Why The Midland Reporter Telegram Makes Me Crazy

File this as another of those rants I come back to over and over. But, man, this is ridiculous, and I see it more and more and more. Jesus.
Yesterday I scanned part of the front page, where the writer used “spicket” when she meant “spigot,” and, if that weren’t scary enough, when I looked it up online, to see if there were some new coinage—“spicket”—that perhaps was confusing her, I found where people had sent in questions to some forum asking why they couldn’t find “spicket” in their dictionary.
And every single one of us knows what causes this problem—this one and a whole host of other examples that Are Not Coming to Me right now, but what the hell. It’s because people don’t read. They don’t read books, and they don’t see words written out, and they have no idea how to spell words they’ve heard (mostly words they’ve heard mispronounced, because they live in Texas. Hello!) but have never actually seen.
Isn’t that scary? That there are supposedly literate people—people who can read and write—and, in this case, who WRITE FOR A LIVING, people!—who do not read? How can people not read? If you’re able to read, then how can you forgo that most luxurious of pleasures? I remember how I felt when my father’s vision deteriorated to the point where he couldn’t see well enough to read. It was so, so sad. And so scary. Both my parents had been readers all my life. I have been A Reader (def:  someone who cannot—canNOT—exist without books, who has to have a book going at all times and panics when The Stack gets low, or when there’s a chance that they may run out of books and somehow not be able to get to the library or the bookstore, never mind that there are two floor-to-ceiling bookcases completely filled with books, many of which have not yet been read. And others of which have been read but so long ago (meaning:  before yesterday) that they could be read again right now and seem brand new) all my life and can’t bear to think that there may well come a time when I can no longer be one. My brain refuses to go there.
Anyway. I’m ranting about—oh, what was I ranting about? Non-readers, for one thing.
And then—and then!—when they DO read? What do they read? They read this newspaper! Yes:  The Midland Reporter Telegram is delivered to the Midland Public Schools as a teaching aid. Yes, indeed. And isn’t that just the scariest thing in the world?
And, no:  I do not expect everyone on the planet to be able to spell. I myself [“Ooooh, and isn’t that the neat use of the reflexive?” is what y’all’re all saying] have trouble with tons of words. Tons! I can’t spell any word that comes too directly from the French, for example. If it weren’t for spell-check, nasty little fucker that it often is, I would never even try for “liaison,” for instance. But here’s the thing:  I know I have trouble with that word and its ilk, and so, if I did not have spell-check or if, for some odd reason, I did not trust spell-check (quelle horreur! And, no, I cannot pronounce it, as I do not hang out with People Who Speak French; I can only pronounce Spanish and, sometimes, English, although of course my pronunciation of English is of a bastard sort, coming as it does from generations of Texans. Like that’s a liability. Huh.)—then I would resort to—gasp!—a dictionary. Online, sure. But also any one of the many dictionaries that lie in almost every room in this house. I double-check things since, as you might guess, I’m often skeptical of the accuracy of any certain one of them.
ANYWAY. My point—and yes, I do have one—is that I know I have trouble with spelling many words, and so, if I were using them in, oh, something that was going to be published, like, oh, a newspaper? I would look them up.
Wouldn’t you?  If you had written that story (and thank god you did not, because as many people pointed out, that story was written by someone who has no business ever holding a pencil or touching a keyboard. The word choices, the sentence structure, the pacing, the order—every single thing about it sucks the big winkie, including the photographs—and if I were that guy, I’d sue:  I’m sure that, no matter how pathetic he looks in real life, it can’t be as bad as he looks in that photo)—but if you HAD written it, and you’d come to the part where you wanted to use the word “spigot” but weren’t reallyreallyreally sure how it was spelled, never having actually come across the word in print, like while you were READING, what would you do?  Would you shut your eyes, spin around three times, and launch your dart into the air, hoping it would land on the correct spelling?
No. Of course not. Spinning around more than twice would serve only (why do we not say, “only serve,” boys and girls? Because the modifier, “only,” must snuggle up as closely as possible to the word or phrase it is modifying, which, in this case is “to make you dizzy.” If we let it lie over there by “serve,” we would be saying it would only serve, it wouldn’t do anything else. When what we mean is that it would serve only one purpose:  to make you dizzy.)
Where were we? Oh! If you didn’t know how to spell it, never having seen it because you don’t fucking READ, then you would do what?
--ask Bob, who sits at the desk next to you and is reallyreallyreally smart, and you know this because he tells you this every day, never mind that he’s been sitting at that same desk, writing copy for the Oil & Gas Section, since 1962 and fills in during the bust cycles by emptying the wastebaskets and making the morning donut run.
--check online, where you can find oh! such bounty of usefulness, like this. Oy. The Wasteland. But also this, which lets you see where there’s some wiggle room. Now, there are people who would point to this and say, “See? This is how language works!” They might try to convince us that Ms. Thurber (and god only hopes she’s not remotely related to James—and, by the way, you needn’t read further than that he was “known for his concise, witty prose” to get the gist and then heave the big sigh, waxing nostalgic about the days of Concise & Witty Prose, which you certainly do not find here, as “concise” is just too much like work, you know?) is a scholar of 15th-century English. They would be the same people who point to this as justification for those who say “aks” rather than “ask.” I have been that person, in arguments. I have also argued of the legitimacy of the word “dis,” as a shortening of disrespect, pointing out to the person who argued against me that it does, indeed, Date Back. Here. See?
But! Also useful things like this. Which, alas, serves only to reinforce my argument that we are a nation of slackers, filled with people who never, ever, ever read anything and so go only on pronunciation and just love helpful little tools like this. It is pretty snazzy, though, isn’t it? Would that all knowledge were so easily distilled and presented. Not to say “digested and spoon-fed.”
--check your dictionary.
Well. Whatever. Thinking about this just makes me tired, you know? If the purpose of language is to communicate (which it is. Duh.), then anything that interferes with communication is a liability. And when I read that intro and came to the word “spicket,” I had to read it several times, trying to figure out what it meant. At first I thought it was a Farm & Ranch Term, you know, like some piece of water well equipment I’d never heard of. A cross between a fence picket and a spigot, maybe.
See, you should never, ever have to re-read parts of whatever you’re reading. Unless:
--it’s new material, tough material, something you’re trying to learn. You know:  math. History. Science. English. Pretty much anything that doesn’t come with pretty pictures.
--the writing is so wonderfully brilliant that you have to go back over it slowly, savoring every word and artful turn of phrase again and again
--you are somehow lacking a functioning memory and can’t hold a thought in your head long enough to get from one paragraph to the next, in which case all bets are off and you can just read the same book over and over and over, finishing the last page and immediately turning to the introduction and going, “Gee, this looks like a really good book. It sure is worn out, though. That’s odd.”
In other words, the only time you should have to re-read something is because of YOU, the reader:  you don’t understand it, you can’t grasp it, you love it, you’re trying to memorize it. It should never, ever be the fault of the writer. The writer’s job is to write so clearly and effectively that you can read it once and know exactly what you’re supposed to know.
OK. I’ve ranted enough for this morning. Go. Find something to read. Then come tell me about it. Tell me about the best book you’ve ever read—or the best book you’ve read lately. Tell me what you read for fun, and what you read for comfort. What inspires you? Give me hope that there are lots of us out there, forging our way through the un-reading wilderness.
Huh. Now there’s an image you could argue makes no sense:  The Unreading Wilderness. But it works for me:  a forest of trees, stacks of books all around them, but with their limbs folded across their trunks and their tree lips all pursed and their reading glasses hanging dusty and unused around them, refusing to read.
“No, we will not read. It is Our Job to be the Unreading Wilderness. We have cable.”
Ah. Words.