hated them.
That’s SIC. In the words of the Korean philosopher Geseki, “Sic this, seki.”
Proper speech are for squares. Negro dialect, also.
Well after all Muslin was his first language.
I don’t recall, however, anything like the following:
“Let Freedom Reign [sic]“
So the Post does actually have editors. Would it be possible to have one of them correct the factual errors and outright lies on their opinion page?
Copy editors deal with grammar nazis all the time — and if this guy didn’t put [sic] in there, he’d be hearing from all the others (yes, they eat their own — it’s their primitive, brutal way) about how he’d missed a mistranscription of Obama’s writing. I could go on and on about copy editing, but you’d have to get me really stoned first.
[re=546580]Nappied Hypotenuse[/re]: Right on.
I will forgive sic-ness, but when footnotes start appearing I must put my foot down, unless it’s APA format. Then ibid.
Well, rules of grammar are supposed to mean something. I’m a little testy about certain things that people should know (remember “its” vs “it’s”?). But I would have given anyone a pass on a personal note like this.
[re=546611]JMP[/re]: That’s not the job description. Their job is to make sure the factual errors and outright lies are spelled correctly and grammatically correct.
Now that they’re suddenly concerned with grammatical errors, I can’t wait to see the WaPo’s transcript of Sarah Palin’s next speech:
Hello, [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] .
God [sic] America!
[re=546610]Mr Blifil[/re]: My favorite W quote also concerned MLK; when Coretta presented W with a portrait of MLK at a White house ceremony, W’s response was “thank you. I can’t wait to hang it. heh.” Noone pointed out W’s grave faux pas of forgetting to wear his Klan regalia when making lynching jokes to MLK’s widow.
[re=546618]FMA[/re]: I meant to add, if the factual errors and lies were misspelled or ungrammatical, it would have a negative effect on their columnists’ credibility.
Two theories:
Since the 9-1-1/9-11 incident, the editors are taking no chance of crappy grammar being pinned on them, they have gone into full defensive asshole posture.
or
The WaPo people are secret teabaggers who just want to prove that Obama is an inarticulate illiterate fraud without his teleprompter.
i cant beleive he cant spell!!!! inpeech!!!!!!!!!!!
[re=546617]proudgrampa[/re]: I used to run a newspaper and over-ruled the copy editors all the time. Any desk editor worth a damn would have pulled the [sic] out, let it run and not lost any sleep over it. This isn’t some child’s letter to Santa (or Strom Thurmond’s letter to Satan) for crissakes.
[re=546600]An American in Toronto[/re]: New teabagger sign: “Learn two right Nobama!!”
[re=546618]FMA[/re]: Ah yes; in school they taught me that the function of the media was to inform the public of actual facts, and it’s been hard to disabuse myself of that particular untruth.
And for what? Here is their audience, a WaPo reader, chosen totally at random [sic]:
carleen09 wrote:
And so,after I painstakingly read all the comments to piece of WAPO Drivel totally
pathetic attempt to con the WAPO readers into somehow believing our American hater
Marxist Dictator from Kenya,fake Messiah
his Arrrogance Barack Hussein Obama is a
Second Coming of Jesus no less,all I can
say is WAPO you tried to con us and got
caught doing it here.
As, Barack Hussein Obama is most totally
arrogant,completely lacking in compassion,
disasterous incompetent,dictatorial loser
to ever set foot in the White House.
Does anyone beleive that carleen09 would have noticed a dropped “s”?
Get down with the SIC-ness!
[re=546626]southern mark smith[/re]: Jesus. Is that for real?? Carleen09′s gotta be a Wonketteer at work.
The only people who care about grammar are latte-drinking Liberal Elitists.
[re=546565]Prommie[/re]: Right on, man/sister! Oh, and it’s “what’s”, the apostrophe denoting a contraction of “what is”.
[re=546619]loquaciousmusic[/re]: She is one [sic] bitch.
At least Obama doesn’t right with Crayons.
