Picayune Extra: Don't sic 'em!

& lots of letters on the John Kass item

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I noted two uses of “(sic)” in the local papers over the weekend. In the Tribune:

And in the Sun-Times:

I posted these to Facebook — the Tribune’s first — and asked simply “Bullshit or not bullshit?”

Pardon my language. I would have used “rubbish” in my more delicate, family newspaper days. And to flesh out the question, is it fair and proper to call attention to a minor grammatical error/typo when quoting from a written document?

“Sic” is not an abbreviation or slang term, but Latin for “thus,” and shorthand for “sic erat scriptum," meaning “thus was it written." Merriam-Webster explains that “sic” is a bracketed interjection writers and editors “use in the reproduction of someone else's speech or writing to indicate that an unexpected form exactly reproduces the original and is not a copier's mistake.”

Above, it means that it was Todd Thielmann, not the Chicago Tribune, who failed to use the apostrophe to make “Wendts” possessive; and it was Cardinal Cupich, not the Sun-Times, who didn’t add the letter “r” to “you” in writing an email to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Should the papers have quietly, mercifully corrected the minor errors? Fixed them parenthetically? Or sicced `em?

My post touched off a spirited conversation including more than 100 comments. Here are a few from the sic semper folks:

Gary S. — The line needs to be drawn somewhere. Why not draw it between correct and incorrect? Complete transparency from the paper is important.

Sarah O. —If newspapers don’t care about grammar, who will? Newspapers need to adhere to high standards.

Christopher B. — I vote for not bullshit. This is a written quote from the subject, and altering it by adding an apostrophe is not appropriate as it is making a change to a direct quote.

Simon D. — Accidents happen, but laziness in typing up a message shouldn’t just be accepted. … If you allow the rules of grammar to be brushed aside, you open up a world where words have no meaning and we might as well grunt at each other.

Lori F. —This is standard editorial practice to convey clarity and correctness. It isn’t up to the paper to correct anyone’s grammar, spelling, punctuation, et. al. Nor would it be right to do so, for a multitude of reasons. The Trib abided by a standard that was set for very good reasons, including sometimes not hiding the quotee’s ignorance.

If I were feeling ornery I would give Lori F. a “sic” for using “et. al.” where she meant “etc.” Normally I’d simply make the correction or just let it stand because there’s no confusion about what Lori meant. If one reader in 100 stumbled over that slightly errant usage (“et alia,” Latin for “and others” refers to people, usually authors, usually in footnotes). But 99 readers in 100 would pause at a “sic.”

The “sic” stans were significantly outnumbered by the anti-sic contingent. The “it’s bullshit” commenters argued that “sic” is a sneering bit of side-eye at trivial errors that might, in both examples above, simply be considered typos. And as commenter Phil R. pointed out, when it comes to throwing stones at little boo-boos in print, newspapers have a “glass house issue.”

I have that issue, too. As one who makes typos and commits brainos all the time when I’m typing here and elsewhere, I’m the last one to feel the need or claim the right to call attention to the insignificant miscues of others.

In The New Yorker, Louis Menand described “sic” as a “damning interpolation, combining ordinary, garden-variety contempt with pedantic condescension.” Baltimore Sun language columnist John E. McIntyre wrote that his paper has “actively discouraged the use of ‘sic’ in copy, because it is nearly impossible to use it without looking snotty.”

The Associated Press Stylebook now agrees:

Do not use (sic) to show that quoted material or person’s words include a misspelling, incorrect grammar or peculiar usage. (This is a change from previous guidance.) Instead, paraphrase if possible. ... Do not alter the written words.

It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But if the point is to convey information and meaning, my view is that using brackets and paraphrases to “fix” minor solecisms in the name of pure accuracy is an impediment to effective communication. If Cardinal Cupich had typed “yuo” instead of “you” in the above example, what possible purpose would there be in throwing in a parenthetical roadblock or shifting into paraphrase mode?

