Having just spent many, many months (mostly) resisting the temptation to chug-a-lug several gallons of sweet-sweet "Maybe if you hadn't fucked this guy over so badly he could have saved you" schadenfreude, I found myself too weak to resist the funny in this story from "The Torontoist" (h/t Whet Moser at the Chicago Reader) about an editor who took a flamethrower to the crappy writing...in a memo from the corporate office announcing the layoffs...of 100 editors.
They obviously kept the million monkeys and their typewriters.
Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge
Earlier this week the Toronto Star announced, among other changes, that it was planning to outsource some one hundred in-house, union editing jobs. In the press release issued by the union in the wake of the announcement, union chief Maureen Dawson explained that "Journalism is a collaborative effort..."
...
Now, one (apparent) editor at the Star has decided to show us all the benefits of collaboration.
...
Read the rest here, and take to heart this Important Life Lesson:
Do not, do not, do not gratuitously piss off people who can hone a sentence down to a 30 nanometer edge and then use it to
bisect you like a banana split.
*(More-or-less from this quote by Voltaire: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.")
4 comments:
Fantastic. Here's a link to a college professor of mine who did the same thing with administrators' memos. A great writer & sorely missed:
http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/
It's unbelievable, isn't it? Almost nobody in this country can write the only language most of us use!
Our CEO wrote something for a company newsletter a couple weeks ago. I was completely gobsmacked by it. It was a one page article and there was not a SINGLE sentence in it that was properly constructed. Not one. It was filled with mis-spellngs, there were many, many words used incorrectly, some laughably so.
This man determines what I make and whether I continue to be employed. Sigh.
Uhhh.
I think you've opened the new Star source right here, Dg.
And from now on (once we've swept all the old gang out), you will actually have to be able to express yourself coherently to get a job on any journalism venture.
Except for the money guys, of course, and no one expects them to be able to spell.
And don't tell me that those executive PR guys had anything to do with money except for knowing how to lose it.
S
Banana split? I'll have two, thanks! With sprinkles. :o)
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