Typocast 3

It is reported that Northern Ireland Unionists are put out at the prominence given to Martin McGuinness's leadership of the IRA on his tombstone.

But there is more significance to this.

Sinn Féin's politicisation of the Irish language in the North needs no recapping. The Good Friday Agreement envisaged a Language Act which the Unionists are still resisting and one can understand why. The Irish language in the North has been used in a most cynical way as a stick to beat them with. Nevertheless, as it is in the Agreement it should be implemented.

Sinn Féin's cynicism here is clear from a most cursory glance at one of their own emanations: the tweets of their leader Gerry Adams. Bugger a bit of attention has he paid over the years to getting his gratuitous use of Irish right. He is, in fact, a most serious dis-respecter of the language he is so happy to use to beat up the opposition.

I have had occasion to draw attention to this in the past. It is nothing new.

I can see four typos on the above gravestone - three in Irish and one in English. I found two of them myself and was so upset that I didn't notice the other two until my friend, Vivion Mulcahy, pointed them out to me. Vivion is a man who holds that, if you are going to do something, you should at least try and do it properly.

How these mistakes ended up on a gravestone, that one imagines was intended to be iconic and a place of future pilgrimage, is totally beyond me.

Unless, of course, the use of the language is really just a token and a silver bullet, and its purely provocative use rather than its content is what really counts.

A corrected version of the tombstone is shown below. Sinn Féin, and American papers, please copy.

Ruth Dudley Edwards has picked up this post in her column in the Belfast Telegraph

Related posts: Typocast, Typocast 2.

#SackTheSub

Eilis O'Hanlon
"Write a letter"
I have become so infuriated with typos and inaccuracies in the newspapers that I have adopted a Twitter hashtag #SackTheSub, the idea being that the Sub-Editor, whose job it is, should have picked up on this stuff before it went to print.

Sacking the Sub would not have helped in the little spat I had with Eilis O'Hanlon way back because in her case she had inaccurately, and detrimentally, misquoted Pope Francis. No Sub would have been expected to pick that up. That was the journalist's own job. I pointed out to her that she had falsely attributed a mysoginistic quote to the Pope, which she subsequently knew to be false, and I asked if she intended to correct it. Her response was to tell me to write in a letter as that how this is done nowadays.

I was very taken aback at this. Instead of correcting her error in the following issue she wanted me to try and correct it by writing in to the newspaper. This is nuts, I thought. But this week I read a piece in Phoenix which seemed to confirm her stance as what is now standard practice, in the Sunday Independent at least. Of course, that does not make it good journalism.

This is what Phoenix had to say:

Phoenix 29 August 2014 p12
Click text for larger version

I understand the system works by allowing the writer/reporter to enter copy directly into a template of the page where they will have been allocated a certain space. The disadvantage to the reader is twofold.

In the first place the copy is not subject to checking by anyone other than the originator and that may consist of a simple automatic spell check.

In the second place, nobody is determining the relative importance of the item after seeing the copy. It could have fizzled out as an item but in today's competitive environment no journalist sent out for a story is going to admit this, so the reader will end up with inflated copy.

I would hate to undermine the enthusiasm of any writer of copy, but I do think they ought to be aware of this before their next filing.

It seems to me that this development partly undermines the mainstream media's claim to journalistic superiority over mere bloggers. The MSM have always boasted that their copy has to pass a screening process before it is launched on the public whereas bloggers type straight to print, as it were.

I suppose I should have been prepared for something like this from my even earlier spat with RTÉ Automatic Radio some three years ago.

Anyway, time to lighten up, so here's a piece of classy sub-editing from the pen of Gordon Brewster in the Sunday Independent of long ago, probably 1920s or 1930s.

Thanks to National Library of Ireland
Click image for larger version
See original