Headline on my local paper this afternoon re today's bomb scare in London.

London bomb diffused.

That's what happens when you use computer spell checkers instead of human proof-readers.

Surprisingly common. Just on this one story:

UPI: Police diffused a car bomb found outside a London nightclub Thursday ...
PBS: Hours after the car bomb was diffused, British police closed a major road ...
mediabistro: ... police diffused or made safe what they're describing as a potentially viable explosive device ...
AHN: Futures were higher in early trading but dropped on the news that police had diffused a car bomb found in Central London.
RIA Novosti, Russia: Peter Clarke appraised the work of bomb disposal experts, who diffused a Mercedes full of fuel, gas cylinders, and nails, parked near a nightclub in Haymarket.

No doubt there will be more of the same.

1680 ghits for "defused a bomb" vs 346 for "diffused a bomb". Many newspapers pick up a story intact from some news service without doing much in the way of editing, especially online.

quote:

Originally posted by zmježd:
1680 ghits for "defused a bomb" vs 346 for "diffused a bomb". Many newspapers pick up a story intact from some news service without doing much in the way of editing, especially online.

Precisely. Which is why it is so difficult to correct misinformation once it is "out there." Now fact and error are "out there" more than ever in history.

One of us ought to post an online comment to one of those news stories to start the ball rolling the other way, you know, to defuse this profuse, diffuse confusion.

WM

One of us ought to post an online comment to one of those news stories to start the ball rolling the other way, you know, to defuse this profuse, diffuse confusion.

Some see misspellings (and other errors linguistic) as a sign of the End of the English Language™. (Before the 17th century most spellings of Modern English were idiosyncratic at best.) If you look at MSS from the 20th, 19th, and before, centuries, you'll find spelling mistakes galore. Not everybody has the time or the inclination to learn how to spell properly. With such a ridiculous and stupefying spelling "system" as we have, what would one expect? Ask a Russian or a Spaniard about spelling bees. The concept is more foreign than American football.

That having been ranted upon, it is a sign of the times that big media (which is constantly discounting small media like blogs) doesn't have the wherewithal in their millions made and thousands spent to hire a damned copy editor.

The saddest thing about it was that this was a front page headline in two inch letters. The spelling in the body of the report was correct. My guess is that the journalist knew perfectly well what word he wanted and the headline was supplied by a sub-editor who got the job because he was such a rotten journalist.

and the headline was supplied by a sub-editor who got the job because he was such a rotten journalist.

That's probably it. Reporters don't write the headlines.

It reminds me of the 1948 Chicago Tribune headline: "Dewey Wins!"


Not!

I'm under the impression that newspapers aren't allowed to edit stories which come across the AP Wire. This could lead to the repeated hits.

Z is right that standards were way lower in earlier centuries, and Bob is right that copy editing sometimes falls to the clueless newbies. But it's more than that: the economics of selling news have changed in favor of broadcast and internet and the printed word or the printed screen is the low-budget end of things.

Forty years ago my first job out of college was as a copy editor on the news desk of a medium sized daily newspaper in Upstate New York with a circulation of possibly 80,000. Our copy desk had eight or nine editors sitting around a horseshoe shaped table. Most of these were men in their 40's, 50's and 60's who had been at this for years and they had very high standards. Some of them also were totally grumpy.

That's where I learned first hand that newspapers can and do cut, tear, fold, spindle and mutilate the copy they have purchased from the wire services. Our news editor not only insisted we observe every known rule of grammar, but also that we observe every tradition of our newspaper's own style book. Beyond that, we were encouraged to edit, even rewrite sentences and paragraphs; to cut stories to fit (we were given a length in column-inches, had to spec the copy and excise paragraphs to make the copy fit the news hole, rewriting the transitional sentences so that it would all flow smoothly.) Or sometimes we would pad stories out with additional copy supplied by our own reporters. We had glue pots, scissors, rulers, pencils, copy paper, and some of the editors even wore green eyeshades. The news editor had some quirks you were not allowed to ignore. For instance, he did not like having to read that a fire had "gutted" a building. He thought that was too unpleasant. We would have to change that to something like "destroyed the interior." We were not to allow the term "grocery store" to slip through because it was redundant; it was either a grocery or a store, but not both. If the story said someone was wondering "whether or not" something had happened, we had to delete the "or not" because it was redundant.

I had grown up in Cincinnati, where the paper my parents took, The Times-Star, never allowed the Democratic side of a news story to see the light of day. But I did not realize this until I became a copy editor, and began reading the full stories as supplied by the wire services. The wires were reporting several sides of each story. The Cincinnati paper, like every other paper, was bending the canned news to its own editorial perspective by modifying the copy.

My husband has worked for a news wire service, the AP, for the past 25 years, and the rules haven't changed. Member papers pay for the service and then do what they want with the copy.

What has changed is that now news desks are thinly staffed, even at the wire services, and often by young, inexperienced, poorly paid and trained kids. They simply have not been around long enough to absorb all the nattering details that my news editor would have hit me over the head about. Furthermore, everything is computerized, and I imagine in order to increase efficiency, that most daily newspapers keep no more than two or three copy editors on deck to speed read all that copy and chop it down to size. Page layouts are done on the screen, and the "layout man" can now cut as he's arranging the page. Not as much attention to detail, except, still, at places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which are, after all, endangered species.

Wordmatic

I was told by a journalist friend that the reason why so many celebrities' names are shortened (Gazza, Macca, Becks - to name just three) is so that they can be fitted more easily into the huge headlines that the "popular" newspapers like to use.

Could this be why, I wonder, the grossly over-exposed Paris Hilton gets so much coverage? Would she had she been named Minneapolis Hilton?

Am pleased to report this a.m.'s Philadelphia Inquirer, above the fold, has:

Police find,
defuse two
car bombs
in London

As for shortened headline terminology, this is true even in papers that don't use "assassination type" every day. We were allowed to say "High 9" for "Supreme Court" and "solons" for members of Congress or congressional committees. Then there's the famous old "Chi Fry" for the Chicago fire!

WM

The billboards for my evening paper yestereday spoke of "Car bomb horror". If it had gone off, the word might have been justified, I suppose.

quote:

so many celebrities' names are shortened (Gazza, Macca, Becks - to name just three)

Who? Who? Who?

Paul Gascoine (footballer most famous for crying), Paul McCartney (former pop star ), David Backham (former well known football player currently contracted to that globally known club Los Angeles Galaxy)

Confusingly, some red-tops have started using "Macca" for Steve McClaren, the manager of the England football team, as well.

Several times I see weirdly truncated names in headlines and on billboards and have to pause to work out what they mean. Surely that is counter-productive?

And a red-top is a tabloid newspaper with a red banner across the top?

Yes. There are three such: the Mirror, the Sun, and the Star. All write in this strange fashion.