And if we’re going to be sticklers, what about noun/verb disagreements, which can easily happen in long sentences? Or, even more fussily, what about when a writer uses “who” when properly educated people would know to use “whom”?

The AP says, “Do not use substandard spellings such as ‘gonna’ or ‘wanna’ in attempts to convey regional dialects or informal pronunciations, except to convey an emphasis by the speaker.”

I agree with this dictate, fuzzy though it is, because it would be really easy for writers to slip into caricature or even offensive stereotypes if they committed every deviation from standard English and conventional pronunciation to print.

Verbatim slangy, rambling quotes can be perfect for profile stories where it may be important or telling to show how the speaker communicates. But in news stories or short columns, when the purpose is to convey specific opinions or facts, such “accurate” quotes — perhaps complete with the uhms and ahs that pepper the speech of even very distinguished people — can make a source sound goofy, scatterbrained or even ignorant. Very early in his career, former Tribune columnist Bob Greene’s rise to prominence was accelerated when he went to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s news conferences and then had the effrontery and nerve to quote him exactly as he spoke.

Or consider what I wrote in 2007:

I don’t believe that the way the president is defining failure or success jibes with reality... Ill. Sen. Barack Obama to ABC’s Terry Moran on “Nightline” Wednesday following President Bush’s speech on Iraq.

Only that’s not exactly what Obama said. Exactly what he said was this: “Uh, I-I don’t believe that uh, the way the president is defining failure , uh, or success, uh, jibes with reality.” (Listen to this seven-second sound clip)

By the way, both the stories from which I clipped those “sic” references at the top of this item were very interesting.

“Cook County official hasn’t fired her cousin, despite a ruling that he must lose his job due to nepotism” (which does not have “sic” in the online version) tells of Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Tammy Wendt’s brazen refusal to comply with an order to fire her first cousin, a top staffer, after a March 10 ruling by the Cook County Board of Ethics that she was in violation of ordinances that forbid the hiring of close relatives, including first cousins.

Given the role that bloodlines and family ties have played in state, local and national politics it’s hard to get too exercised about this brazen bit of nepotism, but Wendt’s recalcitrance is setting up a fascinating confrontation.

“Emails show Cardinal Blase Cupich helped Mayor Lori Lightfoot shape COVID message” tells the story of how Chicago’s top Roman Catholic cleric offered suggestions to Lightfoot how she might betters soften and focus her May, 2020 letter on pandemic restrictions to leaders of the local faith community. For example:

“I would suggest cutting these two sentences: ‘I do not have the luxury of looking away, of thinking that this horrific reality is someone else’s problem. To the contrary.’ I suggest the cut only because it could be misread as suggesting that the letter’s audience does have such a luxury, when many likely know someone who has been infected.”

Cupich’s critiques and proposed changes were thoughtful, constructive and very much on point. If the Cardinaling thing ever gets old, he could probably make it as an editor.

One shining moment, comedy division

Right about the time Kansas sealed its victory over North Carolina Monday night in the final game of men’s March Madness, Kate Harding won the final matchup in Tweet Madness, the 64-entrant bracket tournament to choose readers’ favorite tweet of the 2021-2022 quipping season.

Harding, a writer who lives in Rogers Park, beat out an international field of competitors to take the title.

Review the action here. I’ll have a longer report on the tournament in Thursday’s issue.

Notes and comments from readers —lightly edited —- along with my responses

Some of these messages are in reference to items in last Thursday’s Picayune Sentinel.

Robert P. — I read the controversial column by John Kass —“Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: An overwhelming sense of lawlessness” — when it was published in July, 2020. And I was struck how many times he felt the need to repeat the name “Soros.” To me it just smelled to high heaven of anti-Semitism, as though he had to pound into the reader's brain that this notable Jewish financier was behind so much of the giving. So I’m a bit skeptical of your contention that Kass didn’t know he was repeating anti-Semitic tropes. Had it later come as a revelation to him, don't you think he would have said something in the aftermath like "I didn't know"? His defense of his column would have been much more persuasive if he had.

