People who know Miss Edith, or are familiar with her writings, won’t be surprised to find that she’s the sort of person who’s easily pissed off by improperly used punctuation and words. Miss Edith makes mistakes, too; readers have pointed out to her flaws even in this site, and she’s done her utmost to fix them posthaste (though if you notice a problem, please let me know!). Edith is genuinely mortified when something wrong gets past her. She likes to think of herself as being a one-woman New Yorker editorial staff in this regard – The New Yorker, of course, known for being a magazine that is, among other things, nit-picky about form.
So imagine Miss Edith’s horror when last night, perusing The New Yorker issue of 25 June, she sat down to enjoy a Calvin Trillin piece about vigilantism on a small Canadian island and read the following:
“That evening, Ross piled some wooden palettes in his front yard, right next to the street, put a couple of propane tanks on top of the pile, started a fire, and, according to Foster, said that he was going to blow up the entire neighborhood.”
Miss Edith does not paint and has little first-hand experience with palettes, but she has spent a good amount of time in art supply shops (she has fetishes for nice paper, colored ink cartridges, and cheap pens that write in funky colors) and it’s always seemed that palettes are just expensive enough that they’re not likely to be candidates for material to build a bonfire. A quick perusal online of the price of wooden paint palettes confirms this.
It seems much more likely to me that the unpleasant, pyromaniac Mr. Ross was using wooden pallets to build his firebomb. Pallets: the cheap wooden structures one uses to load and unload shipments of this, that and the other. Pallets can be taken from all kinds of places. You can steal them from construction sites, for example, quite easily, if you have a truck you can load them into. Not that I recommend this; I’m just saying. You could. If you wanted to.
If Mr. Ross did actually use palettes to build his fire, I’m impressed. If he didn’t, then shame on The New Yorker for letting this slip.
I suppose we should be grateful that the article didn’t say that Mr. Ross built his bonfire out of palates; that would just be gross.
Why can’t people get a grip on this stuff? When even the people who are supposed to know their ass from their elbow lose track of communicating accurately and effectively, what hope can we have for the people who seem to think these things genuinely don’t fucking matter? It makes Miss Edith’s blood boil.
Though I enjoyed Mr. Trillin’s piece otherwise.
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2 comments:
I share Miss Edith's consternation with the New Yorker's failure to distinguish between "pallet" and "palette." A personal pet peeve is the use of "impact" to to avoid having to choose between using affect and effect. Despite what Ditech claims, people are not smart. They are largely unable to express themselves coherently!
What really makes Miss Edith completely fucking bonkers -- I mean, one of the things in this large category -- is when people don't distinguish between pallet, palette, and palate. What with food trendiness and food writing -- much of which is about, yes, palates -- this comes up a lot. Makes me want to tear my hair out.
Infer vs. imply is another oldie but goodie. These days you hear people who theoretically really ought to know better mixing these up. Very, very, very sad.
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