Oh, man, that blingee.
Little-known fact: I voted for Barack Obama specifically [i]because[/i] he shits cash-money. It’s something we all found out about back in his Chicago days.
[re=546617]proudgrampa[/re]: Given that the editor was looking at a transcription of Obama’s original wouldn’t it have been prudent to assume that the dropped s was a transcription error? In which case would it hurt to simply correct the grammar in this instance rather than highlighting it? I, mean, I love flogging the ‘baggers for their unique dialect but I do so convinced that their weak grasp on English grammar is symptomatic of their weak grasp on reality generally. Assuming Barry actually made this particular error himself would anyone think it indicates that he’s a crypto-moron?
Bill Ayers can’t grammar for shit. Fire him.
In the copy editor’s defense, newspaper staffs have been cut back so much that they get approximately .02 seconds to make a decision on editing a sentence. There are no 45-minute discussions over grammar any more; every single person on the desk is editing copy, designing layout, writing headlines, and pushing completed pages directly to the printing press. The section editor never sees it once it goes to the desk, and maybe two people on the desk look at it, VERY briefly. That was probably an editing decision made by the copy editor’s midbrain, and approved by his/her fingers.
The illiterate letters to the editor are cleaned up if they go into the print edition.
As the worst spelling and grammarian posting on Wonkette, and resident dyslexic who always drops letters off of the ends of word [sic], I stand in support of the President’s poor sentence structure.
What do you expect? [Sic] semper tyrannis.
Eats shoots and, leaves. Also.
[re=546626]southern mark smith[/re]: We were talking about some other carleen09 comment just last week. That nut is obviously the David Foster Wallace of the WaPo Comments section.
[re=546672]imissopus[/re]: Yeah, that was the “what do ‘baggers want?” post, right?
Copyediting is an illness that afflicts gifted, anal-retentive wordsmiths and turns them into complete assholes. I know this because I am one. It’s a curse: Everywhere I look there are such egregiousnesses as misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and series of threes that are not ordered according to respective syllable length.
The insertion of [sic] (which by the way should be italicized) into copy is a majorly asshole move that, back in the day, was the copyeditor’s call. I used to not do it if something was in quotation marks, unless I especially wanted the quoter — say, Jimmy Swaggart or Leona Helmsley — to look like an ignoramus.
And I truly doubt this will become Barry’s latest major gaffe of staggering failure. Most people don’t read WaPo, and even if they did, they’d never have caught the subj/verb error in the first place.
Now I must go to my local news web site and vomit.
[re=546672]imissopus[/re]: I must have been drunk and missed that. Was it formatted as well as this one?
[re=546565]Prommie[/re]: “Whats strange is, most of them are outright proud of being assholes.”
“Whats” should be “What’s,” as it is a contraction of “what is.” You’re welcome.
He can’t even write without a teleprompter.
Kenyanbonics, y’all
Like off-shore drilling, this was clearly an attempt to reach across the aisle and appeal to right wing voters.
[re=546626]southern mark smith[/re]: I read through about four screens of the comments on the article before giving up–the comments on WaPo make Freepers look intelligent by comparison. You’d think that a steady media diet of Wonkette and The Daily Show would have given me some immunity, but there was just far too much Crazy over there.
What[sic] up?
Jesus, I want to gay marry and regular marry my beloved Wonkette commenters. The level of commentary here (yes, even including moar butt secks, etc) is about fifteen billion million times that of the drivel one finds most everywhere else, including the WaPo.
[re=546601]Naked Bunny with a Whip[/re]: Yes, it is truly bizarre that they chose THIS error to highlight, as the paper has reached a place where my husband and I play “who can spot the most typos/grammatical errors/cut off paragraphs” game every day as we read the paper. Their latest trick is to lift entire blocks of questions and answers from online chats. No need for actual reporting–User Generated Content R Us.
I once witnessed Nobama droppin’ [sic] a “g”. Firing Squad?
