Talk Like A Pirate Day

Talk Like A Pirate Day

Today's post is a departure from the usual deadly serious talk about commas and dangling modifiers, but it IS all about speech.

Pirate speech, that is -- as in the 11th annual Talk Like A Pirate Day (TLAPD for short) that takes place every Sept. 19 all over the world.

Pirates offer such wonderful color and flair to our speech that I felt they were worthy of a post to coincide with this hallowed day. And you just might learn something here after all that you can use in your writing and editing! If nothing else, use today's post to enhance your speech, not just on Sept. 19 but every day!

On a lighter note, here's one group we really hope   doesn't suffer from any types of Parrot's Disease! 

  

Before I delve into Talk Like A Pirate Day and its two wonderful co-founders (whom I contacted personally before writing this post so as to avoid being given the black spot!), we first must give due honor to the man called "the patron saint" of the annual Sept. 19 

event:    British actor Robert Newton. 

Newton, who in true Pirate fashion died of alcohol-related causes at the young age of 50 in 1956, was (in my opinion and that of many others) absolutely spectacular as Long John Silver in Walt Disney's highly underrated film adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island." 

    I would submit that the film is one of the greatest Disney films, animated or live action, of all time. If you haven't seen it, go rent it or find it at your public library! You'll love it.

Here is what IMDb (the popular Internet Movie Database website) says about Newton's performance, and note that it coincidentally (not ironically!) uses the exact phrase "talk like a pirate":

Robert Newton was one of the great character actors -- and great characters -- of the British cinema, best remembered today for playing Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1950) and its sequel for Walt Disney in the 1950s. His portrayal of Long John Silver and of Blackbeard, the Pirate (1952) created a persona that was so indelible that his vocal intonations created the paradigm for scores of people who want to "Talk Like a Pirate." The performance overshadows Newton's legacy, which is based on many first-rate performances in such movies as This Happy Breed (1944), Odd Man Out (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948), where his Bill Sykes is truly chilling. Oliver Reed, who played Sykes in the Oscar-winning movie musical Oliver! (1968) was influenced by Newton.

Read the full biography of Newton at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0628579/?ref_=tt_ov_st.

And here's the "patron saint" reference (he was labeled as such by TLAPD co-founder Cap'n Slappy) in Wikipedia that also mentions TLAPD:

Newton is best remembered for portraying the feverish-eyed Long John Silver in the Walt Disney version of Treasure Island, which became the standard for screen portrayals of pirates. Hailing from the West Country that was also the birthplace of many famous English pirates, Newton is credited with popularising the stereotypical West Country "pirate voice" by exaggerating his West Country accent.^[1] Newton has become the "patron saint" of the annual International Talk Like a Pirate Day on 19 September.

With his strong West Country accent, Newton portrayed Bristol's other famous pirate Blackbeard the Pirate in a 1952 film directed by Raoul Walsh and also starring Linda Darnell and William Bendix. 

(see more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Newton.)

Anyone under age 40 probably can't relate to this, but when I was in elementary school, before the age of videos and the Internet and handheld gadgets, it was a really, really big treat for the school to invite the children into the gym (we had no auditorium), all filled with chairs, once or twice a year for a screening of some film that the school obtained a copy of. Not discs or videotapes but actual reels of film shown via a projector.

 

I recall one year the school showed "Treasure Island." It was perhaps the best 90 minutes or so that I spent in all the years of elementary school. I was spellbound by Newton's fantastic portrayal of the main pirate in the film, Long John Silver. How fantastic was his performance? So fantastic that even though he was a typical pirate -- a lying, conniving, greedy, backstabbing, murderous fiend and rogue -- you end up rooting wholeheartedly for him and (spoiler alert! skip to next paragraph if you don't want to know) are overjoyed that he averts a hangman's noose at the end.

Every actor or child who has ever tried to impersonate a pirate since 1950, whether he realizes it or not, owes nearly all of what he thinks an ideal pirate should act and sound like to Newton. Only Johnny Depp comes remotely close as an iconic pirate (In the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films) in the public consciousness in the past 63 years.

More praise for Newton from IMDb:

Often credited with originating the style of speech generally equated with pirates. After his spectacular turn as Long John Silver in the Disney version of Treasure Island (1950), actors playing pirates in film, radio, television, and theatre, all tended to use (and still use) the same pseudo-Cornish accent Newton came up with.

