Whoa: two posts, one day.
I don't read Time Magazine's Swampland political blog every day, but when I do, and when I encounter a post by Karen Tumulty, there's a pretty good chance she'll refer to her writing for the print edition of Time. And when she does, she invariably uses the words "dead-tree," as in the "dead-tree version" of the magazine. I find this annoying. The word print is three letters and one syllable shorter than "dead-tree." It's a needless affectation that's perfectly fine as a spice, but her over-reliance on it simply weakens the phrase and draws attention to itself.
Kind of like John McCain with "my friends" or Joe Biden with "Literally — literally!" for that matter.
A simple Google search for ["karen tumulty" "dead tree"] finds 704 occurences on the web, including 290 on the Swampland blog alone. This is ridiculous. Tumulty's first post on the blog was on January 7th, 2007. She seems to have made 802 posts. So about 36% of her posts use this phrase, which occurs on average once every 2 and 1/4 days. Overuse!
Now, I don't want to impugn her reporting or commentary, with which I have no particular beef. But someone at Swampland needs to stage an intervention, like Dave Foley's character in one of my favorite Kids in the Hall sketches:
Ascertain
No comments:
Post a Comment