The Papir of Recard

If we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are known for anything—and, last we checked, we aren’t—perhaps it’s our occasional grammatical and orthographical lapses. Sure, we have a staff of over 250 editors and interns, but even we can’t catch everything.

As a result, sometimes we offer “posts” with unfortunate mistakes. In fact, the mistakes are particularly unfortunate, since oftentimes we ridicule others for their sub-par grammar. Such, we suppose, are the wages of hypocrisy.

Thankfully, we have the help of a few outside grammarians. Renegade grammarians, you might call them. Our old pal aelfheld, for example, enjoys lending a hand when we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” offer one of our typical solecisms. And, we might add, our good buddy does this for free. (Yet they say that people don’t care about others anymore.)

All the same, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” would like to think that we’ve never made a whopper of an error—the kind of screw-up that should ruin careers, if not lives. Naturally, we’ve spelled “weblog” “welbog” before. But who hasn’t? Still—knock on wood—we don’t recall a misstep so bad that we contemplated taking up careers as yak farmers.

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” wonder if our stately friends at the stately New York Times can say the same thing. Although the Paper of Record must possess an editorial team that dwarfs the crack young staff—aelfheld or not—it appears to have offered a prime example of the disastrously horrid grammatical blunder. To make matters worse, it’s on the front page.

In the Saturday, November 19 edition of the Gray Lady (or, as our British friends would call it, the Grey Ledy), one Eric Schmitt presented a column entitled “Uproar in House as Parties Clash on Iraq Pullout.” It contains the following mind-blowing sentence (all of the errors are the Times’, not ours):

They House came to a standstill shouted Ms. Schmidt down, causing the House to come to a abrupt standstill, and moments later, Representative Harold Ford, Democrat of Tennessee, charged across the chamber’s center aisle to the Republican side screaming that the attack had been unwarranted.

We know what you’re thinking, dear reader: Wow, that’s bad. If it were the product of a college freshman—and it very much seems like it is—it would demonstrate said student’s lack of editorial acumen. All the Solecisms and Blunders That Are Fit to Print, eh?

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” found the next sentence of the piece interesting too:

“You guys are pathetic.” yelled Representative Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Whom is he calling pathetic? The Republicans or the inept staff at the Times? After all, the Gray Lady’s minions made an error in that sentence too.

It’s a sad day when the Paper of Record doesn’t live up to the storied editorial acumen of the crack young staff. Perhaps Maureen Dowd will defect to our outfit—if she’ll fit in it.