So, as we celebrate the annual Talk Like A Pirate Day, let's 

raise the Jolly Roger in salute to the greatest pirate actor of all time, Robert Newton!

Now a bit about the event, in case you are interested (most of the items below are taken directly, with permission, from the official TLAPD site, http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html):

Ever since Dave Barry    mentioned us in his nationally syndicated newspaper column in 2002, what once was a goofy idea celebrated by a handful of friends has turned into an international phenomenon that shows no sign of letting up. Maybe you read about us on line.. Maybe you caught one of our radio or TV interviews. Or maybe you just stumbled on to our site while googling around for sites your mother probably wouldn't approve of. Or perhaps you're one of the millions of people from South Africa to the South Pole, from New York to the Pacific Northwest, who've made it your own personal excuse to party like pirates every September 19th (and sometimes for days before and after)!

The "us" in the previous paragraph refers to co-founders  Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers and 

 John "Ol' Chumbucket"   Baur, who are referred to this way on the official site:

Ol' Chumbucket and Cap'n Slappy are actually two reasonably well-adjusted middle-aged guys who are trying to take what started as a small private joke and turn it into a productive job.

Here is what Cap'n Slappy sent me when I asked for his thoughts on how it all got started:

International Talk Like a Pirate Day was a whimsical notion that started with a racquetball injury. That "ARRR!" heard round the world. It was a concept that made us laugh -- but we had no idea it would every get this big -- worldwide following. It is both infectious and addictive -- that is, if you are outside and someone yells, "ARRRR, me mateys!" It would be very difficult to resist the pull of your inner "ARRR!" in response. That's the infectious part. But it wouldn't stop there -- as you continue talking like a pirate you can't resist the urge to say things like, "Splice the mainbrace!" or to refer to children as "wee sprogs!" or to shout "Shiver me timbers!" in surprise -- and then begin to make up your own phrases -- like, "Great Neptune's Salty Man Nipples!" or "I'll be hornswoggled for a Dutchman's potty!"

That's the great thing about it -- you don't have to even know what your saying if it just SOUNDS piratty.

Complete strangers bond over enthusiastic attempts to bellow forth a lot of nautical nonsense from centuries past. Perhaps part of the fun is that pirates appear to eschew all punctuation except for the exclamation point. And there's something refreshing in replacing the pedestrian swear words we use when referring to lousy drivers with, "Ye filthy bilge rats!"

But that's the secret gift the day gives. The permission to let your freak flag fly - so long as your freak flag is a jolly roger.

These scurvy dogs even have put out a few books, including

 the delightful "Pirattitude."  

Want to know more about the two men and how to contact them? About the event? About TLAPD events taking place near you? About awesome merchandise they sell? Check out these sites. I should add that I have no connection to them and no financial interest. I simply love the concept and want everyone to know about TLAPD!

* The official TLAPD website: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/contact.html

* The TLAPD Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/InternationalTalkLikeAPirateDay

* Watch a short video that explains the finer points of Pirattitude: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=OfficialWench

* IMDb's entry on "Treasure Island":  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043067/

At least for one day (and why not more?) out of 365, why not have some fun? Get out there and do your inner pirate proud!  

It's time to wrap it up. My next post will discuss some great, colorful phrases that sadly are hardly ever used nowadays. Perhaps we can help bring them back! Stay tuned ...  

 

Dates: Writing them should be easy

Dates: Writing them should be easy  

How can something as simple as writing a date    turn into such a problem?



Advertisements in particular seem to be the worst offenders, but dates somehow have become a mystery to far too many people in all levels of communication.


What am I talking about? Two things, actually: 

1) The incorrect placement of AD
2) The incorrect use of ordinal numbers in place of cardinal numbers

1) Let's start with AD. It's a term we read and use quite often, but do we even know what it means? For that matter, how many of you use p.m. and yet have no idea what the letters stand for (post meridiem, or after the meridiem or middle point, which noon is considered in a calendar day)?

The key to any good communication is understanding what you are using in that communication. You shouldn't be using terms and abbreviations if you don't know what they mean.

AD is Latin for anno Domini, which means year of the Lord (anno is year, Domino is Lord). It indicates the years in the Christian era, or since the "year of the Lord" (the accepted date of the birth of Jesus Christ, using the Gregorian calendar). Once you know that, it should be painfully obvious that AD belongs BEFORE a date, never after.

For example, you wouldn't say we are now living in "2013 the year of the Lord," or that Charlemagne    was crowned emperor in "800 the year of the Lord." If you read those out loud, you hear how ridiculous they sound. Yet that's exactly what it means when anyone writes 2013 AD or 800 AD. The wording is backward. This is the year of the Lord 2013 (AD 2013) and Charlemagne was crowned in the year of the Lord 800 (AD 800). 

So why we so often see AD wrongly placed AFTER the date rather than before? It's partly ignorance -- not realizing what AD means -- but largely our archenemy, that insidious malady I call Parrot's 

Disease,   that habit of blindly copying what we see without ensuring it is correct.


If you learn only one thing from reading my blog, at least let it be this: Be skeptical and look things up to be sure! Do not trust myths and rumors or repeat things you have seen or heard, no matter how common. This is how such atrocious writing becomes so common. Be uncommon and be sure something you write is correct. Don't just parrot what you read and hear!

2) As for ordinal numbers, the key when it comes to dates is realizing that although we may use them in pronouncing dates, we shouldn't use ordinal numbers in writing them. In other words, we may call today Sept. 13th when saying it aloud, but the only correct way to write it is Sept. 13, 13 being a cardinal number. 

Ordinal? Cardinal? Confused? Here's an easy way to sort them out: Think order (or ranking) for ordinal, as in He bats first in the order or Jane placed the sixth order for a cake this hour and will have a long wait or In order of importance, showing up on time ranks first.

For cardinal, merely think of cards, as in a deck of cards. The numbers on a deck of cards are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, all cardinal numbers. All the regular numbers we use (0-infinity) are called cardinal numbers, and those are the numbers we should use to write nearly all dates.


The only exception would be the construction we use in more informal conversation, such as The party will take place on the 12th of October. But as you can see, that's not formally writing a date as much as it is describing a particular moment in time. In other words, on a birthday party invitation you're not likely to see when: the 12th of October. Instead, you'll see when: Oct. 12.

When writing a date (such as the kind you find on folios at the top of every page in a newspaper), use only cardinal numbers: Jan. 1, Feb. 29, March 3, April 15, Aug. 30, Dec. 25 and so on. NOT Jan. 1st, Feb. 29th, March 3rd, etc.
 
It's time to wrap it up. My next post will depart from our usual lessons to discuss/promote another date: Sept. 19. It's

the annual  Talk Like A Pirate Day! Stay tuned, matey! ...  

 

 

 

Daffy definitions

Daffy definitions

If you've read my blog before, you will recall my frequent references to what I have dubbed  Parrot's Disease, that unfortunate practice of blindly copying what we see, read and hear without taking the time to question its validity or look it up to be sure it's accurate.


Today's lesson is nearly all about Parrot's Disease and how it has led to many words and phrases being used incorrectly. If you learn nothing else today, at least emerge more determined to be skeptical and look things up rather than blindly trusting the world. 


Perhaps the worst part of it all is the modern dictionary's willingness to accept too many of the daffy definitions cited below. Parrot's Disease is everywhere.


Here, in no particular order, are some of the most common daffy definitions I see as an editor:


1) Bemused -- Gee, it's so close to amused it must mean basically the same thing, right? NO! I am not bemused when I read a story in which bemused is misused.


Bemused has no connection whatsoever with being amused. It means to be confused, perplexed or bewildered, as in The veteran actor looked bemused as the young director berated him for his performance.


2) Anxious -- It is NOT a synonym for eager. If you are anxious, you are nervous, unsettled, worried, full of anxiety.

Wrong: He was anxious to enter the game and show the coaches what he could do.
Right: He was eager to enter the game and show the coaches what he could do.
Right: He anxiously awaited the results of the test, knowing that a bad grade would ruin his chances of a scholarship.

3) The lion's share is wrongly defined in virtually every dictionary. Why would I make such a bold statement? Because it does NOT mean the majority, most or even the overwhelming majority. It means ALL, as in 100%.


If you're going to borrow a phrase from a famous source, don't you have an obligation to acknowledge its meaning from that original source? I know someone will gripe that it's merely a case of a phrase evolving into a different meaning, something that happens frequently. But that's not the case here. It's simply a matter of butchering the phrase in the first place and distorting its true meaning, then Parrot's Disease sadly taking over as the butchered meaning becomes accepted.


What am I referring to? The phrase the lion's share comes directly from Aesop's Fables. 

 The lion in the fable proclaims that he merits ALL of the spoils of the hunt he takes part in with a cow, goat and sheep, or the lion's share, as his right considering he is the strongest and biggest of the hunters. He definitely isn't interested in sharing any of it. To him, the lion's share means 100%. NOT anything else.


And that is what the phrase should indicate whenever you use it.



4) Enormity -- The dictionary yet again lets us down by insisting that this word can sub for magnitude. It can't. Nor should it used, despite what some dictionaries say, to indicate size, as in enormous. It means (as least in proper newspaper usage) the quality of being wicked, evil, immoral, outrageous.

You can talk correctly about the enormity of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship in    Nazi Germany, but not the enormity of the decision that led a person to choose one college over another.


When people use enormity they nearly always intend to mean magnitude.

Right:  He recoiled when reading about the enormity of the Syrian government's gas attack on its own people. 
Wrong: The enormity of the crater surprised the scientists.
Right: He realized the magnitude of the moment as he made a decision on whether to send the nation to war.

5) Nonplussed -- The "non" seems to throw off a lot of people, who then surmise that it means "not plussed" or something like that and go on to use the word opposite to its true meaning. 


It means to be baffled, at a loss, in a quandary, as in The politician was nonplussed by the heckler's insistence in arguing such a trivial point in the agenda.

 
6) Disinterested -- It absolutely does NOT mean uninterested. You don't become disinterested in a movie once it gets boring. You become uninterested. The words are not synonyms. Yet again, the dictionary gets it wrong!


Disinterested means to have no vested interest in or selfish motives about something, or in other words to be impartial. A judge   should be disinterested in all sides of every case brought before him.


7) Irregardless -- No matter how many times you've seen this "word," here is the reality: It DOES NOT EXIST. The word you want is simply regardless. One more time: Irregardless is not a word.


8) Literally -- How I hate it when people literally use literally incorrectly. I heard someone foolishly say, "I literally exploded when I heard that." I wanted to reply, "Then what are you doing still alive?"

It does not mean    figuratively, as the foolish speaker used it. Or metaphorically. It means it happened exactly as described. And of course no person could literally explode and then be alive to talk about it.

Right: The professor literally spat on the host and walked out in the middle of the interview when he felt insulted.
Wrong: Nancy literally got the green light from the city to conduct the research. (Unless the city has a light that is the color green and it has some great significance in determining events, no one ever gets a green light from it.)
Right: China is literally a day ahead of us on the calendar.

9) Could care less -- Completely wrong in 99.99% of cases in which it is used. If you could care less, it means you are capable of caring less than you already do. That by definition means that you DO care somewhat, or else you wouldn't be able to care less. 

What you really mean is that you care so little about something that you could NOT care less, or could not care any less than you already do. By saying you care less, you are saying the opposite of what you mean.

Get it right! The term is could NOT care less (or couldn't care less).


10) Ironic -- Perhaps the most misused word on this list. It doesn't mean a peculiar coincidence. It's not one bit ironic that you run into a person three times in three locations in one day. Nor is it ironic to find something weird, strange, funny, paradoxical or interesting.


Something is ironic if it produces a result that is the opposite of what was intended or said. 



Wrong: The man won the lottery but ironically died before he could collect his winnings. 
Wrong: In a touch of irony, it rained during their wedding procession.
Wrong: It was ironic that she grew up in Chicago and ended up marrying a man who was a Chicago native, even though they met in Boston.
Right: The protesters decried the use of expletives 

   and sexually suggestive lyrics in the song, but the publicity from the demonstrations ironically helped the rapper sell five times more copies of his CD than before the protests began.

It's time to wrap it up. My next post will be focus on writing dates correctly. It's a much bigger problem than you think. Stay tuned ...  

 

Dateline: your town

Dateline: your town

If you work in the media, you   
probably know what a dateline is. But exactly what is a dateline, and where's the "date" part in a dateline?


For reasons that aren't entirely clear or convincing to me, for centuries newspapers would place a location and a date at the beginning of a story (like the very old one above) that takes place outside of the publication's circulation area. For example, a newspaper in New York City might have used for a dateline something like this at the beginning of the text of a story, before the first sentence:


PARIS, June 24 --  


The format requires the city in all caps, then the state or nation after it lowercase (if used; Paris does not require such, as I will explain later).

And now you see where the date part comes from. 

But why was the date put there in the first place? Wouldn't the context of the story make it clear when the action is taking place, such as references to last week, today, yesterday, June 17, etc.? That's certainly the case for any article you read in a newspaper nowadays.

Perhaps it stems from the era of multiple newspaper editions each day and the need to make absolutely clear what day a story took place. That's the reason why the newspaper hawker on the street would utter   the famous "extra! extra!" -- before the advent of immediate news from TV, radio and the Internet, newspapers often would print an "extra" edition (or several extras) to rush into publication some breaking news they didn't want to wait until the next day to publish. To entice readers to buy a new edition, the paper would put out an "extra" and the hawkers would announce the latest news in the extra with their loud sales pitch.

Or perhaps it came from weekly/monthly editions and the desire to let the reader know which day of the previous week/month the story took place. But again, wouldn't the story be able to make that clear without such a crutch? I certainly don't need a date on the stories I read in the free community weekly that is thrown on our driveway every Wednesday.

I don't know the answer, and a brief Internet search offered little help on the origin of datelines. But that doesn't matter. The important thing today is to grasp the proper use of datelines when it comes to locations, vital because it applies not just to the dateline at the beginning of a story but how to use a location in the story itself. This will make sense in a moment.

I'm not aware of any major newspaper in the U.S. that still uses the actual date in a dateline. But you might be surprised to learn that as recently as late 2007, The New York Times continued that long-outdated practice. Why it took The Times so long to come to its senses is a mystery to me.

What made that practice particularly dopey was the paper's insistence on treating every story as if it were happening right at that moment, as if typing "June 24" magically whisked the reader    back in time into that 24-hour period even though they were reading it at least a day and often days later. The text of the story would use words like "today" simply because of the date used in the dateline. In other words, the June 28 edition of The Times might have printed a story about an event that occurred FOUR DAYS earlier, on the 24th, but because "June 24" was typed in the dateline, the newspaper felt that gave it license to treat the story as if you were reading it ON June 24 and would write that something happened today -- meaning today, June 24, not today, June 28.

That's ridiculously confusing to readers, who then might see "today," "yesterday" and "tomorrow" sprinkled all over the newspaper in various articles with different dates in the datelines, with the newspaper very wrongly figuring you the reader immediately will connect the dots from the obscure date printed in the dateline and will know today doesn't really mean today in several places in the newspaper. Huh?

Talk about needlessly confusing readers.

Thankfully, all we need concern ourselves with is the location in datelines. The guidance for most newspapers is Associated Press style, followed by the newspaper's own individual style guides and the general rule dictating how to use datelines for stories that take place in the same state that the newspaper is published in.

This is important because it dictates how to use such locations in the story, not just the dateline.

For example, AP has compiled a list of U.S. and international cities that "stand alone" in datelines, meaning the city alone is sufficient to identify a location. Stories put on the AP list are considered so familiar and famous that no normal reader would have any problem recognizing them using the city by itself. And remember, brevity is essential in newspapers because of space limitations, so any chance to identify someplace using fewer words is good.

For example, on AP's list of datelines are such places as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Moscow, London, Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro. So for the dateline as well as all uses of the city in text, you can write London and not the longer London, England. Of course there are other cities in the world named London, but the thinking is that unless a story specifies otherwise (such as writing London, Calif.), it is safe to assume all references to London refer to the famous English capital.


Washington rightly    is also on that list of datelines, with the thinking being that the nation's capital is mentioned in stories about 100 times more often than is the state of Washington and that there should be no confusion about which Washington we are talking about. Again, simply specify that you AREN'T talking about the famous and common location by simply writing Washington state, for example.

Yet even though this is clearly the rule, at every newspaper I have worked at as an editor, I find that reporters, editors and copy editors are forever wrongly putting  ", D.C." after Washington. They somehow think readers need this clarification, even though the style we use (AP) clearly thinks there is no such confusion. Trust AP style and just use Washington 95 percent of the time.