As I wrote last Thursday, I don't think Kass intended to sound anti-Semitic notes, in part because I don't think he is anti-Semitic and in part because I believe he's smart enough to know that to do so would have distracted from and badly weakened any argument or point he wanted to make. His response to the subsequent controversy, however, has amounted to "repeatedly invoking Soros is not an anti-Semitic dog whistle (even though many people say they hear it that way)."

I've long argued that intent does matter in such instances, and that's gotten lost in many similar situations. And because I don't think Kass had anti-Semitic intent here, I think forgiveness would have been in order.

Here’s an analogy: Say you’re busily shopping at the supermarket, scanning the shelves for the best prices, and you accidentally ram your cart into another shopper. You were careless but your heart was not in the wrong place. So you apologize, say you didn't mean it, and the other person says OK, please be more careful and everyone goes about their day.

But we live in a world now where intent doesn’t matter, apologies are not accepted (and often not offered) and inadvertent clashes or misunderstandings escalate into festivals of umbrage and recrimination. The other shopper flies into a rage, in other words, and you lash back defensively.

Kass was the distracted shopper in my analogy. But he was treated like some grocery store sociopath.

Jerry B. — The most logical conclusion is that the leaders of the Tribune’s newsroom union were bigtime angered by Kass’s refusal to support it and merely used the anti-Semitic charge as a pretext.

The union wasn’t “angered” by Kass’ refusal to support the union movement. They — we — didn’t need him when 85% of the eligible journalists supported the initiative to form the union. His lack of support for the union was purely symbolic. And his colleagues were by no means the only people who felt the Soros-Soros-Soros-Soros drone evoked anti-Semitic tropes. It was, in fact, a national controversy.

Dave O. — I still don't understand how, if some people who rail against Soros are anti-Semitic that means that anyone who speaks negatively of Soros is anti-Semitic. Heck, there are a lot of Jewish people who speak negatively of Soros.

EZ — I don't contend that anyone who invokes Soros is anti-Semitic. I contend only that anti-Semitic people have so frequently invoked his name to advance anti-Semitism that invoking his name over and over in a column gives rise to the appearance of advancing anti-Semitic tropes.

I'll repeat myself: I don't agree politically with Kass on much of anything, but I don’t think he intended to give that appearance and I don't think he's a bigot or an anti-Semite. I think he was surprised and then hurt and then angry at the insinuations, and I can certainly understand those emotions.

But why invoke Soros at all? To suggest that Kim Foxx is a tool of a rich, liberal, foreign ideologue and is following marching orders, not her own judgment, to institute policies that deliberately result in greater threats to public safety. It's a lazy argument, as are arguments on the left that because Charles Koch, the surviving member of the dreaded Koch Brothers, helps fund a program, it's automatically bad. 

Steve R. — The idea that once a union is established everyone has to join denies an individual's right to free speech and the right to be left alone. The forcible extraction of "dues" amounts to extortion. ("Those are some nice benefits. It'd be a shame if anything happened to them.") What you see as benefits may not be what others see. Unions have a sordid history of high-pressure tactics, mob actions and corruption. That's reason enough not to force unwilling employees to become members. They should be allowed to tell their union colleagues, "Don't do me any favors" without financial or other penalties.

The idea is that if you get the pay raises and benefits and job protections of the union — which, again, by law, you do — then you have to pay union dues. There is a carve out in Illinois law for the portion of dues that go to supporting union political activity, which members don't have to support.

There are "right to freeload" states where you can enjoy all the benefits of being in the union without having to pay union dues (conservatives and pliant, credulous journalists use the term "right to work," which is why I prefer the former if equally tendentious term) and it tends to weaken the union movement and union protections.

One could envision a company where unionized employees would get union benefits and non-unionized employees would not, but one can also see how employers would use the split to weaken the union by offering non-union people the same or even, temporarily, better salaries and benefits in order to get people to quit and kill the union.

