Creative Journalism

I am the first to admit that my level of mathematics is not top notch. Numbers make me dizzy. I once had to be quietly escorted out of a 67th floor elevator. The night-janitor found me curled up in the corner in the fetal position, softly calling for Mamma. All those buttons. All those numbers.

So when I posted my last blog, I didn't really look too carefully into my sources. In fact, as soon as I saw numbers and formulae, my eyes began to glaze over. Digits danced before me in a hazy cloud of fog. If the author says there is a 2.5 billion to one chance of winning the lottery, then that is good enough for me.

Subsequent to that post, I was made aware that I should have done the math myself. It seems I could have increased my chances of winning by 720 times. I was told that if I had read my source's entire article, not just the one paragraph, I would have come to a different conclusion.

I didn't have the patience or the inclination to delve into the intricacies of the matter. Face-value was good enough for me. You see, it's not whether or not the facts are correct, it's whether they are plausible enough to seem correct. Standard journalistic practice.

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" is more than a motto; it's journalism's guiding principle. This quote, attributed to either Frank Dobie or Delbert Trew (according to this article, at least) has sold more newspapers than I'd care to count*. Just ask any Fleet Street executive.

The University of Toronto actually has a course called "Creative Journalism":

Creative Journalism uses new and provocative forms of style and content to challenge and change the contemporary media.

In other words, they learn how to mix creative writing with real journalism to make the news more pallatable, exciting and entertaining than it actually is. To do so, they study high-quality publications such as "Rolling Stone, Pitchfork Media, and alternative weeklies". A passing grade is only achieved if your articles begin with "Once upon a time..."

So forgive me for not reading through my source's entire article. Forgive me for not searching for corroborative evidence. Forgive me for not checking that 1+1 does, in fact, equal 2. When it comes to informing the public, 1+1 can equal whatever you want. And why not? If it weren't for creative journalism, we'd be forced to find entertainment in the rivetting fiction of the the stock market results.

*No. I did not obtain any source for this statement. Just believe me, it's easier.

It's a Violent World and It's Your Fault!

I suppose that the majority of parents want their children to live full and happy lives, free of violence, murder, death, pain and suffering.

According to this article about school violence:

"The fact is, violence of one sort or another is part of many schools today. Fortunately, this usually involves a small group of people fighting amongst themselves...Since the 1992-3 school year, 270 violent deaths have occurred at schools across the nation."

So, in other words, it's fine for kids to shoot each other, as long as they only do it among themselves. Sounds like a plan.

The article goes on to report staggering statistics about how many schools across the United States reported violent crimes on school premises each year, stating that the rate of violence has decreased. They warn:

"We must fight against this complacency without overreacting. We must fight to make our schools safe."

Isn't that akin to "KILL ALL EXTREMISTS!"

But it is our own fault. We have taught our kids to be violent.

How? Language.

Case in point: what did I learn in English class in high-school? To Kill a Mockingbird, Macbeth, Julius Caesar (among others) - all wonderful and highly acclaimed works of literature about rape, lying, murder, assassination, treachery and death. Just the sorts of things you would want your teenage children to study in depth. And we say that movies and computer games are responsible for youth violence! Harumph!

That's not to mention the fact that the English language itself is rife with oft used violent expressions:

• break a leg
• give my eye tooth
• give my left arm
• cut off his nose to spite his face
• kill time
• roll with the punches
• beat a dead horse
• to step on his toes
• to force one's hand
• to bite the hand that feeds you
• a dead ringer
• she cried blue murder
  
• stick out like a sore thumb
• ankle biter
• it's a slap in the face
• you beat me to the punch
• like banging your head against a brick wall
• hit me with your best shot
• keep your eye on the target
• hit the target
• He's such a riot
  
• to tackle a problem
• better than a kick in the pants
• when push comes to shove
• he's a real lady killer
• keep your nose to the grindstone
• to gang up on someone
  
• won the battle but lost the war
• on the warpath
• blinded by the light
• straw that broke the camel's back
• to put your nose out of joint

By educating these children we are turning them into thugs. By teaching them language skills, we are helping them to destroy society. Literacy is dangerous. Plain and simple. Keep the kids in the dark. Better to be stupid and alive than educated and dead, I say. Drugs and alcohol don't cause gang wars, Mrs Miller's 8th Grade Book Club does!

English Lesson

It says somewhere that one of G-d’s greatest gifts to us is the ability to forget. That way, pain and suffering don’t stay with us forever. Memories of bad experiences fade with time. The cost of this all, as you well know, is that good memories also fade away. We forget details of places, people and events. Sometimes we even make up our own memories in place of the ones that we forgot. Have you ever had a conversation that went something like this:

“Yeah, I remember. It was a big blue boat with white writing on the side. How can I forget?”
“Actually, it was a small white boat with blue writing on the side. You were three at the time, how can you possibly remember?”
“No, I’m sure of it: big, blue with white writing!”

This is called misremembering. It’s not exactly forgetting, but it’s remembering incorrectly. We do this for all sorts of things, especially people:

“He was such a good guy.”
“Well, he evicted us from our house.”
“No, wasn’t that his brother?”
“I think you are misremembering.”

Misforgetting is another thing altogether. Misforgetting is when you forget something incorrectly. In other words, you thought you knew something and forgot it, but the reality is that you never knew it to begin with so you have misforgotten it.

“Um, I used to know how many liters of water evaporate from the Mediterranean Sea every year, but I forgot”.
“I think you mean the Black Sea. You never studied the Mediterranean region”
“Oh, yeah, I think you are right! I just misforgot”

Misforgetting can be useful. It can make you look wiser than you actually are. For example, you can be at a dinner party, blabbering on about stocks and shares and financial markets and then say something like, “Was it ACME Ltd that went up or was it Company X that did. It was so long ago, I don’t remember”. The fact that you never heard of either of these companies is irrelevant, you have simply planted the idea in your listeners’ minds that you, at one stage, knew all of the details but you just forgot. In other words, another definition of misforgetting is “lying”, but only if done on purpose.

Misforgetting is a great word. Not only because (to my knowledge) I just made it up, but because it will confound those who don’t know what it means:
“Hang on, didn’t you say that you used to know the code but you forgot it?”
“Oh, actually I don’t think I ever did. I must have been misforgetting at the time I said that”
“Um, well, that’s alright then, I guess…”

The word “misforget” is also a great word because it describes the combination of two mistakes into one. At first you forget, but then you realize that you forgot incorrectly. I don’t think there are too many words that can do that.

I suppose to “unmisforget” is to have once thought that you misforgot, but then you realize that you actually forgot correctly. Unmisforgetting can be a very satisfying experience. You can feel victorious that you unmisforgot something and set the record straight that you really did forget it correctly. This word trumps “misforget” because not only does it combine two mistakes into one word, but then, with the addition of only two letters, it corrects one of the mistakes.

Now you know why my wife doesn’t let me help my kids with their English homework.