Honestly, kind of enjoyed that. So many stories of that day have been left out of the historical record because they don’t fit the narrative of heroic deeds in the face of terror (writing only from an NYC perspective).
Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
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Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#12I honestly admire the fashion editor. Her life is laser focused on looking great and tracking the developments of high fashion. Events that shake the hoi polloi to their core barely even register to her. A queen.
I was going to nitpick about your usage of the hoi polloi, because “hoi” means “the.” But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet…
If you're learning linguistics from wikipedia maybe check out "prescriptivism" and see how many contemporary mainstream linguists work within that framework for native speaker usages.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#13I honestly admire the fashion editor. Her life is laser focused on looking great and tracking the developments of high fashion. Events that shake the hoi polloi to their core barely even register to her. A queen.
I was going to nitpick about your usage of the hoi polloi, because “hoi” means “the.” But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet…
We say "The La Brea Tar Pits" without a second thought.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to nitpick about your usage of the hoi polloi, because “hoi” means “the.” But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet…
If you're learning linguistics from wikipedia maybe check out "prescriptivism" and see how many contemporary mainstream linguists work within that framework for native speaker usages.
How does prescriptivism interact with wikipedia? Since wikipedia can (in the ideal at least) be edited by anyone, I'd expect it to match common usage more closely than a normal encyclopedia.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#15I suppose you can't really fault a person whose professional life requires her to view every event with the question, "How does this affect the fashion industry?" for viewing the attack on the twin towers in exactly that way — especially in this article, which was published as the "Fashion Notebook" column. The tweetstorm blames her for not relating what was told her by survivors and first responders, but those stori…
It surprised me because I'd always assumed a lot of people in a newsroom were extremely similar, despite their different beats.
In my mind it's interchangable whether that report on Ukraine counts as world news, war, current affairs, or politics. I assumed this was the 'journalist' skill set in action.
But perhaps being fashion editor is no better a current affairs reporter than the crossword setter or cartoonist would be.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#16I actually think it's unfortunate that she didn't focus more on fashion. There are so, so many accounts of 9/11 that focus on the facts and the immediate tragedy. But I'm willing to bet that 9/11 impacted industries and people significantly even if they weren't directly involved. I have little to no interest in fashion, but I'd find an article on the impact of 9/11 on the fashion capital of North America a much more…
I think the point was that she was so bad at her job that she wasn't going to write anything about the attack, at all, whatsoever. She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone. She didn't have the initiative to walk to ground zero. And then what she did write was a story about how she was sad the fun events were cancelled but she wasn't that sad because she had appletinis.
She just didn't care. Her focus was on the fun events that she had planned to attend and absolutely nothing else.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#17A lot of journalists covered 9/11, so I'm not sure that this particular fashion reporter didn't seem to care is all that interesting.
I do think it's an interesting case in the level of acceptability in the actions and admissions of semi-public figures like journalists. Today there's lots of commotion about people posting their hot takes on the Queen's death, a lot of which obviously regrettable. There's lots of events over the last few years point to a high level of self and contextual awareness being necessary to keep your job in semi-public roles.
Yet, in 2001, days after September 11, you have a journalist that published, after I presume being edited and approved by multiple other people at the paper, about celebrating with Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo ride driving away from the terrorist event (I'm I reading that right?). And nobody during the editing process thought, hey, this is a pretty inappropriate thing to publish?
Such a completely different world.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#18It's quite an artifact of its time. Someone appears to be making a play for her magazine editor role and this is basically oppo-research on behalf of whomever they want in place. This kind of scandal playing is sort of how the media game is played, where these were society plum jobs, and journalism in Canada has been a traditional stepping stone to parliament.
I was distantly acquainted with some of that crowd, and there was an incentive from editors at the time to be provocatively glib because the conflict and outrage sold papers, when those were still a thing. Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write. Internationally, Toronto was a relative backwater full of people who had come from other relative backwaters to reinvent themselves in the reflected images of magazine covers. The article in question was written by someone trying to become the reflection they saw. This was in a time when Sex in the City represented feminine success, and many women I knew would follow magazine and newspaper columnists as a kind of rage-read, and I think they related to those figures in fairly complex ways. Vogue at the time functioned as a kind of ministry of desire that told women what they wanted. However, that no one seems to have written critically about this doesn't so much ignore a decade when womens' media dominated the culture, as it mercifully overlooks its excesses. Having known several fashion editors and writers, their craft is a narrative of cohering symbols of power and desire, and the art is walking a tightrope above a pit of firey cringe. This article was definitely one of those cringe-hell fails that wise old-timers use to scare interns over drinks.
If you took the series Mad Men from the 1960s era, transplanted it to the late 90's and made it about women working at fashion magazines and relegated to the style sections of newspapers, you would get a fairly nuanced view of how, like we take for granted the influence of advertisers on our thinking, we might also understand what the women shaping narratives of desire in the 90s did. Terrible article, but maybe enough time has passed to look at what all that really was.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#19I actually think it's unfortunate that she didn't focus more on fashion. There are so, so many accounts of 9/11 that focus on the facts and the immediate tragedy. But I'm willing to bet that 9/11 impacted industries and people significantly even if they weren't directly involved. I have little to no interest in fashion, but I'd find an article on the impact of 9/11 on the fashion capital of North America a much more…
I think the point was that she was so bad at her job that she wasn't going to write anything about the attack, at all, whatsoever. She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone. She didn't have the initiative to walk to ground zero. And then what she did write was a story about how she was sad the fun events were cancelled but she wasn't that sad because she had appletinis.…
No post body was provided.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#20The suggestion is that in the face of something overwhelmingly weird, you cling to whatever structure you've got.
I think that's an insightful thought. This is a person, who like the rest of us that day, was scared and pretty shocked