Big Fancy Five Dollar Words

Considering that the Murfreesboro Daily News Journal often finds itself on the losing end of the struggle to use the correct version of "your/you're" in its stories, I found it a bit out of place for them to use the term "quixotic" to describe the candidacies of Howard Dean and John Edwards for the Democratic nomination in the lead story.

The DNJ bugs me, if only because it tries to run itself almost tabloid style. It'll editorialize in headlines and stories, and it likes to run "shocking" pictures on the front page of bloody car crashes and shootout victims (more of the former, and only one of the latter, that I can recall, in fairness--though I'm sure there would be more if only that we had more shootouts in our little ex-urb area), yet it's the only paper in our little town. I don't know if they feel like they're competing with the Tennessean or even the USA Today, and the only way they feel like they can do that is to resort to cheap shock tactics.

I'd be more likely to buy it if they'd just put a little more effort into their copy editing, instead of using the word from the New Word a Day calendar....

But they get terribly self-important, doing little things like not letting you link to and read archived stories on their page unless you're a subscriber to the paper already. And especially self-important if they're editorializing in such a manner on their front page as to liken John Edwards' and Howard Dean's goals as fantastic, irrational and dreamlike.

That's more appropriate for, at the very least, the op-ed page. And definitely more appropriate for a paper that does little things, like spells words correctly in headlines (To little to late, in referring to a comeback attempt by the Titans that failed during the football season). I don't know. Just kind of gives you some credibility.

And my issue isn't necessarily that their opinion of Dean's and Edwards' and Clark's candidacies were pointless...my issue is that it's their job to report news, and not make snide remarks about campaigns.

Making snide remarks about campaigns...that's definitely more appropriate for a blog. Props to whomever posted the message on their blog, by the way, about Howard Dean jousting with windmills. That's a far finer Don Quixote reference, and made in a far more appropriate place. Too bad I can't remember where I read such a fine, fine turn of phrase.

Yeah. The DNJ sucks. Their comics page sucks. I mean, sure, they have Arlo and Janis, and Foxtrot....but there's no Get Fuzzy, and there was a minor to-do when they wouldn't Berkeley Breathed's new Opus strip that started on Sundays last fall, which I've only seen once when I bought a Knoxville News Sentinel when I was in East Tennessee over Christmas.

But at least the DNJ runs L.M. Boyd's useless trivia column. Which is why I was reading somebody else's copy this morning.