[re=546646]Buttery1000[/re]: Or write on his hand.
As one habitually prone to misspelling or leaving out an astonishing number of little words like “and, “for,” “with,” “to,” “from” and others from my comments posted here, I’m loathe to criticize the president.
But if any of you jerks misspell a 5-dollar word in this forum, I’m all over your ass; got it?
I’m just assuming that in the Luo language, which as we know is the President’s native tongue, the third person singular isn’t inflected (as it is in English), and, as it was late at night, he was probably tired and lapsed into the grammatical forms he used as a child in Kenya. I mean, he was barely able to get into Harvard fucking Law School, which is widely regarded as one of the least selective of the nation’s worst fourth-tier law schools.
Also, and too, it’s just so cute when the WaPo thinks it’s The New Yorker.
I want a settee that poops cash.
[re=546699]MzNicky[/re]: “The insertion of [sic] (which by the way should be italicized)”
You are my hero(ine).
Another copy editor here — just try editing to the GPO Style Manual sometime, bitch[e]s.
Anyway, it does seems like a pretty bullshit move by the Post. Upon reading the article yesterday, the first thing that came into my mind when seeing the “[sic]” was that somebody at the Post decided to show the world that The Great Half-Black Communicator needs a telepromter to write letters, and given my normal mental density, I gotta say that was the reaction they were going for.
Jebus, next time, Post, just go all in and say, “here’s Obama’s response, written in Ebonics, complete with grammatical error; can you, our readers, the most highly-paid group of white lawyer-lobbyists in history find it? $1,000 and a Post tee-shirt to the first correct answer at HopeyCantWrite@WashPost.com.”
I got this from the WaPo photo gallery re this article. The photos were really poignant, but below, let’s play correct the WaPo typo!
Presidential letters: Obama connects to the people by reading his mail
Each day, President Obama reads 10 pieces of correspondence representing a sampling of the tens thousands of letters that are addressed to the White House. Sometimes, he writes back.
Personally, I can’t listen to She & Him records without being offended.
GRAMMAR REFORM IS AN {SIC} FUCKING DEAL!
My fave part of the story is that a leftie is using a fountain pen.
Confidence!
When I first saw the “sic” in the article, I wasn’t particularly surprised or turned off. Like a lot of folks said, such things at the editor’s discretion, and some editors are bigger dicks than others. But after reading the entire article, the “sic” inclusion looked more insidious.
Last paragraph: “Cline remembered the letter she had written to Obama three weeks earlier, and her hands started to shake. She carried the notecard into the kitchen and held it under the light: cursive handwriting, a grammatical error and small smudges of black ink.”
Her grammar is pretty good in her letter, but did she really notice that small of an error? I think she didn’t and this whole fixation on grammar throughout the article stems from this simple and lame ass attempt to add a little dramatic flair to an overlong feature story.
[re=546889]June Cleaver 2.0[/re]: [waves hand frantically] I know I know! Shoulda been “tens OF thousands.”
Besides which, it should have read “Connect WITH the people,” not “to”; there should have been a comma after “correspondence”; and the comma after “Sometimes” is superfluous.
It’s a goddam SICKNESS, I’m tellin’ ya.
GET A BRAIN, MORANS
The oddest line in that song is when he goes “you find strange hands in your sweater.”
[re=546774]DoktorZoom[/re]: I must have been very lucky, then, to have read that. Very lucky indeed. It leapt off the page.
And what’s worse, as is the case over on HuffPo, each of the 35,000 batshit insane commenters actually believes he/she is having an actual conversation, with others, about something. Either that or “inarticulate grunt in the dark” is their preferred method of communicating.
President Obama is a smart man. He has completely sold out his supporters, and betrayed the US working class, but he is not a retard. This is just a typo, except he did it with a pen instead of a keyboard. I don’t think there is a name for this. Hand-o? No. That suggests some kinda teenage-type sexual act, formerly performed by Sara Benincasa on Pat Robertson.
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