The Yang Slinger: Vol. XCIXI could not take my eyes off a Christmas painting with a mangling of the English language. Welcome to the curse of being a journalist.
One of my favorite events of the year takes place on Dec. 24, when our pals Monica and Eli Valdez host roughly 30 relatives and friends at their home for Christmas Eve. It is, truly, joy personified. Amazing food. Fun games. Warm conversation. My kids love it, my wife loves it, I love it. And every year, Monica and Eli add new little yuletide twists that I find myself seeking out. Maybe it’s an ornament on the tree. Or a type of snack. Really, it can be anything. This year, for me, it was this …
The painting hung on a wall, above a couch and adjacent to the Christmas tree. And, for half a second, I was struck solely by the beautiful scene. Snow falling. A Santa. A tree shop. A bunch of families. Really nice, blissful stuff, reminiscent of the late Thomas Kinkade. But then … I noticed it. How couldn’t I notice it? It was right there, on the tree shop sign, almost taunting me …
And … what the fuck? What the actual fuck? Unless (in some warped universe that my Jewish brain somehow can’t comprehend) the store’s owner is named “Christmas Tree,” and this was Christmas Tree’s Christmas tree shop—this image featured a preposterously preventable (and easily avoidable) grammatical error. So I turned to my son Emmett and said, “Can you believe this shit?” Then to my daughter Casey, “Can you believe this shit?” Then to my wife Catherine—”Can you believe this shit?” And they all just sorta shrugged before returning to their cookies and 7Up Shirley Temples¹. They. Just. Fucking. Shrugged.
I have a problem, and I’m pretty sure it comes with this warped profession I chose to enter some 30 years ago. Namely, I am unable to not see bad punctuation and grammatical errors. The shit drives me crazy. I try and stroll past the sign on my weekly walk that says PLEASE KEEP YOUR DOG’S OFF THE GRASS—and I can’t. I make every effort to go unbothered by the local eatery that brags of THE TOWNS’ BEST PIZZA—and I fail. I never used to be this way. Pre-media, I didn’t mind if a store was having a 50-percent-off CLARENCE SALE or if a school flea market included GREAT DEELS! It was just material I rolled with. Sometimes noticed, oftentimes not. Either way, it mattered not. Then, however, I started at The Tennessean in Nashville, and my stories were edited by a conga line of men and women who checked every noun, every verb, every adjective. Contexts needed to be contextual. Adverbs needed to add up. Semi-colons couldn’t be semi-inane. It was brutal, and before long I had been converted into one of … them. A stickler. A bloodhound. At Sports Illustrated, where I was first hired as a fact checker, it only got worse. A story would come in, and it was my job to … go … over … every … single … word. It was maddening goop. Before long I was a grammatical cyborg, sent here from the Planet Pronoun to ruin humanity. And what happens (and I’m not proud of this) is you start believing—truly believing—that the world is overflowing with morons. People who do shit like this …
And this …
And this …
And this …
And while my affliction was never shared (or appreciated) by my friends who entered, oh, law or banking, journalism peers left and right know precisely whereof I speak. “Whatever happened to proofreading? Care? Craft?” asked Mirin Fader of The Ringer. “I know I sound like get-off-my-lawn energy, but it’s true.” Back when I was a student at the University of Delaware, my co-editor of the campus newspaper was Adrienne Lewin, now the editor of of Diversity in Action magazine. And to this day, Adrienne cannot merely enter a restaurant, sit down and breezily choose between the turkey burger and the chicken wrap. “I copy edit every menu I see,” she said. “No one gives a shit yet this occupies my thoughts. I [also] am adamantly anti-Oxford comma, and I cringe when I see an apostrophe to make something plural or with a family’s name.” Truly, it sucks, it sucks, it sucks—primarily because there is no escape. One of my good pals from back in the Sports Illustrated days is Desa Philadelphia, who was working at Time (a neighboring magazine) when I was at SI. According to Desa, the muck isn’t merely maddening, but refuses to go away. Hell, on the day I asked her for thoughts about this post she was returning from a showing of the new Nicole Kidman film, “Babygirl.” Her frustration was boiling over … “[In the movie] someone was giving a speech where they used an ‘us’ that should have been a ‘we,’” Desa told me. “She said something like ‘for all of us women.’ Anyway, the answer is that it has made a a tortured soul.” Jonathan Eig, author of the Pulitzer-winning “King: A Life,” said he didn’t understand the possessive apostrophe until high school. “I remember when I finally figured it out,” he said. “Why didn’t one of my teachers explain it to me sooner?” With that discovery, however, a monster was birthed. Jonathan is a studious and zoned-in guy whose attention to detail is the hallmark of his work. But, eh, it also can drive a dude crazy. “My teenager, she swears she doesn’t want to be a writer, but she loves spotting mistakes in signs and texting them to me, to show that she’s smart and paying attention,” he said. “I love that she’s into it. It’s also a running father-daughter bit in the book ‘Empire Falls’ by Richard Russo, by the way, one of my favorite novel’s. Now, to get to your question: A writer cares about words because word choice matters. The more I write, the more I care.I’m the guy who stands in the grocery line and reads ‘Ten Items or Less’ and wonders why they didn’t use ‘fewer,’” he said. I get mad at ‘Hopefully’ and ‘Due to’ and a bunch of other things hardly anyone else cares about. I get especially peeved when the sloppiness comes from a teacher or principal at one my kids’ schools. I’m not the kind of guy who corrects strangers on their grammar, but I do correct my kids, and sometimes my wife, which doesn’t end well. I also keep a bunch of old-school thesauruses (thesauri?) on my desk, as well as old copy of Modern English Usage, which was a gift from my wonderfully snobby English professor, Joseph Epstein. I don’t use those books as much as I used to, but I still get a nerdy thrill when I dive into them. And, yes, I put the extra apostrophe on ‘novel’s’ in the sentence above because I thought it was funny and because I knew you’d catch it.² That’s what passes for humor for a loser like me.”
I have a friend named Dave Coverly, who (for my money) is one of America’s truly great artistic/messaging talents. His single-panel comic, Speed Bump, is absolute gold—and there is never a wasted word or miscalculated space. In other words, he takes his craft incredibly seriously. So upon my showing him the Christas scene with CHRISTMAS TREE’S … “When I enlarged the photo my sphincter cramped,” he texted. “How did this person paint all of this with … NO ONE POINTING THIS OUT?” It is a helluva question. One I actually attempted to answer. Monica told me she bought the print at either Kohls or Burlington, but the stores offered no clues as to the identity (or whereabout) of the artist (the print is mass-produced and unsigned). A reverse Google image search also yielded little of usage. So I turned to Dave to explain the nature of word choice on pieces of art. “It’s something I’ve fought over with editors (I’ve gone through five of them) for the past 30 years,” he said. “Using grammar in a word balloon in a cartoon is very different than in an essay or column because I have to write how I *hear* the dialogue, not the way an editor would consider technically correct. I’m transferring a conversation in my head into someone else’s head on a cadence that I feel makes it the most funny. To that end, pauses are crucial, so I use tons of dashes when a comma or period is probably the norm. As most people know, though, the key to the pacing of a joke is a beat and a dash is the cartoon equivalent of a beat.” I asked Dave what the actual editing process is like. Or, put different, how likely is it for a CHRISTMAS TREE’S-esque blunder to sneak through. “In my case, there are actually two levels of checking after I turn in the work—first is my syndicate editor and second is presumably the individual newspaper’s comics editor. The latter has gone through way of the dodo though due to money so papers just print whatever they’re sent and blame us if it’s offensive. In the end, though, if I did something wrong my editor would try to take the blame but ultimately it would fall on me.” One more thought from Dave. “Also I’m going to have nightmares about that fucking painting,” he said. “So thanks.”
No. Me, too.
A random old article worth revisiting …On Jan. 6, 1981, Ralph Sampson and the University of Virginia men’s basketball team came to the Delaware Field House as America’s top-ranked outfit. The Cavs smoked the Blue Hens 88-69, and this piece in The Review, Delaware’s student newspaper, told the story well. It was bylined by Jonathan Feigen, who earlier this week announced his retirement from the Houston Chronicle. The talent was obvious from early on (And … grrr … “Cav’s”).