Newspaper unions don't have a particularly ugly history and you need to remember why unions were formed-- not to "extort" companies but to win fair wages and decent working conditions.

The power of organized labor is meant as a counterweight to the power employers have and it's by and large been good for the country and good for the middle class. I would never say they have totally clean hands and excesses are easy to find, but so are depredations of employers.

I don't know why Kass didn't want to join the union and he was entitled to refuse, though to my knowledge he's never explained his reasons to his readers or his former colleagues. Maybe he felt that he, personally, as the highest paid columnist, had no need of any union protections or benefits — which was almost certainly accurate.

But it was his attempt at a secret workaround to avoid union membership that brought shame to him and to the managers who engineered it. And he's continued to misrepresent the story to his readers going forward.

I kept quiet about it for more than two years. But I decided after reading his latest false retelling of the story that enough was enough.

David L. — It’s very easy to see that the far leftist prosecutors that Soros backed are refusing to appropriately charge, prosecute and incarcerate criminals in the name of social justice, thereby increasing danger to all law abiding citizens. (And it is very noteworthy that Black city residents are disportionately the victims of the increased city crime.)

To assert that connecting the dots between Soros backing Kim Foxx and her failure to do her job in the name of social justice constitutes an anti-Semitic trope is the same cancel culture rubbish as immediately branding anyone who dared criticize Obama as racist. Disagree with Kass and his positions all you wish and find fault with his reasoning if you desire, but do not accuse him of anti-Semitism, even unintentionally, simply because an individual he wrote about happens to be Jewish.

It’s not as “easy to see” as you blithely assert. Criminologists who study cause and effect when it comes to incarceration, bail and prosecutorial priorities don’t draw these conclusions when they control for as many variables as possible. Anecdotes are easy to find, but data is much harder.

The implication of Kass’ column was not just that Foxx is pursuing policies that make us less safe — and I’m more than open to the idea that data could be marshalled to prove that — but that she’s doing so deliberately and at the behest of a Hungarian billionaire who, for some demented reason, wants to see low-income communities ravaged by crime.

The emphasis on personality rather than policy and data obfuscates rather than clarifies. Seven gratuitous references to Soros invokes a foreign boogey man whom some — many people? — see as a symbol for “Jewish puppet master.”

Again, I am not accusing Kass of anti-Semitism and I don’t believe in “unintentional anti-Semitism.” If, for example, your Peepaw calls Black people “colored” because that’s the term he grew up using, that’s not racism of any sort, even if someone who hears him misinterprets it as racism. It’s only racism if he continues to use the term knowing that others, particularly Black people, hear it as racist.

My stance here is the opposite of “cancel culture” in that I’m arguing that what I see as Kass’ lack of intent to disparage Jews absolves him of any infamous charges. Note, though, that the newsroom union didn’t call for him to be “cancelled” in its letter to management, it asked only that “the paper, and Kass separately, apologize for his indefensible invocation of the Soros tropes” and said it would “welcome the opportunity to speak with him and with newsroom management about the matter.”

No one ever apologized or convened such a meeting. Kass left the paper along with a whole raft of us a little less than a year later.

Marc M. — George Soros is a high-profile public figure, author, and is actively involved in politics. Establishing a barrier to referencing him by name because some may hear it as an anti-Semitic dog whistle doesn't seem right, as it presumes that everyone that uses his name has agreed to the secret code and evil ulterior motives.

No, but it argues for care and context when you want to reference him. It’s certainly fair game to ask: Who is Soros? What is he supporting? Does it work? Can we glean his motives?

But salting his name into commentaries is a bit like repeatedly mentioning the race of a criminal defendant — it may be a true statement, but it damn well better be relevant if you want to bring it up with impunity.

Bob E. — Have you given Kass an opportunity to respond to your allegations [or your version of the facts]?

Did he give the union leaders the chance to respond before slagging them? Did he get a comment from Colin McMahon, the executive editor he dismissed as “weak”? Did he check with George Soros or Kim Foxx before writing the column that got everyone so hopped up?

