8 January 2011
Erin McKean has a delightful piece in the Boston Globe looking back at the linguistic news stories of the past year. It’s refreshingly different than the naming of the “words of the year,” which I enjoy but gets tiresome.
(And I’ve mentioned it before, but I just can’t over how the Globe dates its online news stories. This one is dated tomorrow, 9 January. Unless the Globe has invented time travel, this is not possible. Journalistic convention is that the dateline contains the date on which the story is filed, not the date it appears (which I’m guessing in this case is the date on which the column appears in the print version). This is even more vital in digital publishing, when stories are often written in the midst of rapidly changing information. Often readers can’t properly assess the quality of story if they don’t know when it was written.
