I don't know what sickens me more: That someone is digging up a 20 year old article to throw tomatoes at some poor woman, or that this is front page on HN...
Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#52It'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 t…
> Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write
This has got much worse, and spread to politics and public life as a whole.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the context, I think. She took the limo ride because it's was available. Alcohol is alcohol. What if it was another person sitting in an ordinary cab drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle saying to his/her friends "Thank God we're getting out of THAT, right?"
> Alcohol is alcohol The reporter could've left out that they were toasting Sour Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo, but she didn't, so we know they weren't somberly drinking from whiskey bottles. That might be the craziest part to me. They could've not included the limo ride or passed it off as something else, but it's explicitly pumped up as something luxurious.
> explicitly pumped up as something luxurious
I read it as something deliberately escapist. It didn’t matter what it was, there was too much to process and focusing on a limo and drinks meant they didn’t have to focus on what had happened. She included details because that was her job to describe the scene.
People process grief/stress/trauma differently. I wouldn’t read too much into the details.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#54Earlier 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…
We say "The La Brea Tar Pits" without a second thought.
This is one of my favorite Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#55It'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 t…
> Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write This has got much worse, and spread to politics and public life as a whole.
I agree it's gotten worse but is it a bad thing? I think the AOCs and MTGs and other politicians who's popularity is based on the fact that they are a caricature their base can rally around are not serve an important "court jester" function that keeps the witches and the turtles slightly less unchecked than they otherwise would be.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean just reading the article about it would tell you how useless it is try to nitpick things like this.
It is useless because it is nitpicking. But still, descriptive rules for a language can still be pretty specific and complicated, so even if we toss out all prescriptivism that won't free us from corrections I think.
It will because no "correction" is necessary. If the speaker's intent was understood by their audience then their usage was correct. If it was not understood, the audience will seek clarification and the intended meaning will emerge that way.
This sort of unsolicited "correction" of other people's language is unnecessary and basically never helpful outside of an explicit educational/language-learning context. The goal isn't to perfectly communicate according to a specific set of rules, and trying to ossify the descriptive "rules" in that way is just prescriptivism but slower. The goal is to understand and be understood, which will always be a context-dependent moving target.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is useless because it is nitpicking. But still, descriptive rules for a language can still be pretty specific and complicated, so even if we toss out all prescriptivism that won't free us from corrections I think.
It will because no "correction" is necessary. If the speaker's intent was understood by their audience then their usage was correct. If it was not understood, the audience will seek clarification and the intended meaning will emerge that way. This sort of unsolicited "correction" of other people's language is unnecessary and basically never helpful outside of an explicit educational/language-learning context. The goa…
That's an interesting perspective, I see where you are coming from now. Thanks for elaborating.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#58I 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 just want everyone having this wonderful discussion about how to use 'hoi polloi' correctly in a sentence to know that 1.) I love you and 2.) I learned that word literally last night while watching "Better Call Saul". I'm very educated.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google: “ Bernadette Morra. Editor in Chief, FASHION magazine. ” The twitter poster is a buzzfeed news politics journalist.
> The twitter poster is a buzzfeed news politics journalist. I would say, that this sentence is meaningful expresses the gulf in perspectives on the question quite well. To me, that statement doesn't mean anything. The twitter poster was being small and bullying, and if I'm a conspiracy theorist for making a comment that embarasses some people who got off on it, call me Fox frickin' Mulder.
The larger gulf is between who you believe to be embarrassed by your comments and who is actually embarrassed. It's incredibly weird to publicly spout baseless conspiracy theories and then make the equally unfounded claim that others feel shamed by your spouting.
Re: Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
I'm not picking on you deliberately, only choosing to reply to this thread because your wording succinctly sums up the underlying mistake in most people commenting here: > so bad at her job Her job was as a fashion journalist. Not a news reporter, not a war correspondent, not somebody who was remotely trained or prepared to deal with a situation like this. How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bo…
A lot of the underlying principles of journalism are the same regardless of your focus, though. I can't imagine a journalist being at the site of something as momentous as 9/11 and not paying attention to it. Especially knowing you are the only resource your paper has in the area.
>How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".
I don't get annoyed when I am asked to do something in emergency situations of significantly smaller scales than 9/11. I'm not an electrician or electronics engineer, but I have to apply troubleshooting methodology in a way day to day that a lot of people don't, so there have been times where I was the best suited person to try and figure out Weird Electronic Issue X when shit hit the fan. It doesn't annoy me, I just set expectations that I'm not an expert and I might not be able to fully resolve it.
And a lot of the fundamental principles of journalism are just as, if not more, applicable when crossing between fashion and the massive world event happening right beside you. This sort of event is outside of her area of expertise, sure. But no one is knocking her for having attempted to cover it, and not doing so as well as a news reporter or war correspondent would have.
The underlying problem with this piece is that it isn't really about fashion, and it isn't really about 9/11. It's a journal of her day, with weirdly tone-deaf bits about riding in expensive limos and raising glasses of appletinis and then being thankful that she is Canadian.