The Language of Journalism: Volume 1, Newspaper Culture

by Lasky,Melvin J.

• ISBN13: 9780765800015
• ISBN10: 0765800012
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-30
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation.The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity.The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This,is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

Author Biography

Melvin J. Lasky was the editor of Encounter in England from 1958 until its close in 1990. Lasky served as foreign correspondent for the New York Times and The Reporter, and has written for many of the intellectual journals from Partisan Review to Commentary.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Part 1: A Question of Style
Words Win, Language Loses	3	(14)
The Infinity of a Split	3	(6)
In the Passing Parade of Words	9	(4)
The Uses of Illiteracy	13	(2)
Culture Lives!	15	(1)
Full Confrontal	16	(1)
The Equality of Sentences	17	(4)
Chomsky, Pinker, and Cognitive Science	17	(1)
The Bible of Prescriptivists	18	(3)
The Slang of an In-Lingo	21	(22)
Semantics of Silence	21	(3)
In the Land of Jargontua	24	(4)
The Cult of Chic Obscurity	28	(4)
Sort of/Kind of	32	(3)
The Quest for Uncertainty	35	(2)
Like in the O.J. Simpson Trial	37	(1)
On Not Speaking English So Good	38	(5)
Sort of Suspicious, Kind of Guilty	43	(4)
Artful Dodging and the Gott Case	43	(2)
Signals of Prevarication	45	(2)
Of Plastic Prose, in Bits and Pieces	47	(22)
In a Sporting Manner	47	(5)
The Folksy Affectation of Simplicity	52	(8)
Anglo-American Differences	60	(3)
The Coming of the ``Soccer Moms''	63	(3)
The Wrong Profession?	66	(3)
Life-Style Crosses the Ocean, and Returns	69	(16)
Translating Alfred Adler	69	(5)
Transatlantic Variations	74	(2)
Insuring for All Risks	76	(2)
Making a Meal of It	78	(7)
Teutonics, or Refighting World War II	85	(10)
Accent of the Positive	85	(3)
On Hating the Huns	88	(2)
Ugly Germans and Aryan Heroes	90	(5)
Part 2: The Art of Quotation
The Little Goose Feet	95	(10)
Starting and Finishing	95	(4)
Behind the Confession	99	(2)
Expensive Words	101	(4)
Television and Press ``War''	105	(18)
Pictures and Print	105	(3)
Of Trash and Rubbish	108	(4)
The Shrinking Attention-Span	112	(6)
When the Kissing Had to Stop	118	(2)
Oohs, Ahs, and a Wee Bit of Bother	120	(3)
Mailer's Tales of Oswald	123	(4)
Citations Sown	127	(16)
Sketch-Writers and Tinted Spectacles	127	(2)
``Sez You? Sez Me!''	129	(1)
Inverted Commas in Sports	130	(10)
Unquoting the Quote	140	(3)
Words, Words, Words...	143	(8)
The Old Maid of Times Square	143	(1)
Jefferson Under a Shadow	144	(2)
The Infobahn	146	(1)
Boots, Boogaloos, and Giant Raves	147	(4)
The Strategy of Misquotation	151	(12)
B.B. and K.K.'s Memorably Misquoted Tag-Lines	151	(3)
When Scotspeak Goes Scot-Free	154	(6)
Killing With a Quote	160	(1)
The Wide Open Range of Malpractice	161	(2)
The Interviewer and Interviewee	163	(8)
Part 3: The Quest for Meaning
Race and the Color of Things	171	(28)
Black, White, and Other Spurious Shades	171	(7)
Suspicion by Omission	178	(3)
The Risks of Shedding Light	181	(2)
Wog, Golliwog, and Likely Stories	183	(1)
Race in the Shadow of Englightened Counsel	184	(5)
Illusions in New York and London	189	(4)
Chromatic Deceptions	193	(3)
The Stained Cloak of Ethnicity	196	(3)
The N-Word and the J-Word	199	(68)
From Blacks to Kikes	199	(4)
The Breaking of Taboos	203	(4)
Mark Fuhrman's ``N-Word''	207	(4)
The Color Spectrum of ``Race Card''	211	(3)
Ebonic Demotic	214	(7)
Defusing the Enemy's Vocabulary	221	(10)
The Shock Threshold	231	(3)
Speaking with a Forked Tongue	234	(13)
The Case of ``the Jew Rifkind'' and Howard's End	247	(9)
On the Most Powerful Words	256	(1)
Diluting the Deadly Epithets	257	(10)
The Art of Punditry	267	(8)
Slanguage	267	(2)
Expertise, Then and Now	269	(6)
In Pseuds' Corner	275	(12)
Neuro-Linguistic Shadows	275	(7)
Is It Cricket?	282	(2)
Of a High Dumb-Down Tolerance	284	(3)
Pop Kulcher	287	(8)
A Drag on Death and Love	287	(2)
Pliable Platitudes	289	(4)
Pop Critics' Folklore	293	(2)
The Art of Explanation	295	(18)
The Chronic Abuse of a Little Knowledge	295	(6)
Of Rats and Men	301	(1)
The Troubles of the Queen of Green	302	(2)
Mistranslation and Misunderstanding	304	(2)
The Dying Woodlands: First the Bad News (then the Good)	306	(7)
Keeping Up with the Avant-Garde	313	(12)
Rewriting the Classics, Modern-Wise	313	(4)
Towards a Negative Cultural Tax	317	(3)
A Forward and Backward Glance	320	(2)
Bert Brecht's Three Dots	322	(3)
Hard Words and Generation Gaps	325	(6)
Part 4: The F-Word and Other Obscenities
Skirmishes in the Sex War	331	(12)
The Galaxy Strikes Back	333	(4)
Of Circumlocutions and Pleonasms	337	(6)
World War II, Fifty Years After	343	(2)
A Trio of As*ter*isk*s	345	(4)
Gender in the Combat Zone	349	(30)
The Politics of the F-Word	359	(4)
Repeating the Error, or Compounding the Offense	363	(1)
From Jefferson to Ochs to Murdoch	364	(3)
Lady Di's In-Laws	367	(2)
Jacqueline Du Pre, or Tragedy in the Family Circle	369	(2)
Expletives in Public Life	371	(3)
The Point of the Anecdote	374	(2)
Motiveless Malignity	376	(3)
Remembering the Founding Fathers	379	(60)
The Heritage of the '68ers	379	(8)
The Godfather of the F-Word (I): Kenneth Tynan	387	(25)
The Godfather of the F-Word (II): Peregrine Worsthorne	412	(4)
Osborne's Effing Anger	416	(2)
Amis Pere et Fils	418	(8)
Jeeves in Sardinia	426	(1)
A Thought on the Hall of III Fame	427	(5)
One Newspaper Comes Out of the Closet	432	(7)
Notes	439	(28)
Index	467