No. Columnists and pundits in other forums tend to analyze events as they see them and as they’ve been reported, with the idea being that they are advancing and provoking conversations, not composing he-said/she-said articles, and that the subjects of their commentaries have ample access to platforms to respond.

In this case, Kass has his own platform which, to hear him tell it, is quite a bit larger than mine, so he can certainly challenge my “version of the facts” if he’d like. I’ll even link to it!

Controversy over Columbus

Michael M. — Putting the merits and virtue of Christopher Columbus aside, I'm not sure any historical conqueror such as Julius Caesar or Hannibal were much different in their subjugation and enslavement of conquered people. To me, the Columbus statue episode was more about the city caving in to mob justice, mob anarchy than standing up for unacceptable mob rule behavior.

It was "trendy" that calamitous year to wreak havoc on public statues all over the country. I feel that just because a vocal destructive segment of mostly young people felt they could use planned, mob violence against police and municipalities to get their way was wrong and should have been prevented and faced down. To bend to the will of the mob was signaling tacit approval of their agenda.

There has always been a right way to protest against statues or symbols that is legal and non-destructive. Debate and petitions come to mind. I don't think that an actor has the right to physically slap some comedian for a perceived insult, take physical retribution against another because he didn't like what was said any more than I believe a howling violent mob has the right to tear down statues, spray paint and vandalize statues, and disrupt public spaces just because they feel entitled to express their "moral outrage."Law and order should take precedence over mob intimidation. maddenm65@hotmail.com

I agree that the violent protest at the Grant Park statue of Columbus was disgraceful and trying to effect change through such means is only temporarily effective, at best. Peaceful protest to attempt to prompt a civic re-evaluation of who we honor and how we honor them is, of course, not only extremely appropriate but part of our fundamental rights.

The political process, like the criminal justice system, is designed settle disputes without violence. And the dispute over Columbus should have been so settled. We agree on that.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot had the statues removed in order to put a stop to the destructive protests that were diverting police resources and generating situations in which civilians and police officers were being hurt (not gonna referee the excessive force complaints here). And my observation is that, as a political matter, having the statues reinstalled seems as though it will reignite a controversy and debate that the mayor doesn’t need right now.

Liberals and progressives are already quite disenchanted with her, and appearing to side with the champions of Columbus won’t help. She’s been kicking this particular can down the road for nearly two years now and, as a political matter, ought to have kept kicking it for another year.

The City Council — not social justice protesters or the Italian American Civic Committee — ought to decide what to do with those statues after a robust public debate.

Columbus is a complicated figure. But was he simply a man of his time, or a particularly and unnecessarily brutal explorer?

Phillip S. — Regarding naming schools after rich benefactors, that sort of thing won’t lend itself to more diversity in names. Sure we can have Willie Wilson Elementary, but beyond that the choices are limited if we go by dollars. Plus, I’m not a fan of naming things after living people. Too much hassle or embarrassment when those people fall into disgrace.

Bob R. — There is nothing inherently wrong with accepting money from wealthy donors except that it can and does lead directly to disparities in funding from school to school in the same school district. Schools serving the wealthy get more of what they need and want because their parents have the money. Schools serving the poor receive less. The idea that naming rights for schools would be determined by donations, however, is fraught with even deeper problems. The size of any donation says little to nothing of the character of the donor. If names of public schools become available to the highest bidder, that puts the naming rights in conflict with names of others who may be more deserving of the honor because of their public service rather than their bankroll.

Basing the naming of buildings on financial donations takes the “more deserving” question off the table, where it belongs. I expect we can stipulate that almost no one in history meets the standards for enlightenment and purity of word and deed of today, so by making the names on school buildings transactional we can at least remove the sense of collective favorable judgment that attaches to naming rights.

Make the purchase of such rights conditional and reviewable every, say, 10 years, as well as instantly refundable should scandal break.

