pyrrhic victory

Codswallop.

 

I used indefatigable in a headline once.

 

don't go there ... don't go there ... don't go there ...

 

I took a lot of shit for using "ebullient" in a hed, but I stand by it.

And the fucker fit, too.

 

Not every fucking story has to teach. But some can. And 21, what snooty is pretending like people aren't smart enough to get the things that you know. You can generalize all you want about how people will just gloss over something or quit reading, and even point to some mindless reader study that shows people don't want any four-syllable words in the paper, but it doesn't make it true. In a story about Kobe Bryant, I once tried to make a reference to kobe beef. It wasn't done as a joke, and it wasn't anything particularly witty or smart, and maybe it probably should have been taken out based on sheer lameness. But it worked for what the piece was. A copy editor removed it. No one knows what that is, he said. Sure they do, I told him. Sorry, he said. We have to assume people don't know that kind of stuff, unless they read restaurant reviews in the NYT. That night I went home somewhat perturbed and decided to thumb through my wife's US Weekly, the dumbest fucking magazine on the face of the earth. In a story about Kevin Federline, there was a reference to him eating a kobe beef sandwich. I threw the magazine against the wall.

We can keep making stories simpler and lamer, keep searching and clinging to readers who don't want to read the paper anyway, and eventually, when we decide "Pyrrhic" is too much, the next gal decides "serendipitous" is too much, and the guy after her says "prelude" is too haughty, and 10 years from now, we're all typing in instant messager speak. R U dwn w/ dat?!!!

I don't know if "Pyrrhic" is where writers need to make a stand, but it has to be somewhere. I don't have a problem with poorly-educated people deciding who the president should be based on how much they'd like to drink a beer with him. But they shouldn't get to decide the ENTIRE content of my newspaper either. Sports section included. Sports fans are not dumb. They're not all mouth-breathing idiots. Some, yes. But not all. Even if 80 percent of your section is written for the layman, that's still 80 percent. Leave the other 20 percent to people who actually still cherish the language. They'll thank you for it.

 

Whether or not to use Pyrrhic victory seems like a real Hobson's choice to me.

 

Perhaps it would help if you hauled out Occam's Razor.

 

I kinda think the principles that form the foundation of Occam's Razor applies here.

Hell, beat by 39 seconds.

 

A moment of near-perfect synchronicity.

 

What's wrong with ebullient? It's a perfectly cromulent word.

 

I know.

Personally, I thought it embiggened the design presentation.

Of course, I never read the stories, because I was too busy doing a cutout and downloading some helmets to use as graphics.

 

It is not nice to speak ill of the dead.