pyrrhic victory

That's the difference, I guess.
To some, Pyrrhic isn't gratuitous. Its an understood and accepted description of a particular situation.

To you, its a "money" word.

 

I snuck "vernal" (of or relating to spring) into a story of mine about football practice once. It helped that I was working the desk solo.

 

Exactly. Maybe it is a "money" word in some areas but certainly not in mine.[/Northeast liberal elitest]

 

Yeah, you guys are right. Fuck the working man with his inferior high school education. Why should he have a product he can read? If he can't match up to our mastery of words and references, then that mouth-breathing jackoff can rot in hell. And the same goes for the rest of those mouth-breathing retards. We should write to the people who can pick Victorian literature references out of the eighth paragraphs. In fact, I wish we could make our readers take some sort of test to decide whether they're worthy of our brilliant, God-inspired prose. If they fail, well, they can look at the pretty pictures as long as they mind their place.

I'd break out the sarcasm font, but c'mon now.

 

Meat --

That's a fairly impressive display of misplaced anti-intellectualism.

Is something stopping ANYONE from looking up something they don't know?

As others can tell you, I am staunch in my defense of the underclass. But anyone can get a library card. There is no excuse for not knowing the reference or knowing how to look it up.

 

Mr Drink,

Pyrrhic as a money word: small change.

Zeitgeist, maybe. Weltschmerz, definitely. Your view of the lumpenprole readership lumps you in with it. That's your own private zeitgeist, I guess. Resultant mood: weltschmerz.

Crosswords are still in newspapers, right?

YHS, etc

 

Screw the readers. If they're too stupid to know what it means and won't take the time to look it up so they can understand, we don't want them reading the story anyway.

Let them move on to another story or paper.

 

You know what fucking pisses me off? The way "anti-intellectualism" gets thrown around here. It is not "anti-intellectual" to point out that no, the average education and intelligence of our readers is NOT the same as those who produce the product. And unless you're working at NPR or Atlantic Monthly, you're writing for a broad and diverse readership, which includes many people who aren't, God bless them, particularly smart, at least by our standards.

One of the foundations of our job is to parse out information. Simple enough, right? Well, how well are we doing it if we're confusing portions of our readership? And worse still is this "well, they can go to the library and learn something" attitude. Here we are, trying to get people to keep reading the paper that they only have 20-30 minutes for anymore, and we want them to come to a full stop and break out their Webster's so they can fully understand the nuance and clerverness of our goddamned basketball gamer lede?

We are a general-purpose product. We do not only go to the houses of those with at least one person sporting a Ph.D or master's. Some of the people, hell, many of the people who read us do so with a high school education -- or less. I'm pretty sure you can produce a story that reaches the latter without insulting the former. That's what a good journalist can do. Apparently many people here think it's an either-or choice.

Good teachers don't talk over the heads of their students to get themselves over. Good newspaper writers shouldn't, either.

 

My experience is that just as many readers are more intelligent and better educated than the people who produce the journalism. Writing to the lowest common denominator isn't the answer.

 

But again, it's being presented as an either-or choice. You don't HAVE to pick between the graduate school alumni and the 10th grade dropouts. Our job is to produce something accessable to ALL of them. That doesn't mean writing in monosyllables, but it also doesn't mean making a Final Jeopardy answer out of your ledes.

And again, there's disdain towards the intellectually lesser. "Lowest common denominator" carries a hell of a punch, and it's directed at people who probably don't deserve it. We should be thankful for the readers we have, not tut-tutting at them for not jumping through our literary hoops well enough.

 

Exactly.

Meat, no one is saying that you TRY and go over their heads.

But striking ANYTHING that might not be immediately understood by EVERYONE will eventually leave you in a box with 200 words at your disposal.

You have to flirt with the higher end at times, too.

And I say this as someone who despises those who use unnecessary words, or who make things unecessarily complicated.

But in the case of Pyrrhic victory, it sums up the thought most efficiently, and is in fairly broad use.

There is nothing wrong with using it.

And yes, people should have to look stuff up some times. No one knows everything. Knowing where to find what you don't know is important.

 

A Pyrrhic victory means you lose by winning. The victory was too costly.

Precisely. So why can't the writer just say it that way? I don't think it's "dumbing down" the story at all. It's just making it easier to understand. That's it.

The reader doesn't know you considered using the term. Maybe the reader looks at the lede and says, "Hmm. Sounds like a Pyrrhic victory to me." But I'm writing a story for a reader to finish it, not to run to a dictionary -- or, even worse, turn to another story. I figure I've got about 15 seconds for a reader to latch on to my story. I'm paid the same whether he-she finishes it or not, but I want the person to read it.

I'm not saying I'm against using terms like "Pyrrhic victory," but I've also been around long enough to know that if I use it, there are fewer readers who are going to know what I'm talking about than if I write it the way it is written above. Our job is to disseminate information, not clog up the channel of communication. Mystery Meat is much more emphatic than I am, but I agree with him.