I didn't read a heck of a lot before I went to sleep last night, so this evening's post is on a related subject: grammar and the fall of literacy. I play a bit of online Scrabble, and I'm pretty good. I have never played the real board game, so this Facebook foray was my first word game since Upwords and Boggle. Because of my journalism background, people assume I know a lot of words. Well, that's unfortunately not true. To write a news story, you have to keep everything at an eighth-grade level to make sure all your readers can understand. (To one of my former editors, this meant even excluding the word "peruse.") Anyway, this means I never really put into practice all those vocabulary words I had to learn during SAT-prep years. Not that I have a horrible vocabulary, but it's definitely far from impressive. The reason I am good at online Scrabble is strategy. I have figured out what types of plays get the most points. However, that does involve quite a bit of submitting potentially nonsense words into the "dictionary" to see if they're playable. For example, this method has led to my learning that "shoji" and "fixity" are indeed real words.
So, what am I getting at? The key to Scrabble is looking up words. Memorizing two-letter words, hoping against hope you can get that J in somewhere. You don't have to know the words, you just have to know how to find them. For that matter, the same skill is applied during my daily crossword puzzles. It really isn't hard to look things up in a dictionary. I don't know if the real rules of Scrabble allow you to scour the dictionary till you find something that gets you more than 30 points, but in the rest of the real world, it's advisable to make sure you don't type "scourge" when you mean "scour," or "peruse" when you mean "skim." If getting out that big (apparently scary) book seems too old-fashioned, there's always Google. Hence, part of why I made a good journalist and copy editor was not because I know tons of words and style rules by heart, but because I am obsessive about looking things up to make sure they're right. I'd like to think if you find an error in my writing, it's a typographical oversight, not an error of ignorance (I love my backspace key).
Today, I got a little bored. Maybe I should have just picked up "Valley of the Dolls," but I decided to visit the Web site of one of my previous employers. I won't name any names or go into any of the deeper issues I have with the place, but I will say I'm embarrassed to have worked there because of the state of it now. When you work for a publication, there comes with the job a responsibility for making sure the writing is coherent. Or at the bare minimum, that you run spell-check. I only read a handful of sentences on the entire site because I could not force myself to continue after reading the word "unbenounced." Following the offending "word" was a parenthetical explanation: "meaning having no idea." I'm sorry. If you spell something so horribly wrong that you realize your error and make it obvious that you know you just guessed blindly on both spelling and pronunciation, look the damn word up.
I recently submitted applications to summer publishing courses. I had to write a personal statement explaining why I am pursuing a career in publishing. In that statement, I wrote: " ... in the barrage of words we encounter daily, I am consistently disappointed by silly mistakes that spoil the average American's literacy." This mistake is beyond silly. It it ludicrous for such a word to be displayed (defiled) to the public by a (theoretically) respectable news source. Why such rubbish goes unchecked by any journalism-related organization is unbeknownst to me.
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