The graduation ceremony in May
at Naperville (Ill.) Central High School was marred by the revelation
that about half of the valedictorian's speech was plagiarized from a
speech on the Internet, but in this case, the principal was helpless to
punish him because the principal plagiarized his own speech. (He said
he forgot to ask permission of the author, a Naperville Central
graduate who was in the audience that day.) The principal has been
reassigned, and the valedictorian's speech was removed from the
graduation video. [Naperville Sun, 5-30-08]
For a while now, I've been trying to track changes I notice in English, both written and spoken. For instance, before I got to college, everyone, in my experience, always 'set foot' in a place; now I cannot remember the last time I did NOT hear 'step foot.' Then there was the foray onto the Internet which revealed a brand-new way to spell epitome: "apidimy." (Hint: You are on the Internet; it has dictionaries, too.)
No problems there, I think to myself -- 'step foot' at least makes sense, and it's just one person on the Internet who can't spell. English words aren't losing their meanings, right? It's not just the sound of a word that matters, right?
Well, then I saw the following in praise of baseball player Frank Thomas:
"You've played so long people forgot how great you were while young. You won back to back MVP Award's before you were 27, the baseball age that should signifiy the start of the prime years. Here, here!"
Glossing over the omission of 'that' to start a result clause AND the fact that an MVP Award cannot possess anything AND the extra 'i' in "signify," look at the final interjection. "Here, here"? Are you, the writer, trying to say that Frank won both of those awards in the particular place where you are? No, you're probably trying to say "Hear, hear!" As in, "Hear what I have to say about the Big Hurt!" Normally when I see something like this, I get sort of a reactionary churn in my stomach, then quickly console myself by remembering that it was written by someone whose mistake can be easily explained and rationalized.
But not this time. Because these typos wormed their way into an article in ESPN the Magazine, a major national sports publication which presumably employs editors to correct this sort of thing. I know that everyone, even a professional editor, makes mistakes, but three (and debatably four) in one paragraph? You're supposed to be professionals, guys. It's not like you had to rush this one to print--he's having a birthday, not a funeral.
I know this isn't really worth my time, but I like word meaning so much (too much, probably) that I have to vent it somehow. And the Internet provides a venerable venting space.
Addendum: I approve lustily of the trend to use single quotation marks for generic quotations as above. I think it looks much crisper than using double quotes all the time.
This morning when I woke up and started up my computer, I discovered that a battalion of ants had moved into the crumbtastic nether-region of my keyboard. I think I did in about two or three dozens of the blighters -- none have emerged since. I am hoping they did not build a tiny panic room to wait out my toilet paper salvo.
I thought a cheap gym was going in just down the street, but they've taken down the signs for it. I'm hoping this means they're going to start construction soon, but it's looking more and more like a fool's hope.
Oh hey, I haven't updated my xanga in almost two months...like most other people from RHS. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that xanga has definitely and officially jumped the shark. The ad on the left side of the page when I logged on advertised some service called AsianAve. Perhaps xanga has only jumped the shark for certain ethnic groups?
Finally, here's a picture I captioned:
If you don't get the reference, I would like to welcome you to the internet in 2006:
