The Language of Journalism: Volume 1, Newspaper Culture

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Part 1: A Question of Style
	1. Words Win, Language Loses
		The Infinity of a Split
		In the Passing Parade of Words
		The Uses of Illiteracy
		Culture Lives!
		Full Confrontal
	2. The Equality of Sentences
		Chomsky, Pinker, and Cognitive Science
		The Bible of Prescriptivists
	3. The Slang of an In-Lingo
		Semantics of Silence
		In the Land of Jargontua
		The Cult of Chic Obscurity
		Sort of/Kind of
		The Quest for Uncertainty
		Like in the O.J. Simpson Trial
		On Not Speaking English So Good
	4. Sort of Suspicious, Kind of Guilty
		Artful Dodging and the Gott Case
		Signals of Prevarication
	5. Of Plastic Prose, in Bits and Pieces
		In a Sporting Manner
		The Folksy Affectation of Simplicity
		Anglo-American Differences
		The Coming of the “Soccer Moms”
		The Wrong Profession?
	6. Life-Style Crosses the Ocean, and Returns
		Translating Alfred Adler
		Transatlantic Variations
		Insuring for All Risks
		Making a Meal of It
	7. Teutonics, or Refighting World War II
		Accent of the Positive
		On Hating the Huns
		Ugly Germans and Aryan Heroes
Part 2: The Art of Quotation
	8. The Little Goose Feet
		Starting and Finishing
		Behind the Confession
		Expensive Words
	9. Television and Press “War”
		Pictures and Print
		Of Trash and Rubbish
		The Shrinking Attention-Span
		When the Kissing Had to Stop
		Oohs, Ahs, and a Wee Bit of Bother
	10. Mailer’s Tales of Oswald
	11. Citations Sown
		Sketch-Writers and Tinted Spectacles
		“Sez You? Sez M e!”
		Inverted Commas in Sports
		Unquoting the Quote
	12. Words, Words, Words...
		The Old Maid of Times Square
		Jefferson Under a Shadow
		The Infobahn
		Boots, Boogaloos, and Giant Raves
	13. The Strategy of Misquotation
		B.B. and K.K.’s Memorably Misquoted Tag-Lines
		When Scotspeak Goes Scot-Free
		Killing With a Quote
		The Wide Open Range of Malpractice
	14. The Interviewer and Interviewee
Part 3: The Quest for Meaning
	15. Race and the Color of Things
		Black, White, and Other Spurious Shades
		Suspicion by Omission
		The Risks of Shedding Light
		Wog, Golliwog, and Likely Stories
		Race in the Shadow of Enlightened Counsel
		Illusions in New York and London
		Chromatic Deceptions
		The Stained Cloak of Ethnicity
	16. The N-Word and the J-Word
		From Blacks to Kikes
		The Breaking of Taboos
		Mark Fuhrman’s “N-Word”
		The Color Spectrum of “Race Card”
		Ebonic Demotic
		Defusing the Enemy’s Vocabulary
		The Shock Threshold
		Speaking with a Forked Tongue
		The Case of “the Jew Rifkind” and Howard’s End
		On the Most Powerful Words
		Diluting the Deadly Epithets
	17. The Art of Punditry
		Slanguage
		Expertise, Then and Now
	18. In Pseuds’ Comer
		Neuro-Linguistic Shadows
		Is It Cricket?
		Of a High Dumb-Down Tolerance
	19. Pop Kulcher
		A Drag on Death and Love
		Pliable Platitudes
		Pop Critics’ Folklore
	20. The Art of Explanation
		The Chronic Abuse of a Little Knowledge
		Of Rats and Men
		The Troubles of the Queen of Green
		Mistranslation and Misunderstanding
		The Dying Woodlands: First the Bad News (then the Good)
	21. Keeping Up with the Avant-Garde
		Rewriting the Classics, Modem-Wise
		Towards a Negative Cultural Tax
		A Forward and Backward Glance
		Bert Brecht’s Three Dots
	22. Hard Words and Generation Gaps
Part 4: The F-Word and Other Obscenities
	23. Skirmishes in the Sex War
		The Galaxy Strikes Back
		Of Circumlocutions and Pleonasms
	24. World War II, Fifty Years After
	25. A Trio of As*ter*isk*s
	26. Gender in the Combat Zone
		The Politics of the F-Word
		Repeating the Error, or Compounding the Offense
		From Jefferson to Ochs to Murdoch
		Lady Di’s In-Laws
		Jacqueline Du Pre, or Tragedy in the Family Circle
		Expletives in Public Life
		The Point of the Anecdote
		Motiveless Malignity
	27. Remembering the Founding Fathers
		The Heritage of the ’68ers
		The Godfather of the F-Word (I): Kenneth Tynan
		The Godfather of the F-Word (II): Peregrine Worsthome
		Osborne’s Effing Anger
		Amis Pere et Fils
		Jeeves in Sardinia
		A Thought on the Hall of 111 Fame
		One Newspaper Comes Out of the Closet
Notes
Index