There are rare exceptions, of course, but isn't it clear, for example, that when we write "in the 50 states plus Washington" that Washington is the capital and not the state, obviously one of the aforementioned 50 states already?

Newspapers often also have their own individual list of datelines. The New York Daily News, for example, felt that for its readers Newark, Trenton and Jersey City were familiar enough cities in nearby New Jersey that the state did not need to be included in any references to those locations. It also felt, unlike AP, that cities like Tucson (in Arizona), Ankara (in Turkey) and Nashville (in Tennessee) also were familiar enough to readers to stand alone in datelines and stories.

I agree and am baffled as to why dozens more cities are not on AP's list. Here it is:

U.S. cities that stand alone:

ATLANTA	MILWAUKEE
BALTIMORE	MINNEAPOLIS
BOSTON	NEW ORLEANS
CHICAGO	NEW YORK
CINCINNATI	OKLAHOMA CITY
CLEVELAND	PHILADELPHIA
DALLAS	PHOENIX
DENVER	PITTSBURGH
DETROIT	ST. LOUIS
HONOLULU	SALT LAKE CITY
HOUSTON	SAN ANTONIO
INDIANAPOLIS	SAN DIEGO
LAS VEGAS	SAN FRANCISCO
LOS ANGELES	SEATTLE
MIAMI	WASHINGTON

Also HOLLYWOOD when used instead of LOS ANGELES on stories about films and the film industry.
Stories from all

Foreign cities that stand alone:

AMSTERDAM	MEXICO CITY
BAGHDAD	MILAN
BANGKOK	MONACO
BEIJING	MONTREAL
BEIRUT	MOSCOW
BERLIN	MUNICH
BRUSSELS	NEW DELHI
CAIRO	PANAMA CITY
DJIBOUTI	PARIS
DUBLIN	PRAGUE
GENEVA	QUEBEC CITY
GIBRALTAR	RIO DE JANEIRO
GUATEMALA CITY	ROME
HAVANA	SAN MARINO
HELSINKI	SAO PAULO
HONG KONG	SHANGHAI
ISLAMABAD	SINGAPORE
ISTANBUL	STOCKHOLM
JERUSALEM	SYDNEY
JOHANNESBURG	TOKYO
KUWAIT CITY	TORONTO
LONDON	VATICAN CITY
LUXEMBOURG	VIENNA
MACAU	ZURICH
MADRID

In addition, use UNITED NATIONS alone, without a N.Y. designation, in stories from U.N. headquarters.

For cities NOT on AP's short list of those that stand alone, use this format:

* CITY all caps, followed by state abbreviated according to AP and not postal style: Gary, Ind.; Provo, Utah; Teaneck, N.J.
* The following eight states, however, are never abbreviated at any time in datelines or stories (unless you are typing a complete mailing address for someone to write to, in which case "Ogden, UT 84401" would be correct for the city in Utah): Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, Texas and Utah. So you would write Odessa, Texas; Juneau, Alaska; Portland, Maine.
* If a city is in Canada, the city is followed by the province, which is never abbreviated: Edmonton, Alberta; Parry Sound, Ontario; Vancouver, British Columbia.


And course there is the general rule that you omit the state for cities that are in the same state as the newspaper, again figuring the reader will rightly assume the article is talking about a city in that same state unless it says otherwise. For example, the Providence Journal, which publishes in Rhode Island, would never need to put ", R.I," after cities such as Pawtucket, Cranston, Warwick, Narragansett and Central Falls.

****

 

Yet another aspect of a dateline that is at times subject to debate is whether someone must have physically been at the location as a reporter/news gatherer for the dateline to be acceptable. In other words, many newspapers would object to a reporter putting TEHRAN as the dateline for a story about something going on in Iran if the reporter never actually was IN Tehran to write the story. If he just saw a tweet, email, blog or press release or something like that, or just made telephone interviews to gather the information and wrote a story based on that rather than on personal observation in the actual city used in the dateline, he would be wrong to use a dateline, many would contend.



Other newspapers might have no problem using a dateline anytime to identify where a story originates, but most seem to agree the writer should physically be at the dateline for it to be used before a story.


But that's a debate for another day.


It's time to wrap it up. My next post will discuss a few words or phrases that people think they understand but are nearly always used incorrectly. Stay tuned ...