Nanohedron wrote:s1m0n wrote:The newspaper biz is a dying trade...
But internet articles are evidently alive and well. To my thinking this doesn't change things for the purposes of our discussion.
Alive, to be sure. Well? Not if you're comparing them to the standard achieved by the press of 25 years ago (Mind you, at no time could the press pass the standards of 25 years earlier.) Times change, and norms with them.
s1m0n wrote:...and standards are under strain all over. No paper can afford the editing apparatus it had 25 years ago, because of cost and because of time.
Nanohedron wrote:Then it's a better investment to hire writers who are competent at proofreading their own work. When news agencies abandon good professional standards merely for the sake of their ease and wallets, then the Idiocracy is upon us. You won't find me excusing that. If it puts me in the minority these days, so be it.
Tee-hee. Papers do hire competent proofers, but they don't have the same standards as middle-aged fogies of the likes of us. Proof readers and copy editors are young and poorly paid, and always have been. You're now a generation older and quite rightly feeling left behind. Every educated person gets here eventually. What you - and I - need to do now is to find the grace to give up resisting [some of*] the new norms, because those are the future. Sometimes it hurts.
*We need to be able to decide what's actually important (ie, conveying meaning) and what merely exists to signal that the author knows the forms. I'm one of the few writers I know who regularly (and correctly**) deploys the relative pronoun 'whom'. I do so purely to show off. Whom is dead. Sometimes it's fun to be able to prove that I know how it worked, but that doesn't mean that my use of whom alters the meaning of anything I've said.
**If you're curious, test
whom in constructions in which you might use
him.
He (subject) and
him (object) are exactly congruent to
who and
whom. The similar endings telegraphs the fact that these were once part of a regular noun declension system. That system began dying with the shift from old~ to middle english, 1000 years ago. The fact that it's still around for me to play with shows how conservative language can be. English abandoned noun declensions for good a millennia ago, but they're hanging on just fine in our pronouns (him), and were only recently lost in our relative pronouns (whom).