Was amused to see a mistake in The New York Times yesterday, in an obit about former Boeing CEO Frank Schrontz, “Mr. Shrontz was known as a calm hand at the company till, with an everymanager’s feeling for the rank and file.”
(An exec doesn’t want to be remembered for having his hand anywhere near the “till,” of course. “Tiller” is what the writer was going for. And I checked back; the up-fucked expression was rectified later in the day.)
“If I was dead right now,” a friend used to say at times like this, “I’d be rolling over in my grave!”
That’s the same mock dismay I express when I hear college edjumacated people say things like “him and me shoulda went.” It hurts my ear. But really, who cares?
I’ve referred here before to “The Typochondriac,” a column I used to edit for a communication newsletter. Its writer, a hilariously snooty Massacusetts-based corporate writer and English professor named Alden Wood, regularly caught big-time publications committing howlers, and wrote about it—ostensibly to make his readers smarter, but mostly to make us feel smug, in our own mastery of grammar and syntax.
If writers and readers have lost some of our linguistic fastidiousness since the Alden Woods of the world retired, maybe we’ve lost some of our misplaced self-righteousness, too. An even trade, perhaps.
None of which is to diminish the work or the wit of the late Wood. Of which I was reminded a few years ago when veteran communicator Mike Jenkins shared a joke that he heard Wood tell back in the day:
A guy was in Boston for his first time ever, attending a conference for work. Wanting to get some inside info on the “must-eat food” while in town, he asked the hotel concierge for advice. The concierge gave him a few choices, but then suggested Boston Scrod. Figuring it had to be good since it had Boston in its name, the man decided Boston Scrod was it. The conference was running long, and by the time he had his bag packed and his room charges paid, he had a little more than an hour to get to Logan Airport for his flight home. Handing some cash to the hotel bellman, he jumped into a waiting cab, threw his bag across the bench, and settled into the back seat, as the cabbie asked, “Where to, buddy?” and began heading out of the hotel driveway. Nervous that he might not get to taste Boston Scrod, and might even miss his flight, the guy yelled back, “Quick! Take me someplace I can get scrod!” The cabbie slammed on his brakes, turned around in the front seat, and replied, “I’ve been driving hack for 20 years, buddy, and I’ve had guys ask me to do that 1,000 times. But, this is the first time anyone asked it in the pluperfect subjunctive!”
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