The Madness of Tyler Kepner’s Grid …
So unless you’ve been living beneath a pebble beneath a rock beneath a big hunk of cheese, you’re aware of Immaculate Grid, the daily game that’s drawn thousands of nerdy sports fans (guilty!) to its ranks. And while the NBA grid, NFL grid, NHL grid and WNBA grid are all fun, this game is at its best when it comes to baseball—where the names are endless and the transactions ceaseless. No one owns the medium like Tyler Kepner, the Athletic’s fantastic baseball writer. Here’s a breakdown of one of his recent efforts …
Tyler thoughts: • Dick Davis played for the first team I rooted for, the 1982 Phillies • Todd Greene is a go-to guy; covered him with the Angels and we swap Grids every day. • Huck Flener is a name you don’t forget. Covered him in spring training with Seattle. • Matt Mieske is an outfielder I covered with Seattle. • Craig Lefferts came up with the Cubs and pitched for San Francisco’s 1989 World Series team. Works with the A’s minor league pitchers now. • Porfi Altamirano was also on my 1982 Phillies. What a name! • Teddy Higuera had three spectacular seasons in the mid-1980s. • Hal Carlson is a guy I’d never heard of until recently. Pitched for the Phillies and had an odd outlier WAR season in the ‘20s. Poor guy died at his hotel before a start in Chicago a few years later. • Ross Youngs is a guy I love to use. Short career but a Hall of Famer and stud hitter in the ‘20s.
This week’s college writer you should know about …
Olivia Warren, Tulane University Warren, a news editor for the Tulane Hullabaloo, produced a high-level, professional-grade piece for her paper headlined, NINE SHOOTINGS, ONE WEEKEND: GUN VIOLENCE IN NEW ORLEANS. Wrote Warren: “Nine separate shootings took place in New Orleans over Thanksgiving weekend, despite the city’s downward trend in crime this year. The shootings left four people dead and 10 people injured. ‘One of the primary reasons that we have these violent acts has to do with the fact that guns are so accessible, particularly to young people,’ Reginald Parquet, Tulane University social work professor, said. ‘They’re easy to get and young people who carry guns oftentimes feel empowered. They feel that they can make you do what they want you to do by pointing the gun at you.’ Three of the shootings occurred in the French Quarter as a result of multiple fights on the street.” The piece could have been overly dramatic and editorialized. Instead, Warren did what strong reporters do best: She let the information speak. One can follow Warren on LinkedIn here. Bravo.
My TikTok offering of the week …So I left Twitter, joined TikTok—and am loving, loving, loving the storytelling modus. It’s fun and light and free of the Twitter hate. You can follow me here, and every week (at least until the medium is banned in America) I’m gonna post one of my videos. Just, because, hey—a guy needs to eat. 
Journalism musings for the week …
Musing 1: There is no American public figure I find more objectionable than Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who spews bullshit talking points as the schools he oversees routinely rank in the bottom five nationally in pretty much all categories. Here he is, discussing how teachers are instructing children how to hate this nation. What a douche. Musing 2: Really strong work from ESPN’s Marty Smith on the gripping saga of Oregon wide receiver Tez Johnson—who, not for nothing, has jumped atop my list of favorite modern athletes. Musing 3: There’s no better college football writer than Chuck Culpepper of the Washington Post, who never phones in a piece and always thinks of stuff no one else would consider. Here, for example, is the lede to his story, OREGON MEETS A SUDDEN END AFTER OHIO STATE GOES MAD AT THE ROSE BOWL: “The somber locker room had a slapping sound. You’d hear it nearby and then way over on the other side. It kept interrupting the general silence. It was the sound of players from a team that had never felt a loss slapping each other on the backs of shoulders as they hugged. Many of the hugs lasted good whiles.” Brilliant. Musing 4: James Carville wrote a column for the New York Times headlined, I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE 2024 ELECTION. HERE’S WHY—and he’s 100 percent on the button. Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she entered too late. She didn’t lose because' she’s not likable enough. She lost because her party kept saying, “The economy is awesome!” as citizens replied, “Um, it doesn’t feel that way.” Wrote Carville: “To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.” Musing 5: Outkick’s Bobby Burack (a piece of shit I profiled a few years ago) is racist in a way most racists openly pretend not to be. Without question, the most vile member of our ranks. Far closer to Klansman Digest than legit scribe. Need proof? Here you go. Musing 6: In one of the weirdest college sports sagas I’ve seen in some time, the Wisconsin Green Bay men’s basketball program has added—mid-season—a 23-year-old Israeli freshman named Yonatan 'Jonathan' Levy. Tge 6-foot-9 center from HaMerkaz received, according to Scott Venci’s Green Bay Press-Gazette piece, “final eligibility certification from the NCAA last month and is immediately available to play.” Musing 7: The new Two Writers Slinging Yang stars Ted Spiker, the University of Florida’s journalism chair and an all-time great dude.
Quote of the Week …
1 Not joking. The drink is a soda revolution. 2 I did. You're currently a free subscriber to Jeff Pearlman's Journalism Yang Yang. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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The Yang Slinger: Vol. XCIX
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