Mike C. — Why not put up statues of more honorable Italian Americans than Columbus ? 

In 2008, during one of the periodic kerfuffles about the downtown monument to Italo Balbo, henchman to fascist leader Benito Mussolini, I asked readers for suggestions of “more honorable” people of Italian descent. Here are the most popular nominees:

• Enrico Fermi. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics and oversaw the first controlled nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942. Some fault him for playing a key role in the development of the first atomic bomb; I would credit him for playing a key role in helping the United States to be first in acquiring such dreadful weapons.

• Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. He led the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996, and was a widely admired civic as well as religious leader.

• Florence Scala. She was a passionate community activist who led the unsuccessful fight in the 1960s to save her Near West Side Italian-American neighborhood from plans to build the University of Illinois at Chicago campus on the site.

• Ron Santo. He had a 14-season Major League Baseball career with the Cubs, then played a year with the White Sox before retiring in 1974. He was a nine-time All-Star, won five Gold Gloves at third base, whacked 342 homers and went on to become a beloved broadcaster.

Pete Z. - Columbus used Spanish ships and a Spanish crew. Everything he "discovered" he claimed for Spain. His reports are in Spanish and his loyalty seemed to be to Spain. He just happened to be born in Italy. I suggest the Italians celebrate Da Vinci Day instead. Leonardo (1452 –1519) was a most amazing guy!

Perhaps the best idea of all!

Phillip S. — Regarding the guilty plea to drunk driving by Democratic state Rep. Cam Buckner of Chicago — he was found asleep in his car in March 2019, then refused a Breathalyzer test and failed field sobriety tests — I think we’re too hard on people who realize that they are too drunk to drive and pull over to sleep it off. The next guy might think twice and try to make it all the way home.

I hadn’t thought of this and I can see your point. The presumption that someone asleep in the driver’s seat with booze on the breath had to have recently been driving impaired is strong. But that person does deserve some credit for recognizing the wisdom of pulling over and not continuing to endanger others. It would seem smart to build that incentive into the law.

Trump, whose family name was originally Drumpf, blasts a Michigan pol for the spelling of his last name

In attacking Republican U.S. Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan in a speech Saturday, former President Donald Trump said, “A guy who spells his name M-E-I-J-E-R but they pronounce it MY-ER. The hell kind of a spelling is that? MY-ER. MY-GER. It’s MY-GER— but it’s actually pronounced MY-ER… how the hell do you get MY-ER out of it?”

He was speaking Saturday to a crowd outside of Detroit, where nearly everyone grew up shopping at or at least hearing relentless advertising for Meijer superstores — formerly Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. His attempt to “other” the congressman of Dutch heritage by mocking his last name was not only exceedingly juvenile but deeply ironic since Trump’s family name was originally “Drumpf.”

The out-of-touch buffoon was in southeastern Michigan to endorse a Republican challenger to the first term Meijer, who voted to impeach him following the January 6 riots at the Capitol and who is a grandson of store founder Frederik Meijer.

Trump’s grandfather was born Friedrich Drumpf. refSnopes reports that the timing of the name change isn’t clear, but notes that, in his 2004 book “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” Trump wrote that the change was “a good move, I think, since Drumpf Tower doesn’t sound nearly as catchy.”

Ya gotta see these tweets!

I often run across tweets that are too visual in nature to include in the Tweet of the Week contest (the template for the poll does not allow the use of images). Here are a few good ones I’ve come across recently

Teach your children to beatbox:

:

The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

Featuring such movies as Snow White Supremacist, Lady & The Trump, Who Framed Roger Stone, and Anti-Woke-ahontas.

New York Post @nypost

Daily Wire investing $100 million in kids content to battle 'woke' Disney https://t.co/JzymeWzz6c https://t.co/I8uR3mwux0

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

“Are you happy, Ted? Now you know what that button does.”

Uncle Duke @UncleDuke1969

because Popeye is a goddam litterbug

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet of the Week poll!

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