Le Gailey Gets Scrutiny

Grammar-punctuation of Tampa Bay publications

La Gaceta is on Grammargrinch's schedule to suffer examination this time; but I have misplaced my last copy and must wait until the next one makes it to the beach by Conestoga. La Gaceta doesn't have an online edition. Le Patrick is too parsimonious to mount one.

Clinton can duck but she can't hide

Mr. Gailey's title shows standard newspaper neglect of capital protocol for titles not to mention punctuation. My theory says people who check the literacy of these essays have decided that it's too taxing to learn capital and punctuation rules.

Here's the standard for the civilized world:

Clinton Can Duck, but She Can't Hide

By PHILIP GAILEY, Editor of Editorials
Published November 4, 2007

And Slick Hilly remember Slick Willie? got away with it until Wednesday night's debate in Philadelphia, where she stumbled badly two months before the primary voting begins in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Le Gailey has mispunctuated his dig at Hillary. Here’s how he should have done the deed: “And Slick Hilly—remember slick Willie?—got away with it…."

Her aides portrayed Clinton, the runaway front-runner coming into the debate, as the victim of a gang mugging - poor, defenseless Hillary is slapped around by a bunch of mean male bullies.

Passive verbs rank escutcheon of mean male bullies. That breed is as dumb as turnips. Mr. Gailey can put himself in gallantry’s sharp-witted minions by recasting his passive verb to an active one: “A mean bunch of male bullies slap poor, defenseless Hillary around.”

If she was the victim of anything, it was of her own doubletalk.

I don’t know whether newspaper readers’ putative 6^th-grade reading level prevents Mr. Gailey’s using the subjunctive mood in the verb—“If she were…”--or whether he doesn’t know this refinement of grammar. That he doesn’t is possible because I believe he went to the University of Georgia, which the English faculty all came straight off Georgia farms as did Mr. Gailey, so its members are still learning to pronounce trompe d’oil without a cornpone accent before they move on to the mysteries of the subjunctive mood.

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage hews to subjunctive protocols of uptown grammar. But NYT flossy writers went to Harvard and Yale and had the subjunctive mood drilled into them in required course Preciosity 101. Outback types such as journalists hereabouts may not have heard of the rule or sneer at it as too effeminate for ruff `n tough-BayArea journalists. If the St. Petersburg Times has a style book, it should put that document on line for us readers to check such details of literacy. Don't tell me that the SPT does not have a style book. Such gaucherie does not get its staff invited to sit on the Pulizer Committee.

The Philadelphia event was exactly what a presidential debate should be. Candidates should face tough questions and be held accountable for their answers. Contrary to the postdebate spin of the Clinton campaign, it is not a personal attack or piling on when candidates aggressively grill and challenge each other on important issues facing the next president.

Here are some details of style for Le Phil to ponder: The “exactly” redundant adverb is the kind that Strunk & White eschews. “Aggressively” is another.” Be held” is passive and weakens his sentence. Crisper is “…and the voters should hold them accountable for their answers.” Dump the adverbs.

“Postdebate” should be “post-debate.” “It” constructions are wordy: a writer concerned with style makes spare use of them. Edit: “Candidates’ grilling and challenging each other is not personal attacks.”

How dare anyone try to interfere with her cakewalk to the nomination.

This question is rhetorical, but it deserves a question mark.

On another matter, the former first lady was asked if she would release her correspondence with the president, papers that are locked away at Bill Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock.

Passive verbs rank flaccid. Rhett Butler never used them. He knew that he couldn’t win Scarlett if he did because such he-men as Rhett intuit that Georgia belles hold a deep antipathy for men who use passive verbs on the ubiquitous powder-room theory that men who use passive verbs harbor etiolated spermatozoa. “Russert asked the former First Lady (gets capitals) if she would release her locked-away correspondence from the Clinton Little Rock library.

Does any of it really matter? Only to voters who believe it is not too much to expect presidential candidates to level with them.

Mr. Gailey’s level of writing does not entitle him to indulge in artful fragments. We allow those in Faulkner, Proust, or even Dowd—but not Gailey. The redundant adverb “really” makes Mr. Gailey sound like a California Valley Girl.

Stuffing in two redundant adverbs is bad enough. But worse is resorting to two “it’s” in the exit paragraph and leaving readers to scratch their heads about vague pronoun reference. Perhaps this editorial-page-editor quidnunc means this: “Does Ms. Clinton’s evasive style matter? It does to voters who believe she should level with them."

In the comment section below this Gailey essay on Hillary, one woman says that Mr. Gailey never mentions a woman politician without knocking her. Just as I suspected, given the male-locker-room status of the St. Petersburg Times masthead.

This churlishness comes from Mr. Gailey’s Georgia upbringing. I was born in Georgia and can affirm that we have some of the most sexist louts in the country holed up in Georgia filling-station culture, hell holes of misogyny in the small towns that festoon the state. I bet that’s where Le Gailey spent every waking minute of his youth.

The filling-station matriculants never change. Their early lives amongst the tires (“tars”), wrenches (“ranches), and oil (“aw-yul”) fumes rearrange their neurons for good. Their synapses grow to be set in stone on the question of womankind’s unsuitability for the rigors of filling-station status or male news locker room. I have heard my male cousins call women “slatterns” at family gatherings. I think that’s worse than hip-hop hos. Mr. Gailey is hip deep in this malignant attitude toward women in journalism. His baleful influence explains the paucity of women on the masthead.

May cow dung be rained on this editorial-page pooh-bah’s sexist head and may his crops lie fallow in the fields. May he also suffer anaphylactic shock from both Viagra and Cialis.

Other than that, may he have a nice day.