Page 2: Turkeys forever trotting

There was a 1st ever “Turkey Trot” fun run in Mammoth on Thanksgiving Day this year. Mammoth Lakes Recreation Executive Director Rich Boccia boasted afterward that the inaugural event drew 47 competitors.

Mono County Supervisor Stacy Corless said she was glad we printed the results last week because they showed her finishing ahead of Deena Kastor.

Never mind that Deena ran the race with her five-year old daughter, Piper.

Maybe a day will soon come when Stacy brags about the time she beat Piper instead.

But that’s off-topic.

The next week, we ran a few photos and results of the event. The front page photo bore the headline, “Turkeys Trotting.”

I wrote the following text to my staff, “Note on front page headline. Never really a good idea to refer to people as turkeys. Fairly cringe-worthy.”

Editor Katie Vane replied, “Shoot, sorry about that. The association didn’t even occur to me.”

When I texted the Mammoth Track Club’s Andrew Kastor to apologize for essentially calling all the runners turkeys, he replied, “Hmmm. Doesn’t sound too bad to me. Probably funny.”

I like that guy.

It may or may not have occurred to anyone else. I didn’t receive any feedback on it. Now I’m not sure if that’s because no one noticed or if it’s because people are so inured to newspapers making typos and grammatical mistakes that they just roll their eyes and turn the page.

The little mistakes annoy me as much as the next person. The staff can attest to that. But I’m not sure that being a stickler when it comes to spelling or grammar is terribly appreciated. In fact, I think it secretly annoys people. Language is supposed to evolve. Not evolving with it makes you crotchety and irrelevant.

For The Sheet Dining Guide 2016 (just completed and due out Dec. 18) one of the venues submitted a menu where it had dishes listed under the heading “Ruffiage.”

Do they mean “Roughage?” I wondered.

That’s exactly what they meant. Further, when I plugged the term into a Google search, there were many Urban Dictionary references to both ruffage and ruffiage. It’s as if the spelling of the word has literally, within the span of just a few years, been completely hijacked and new word/s created in replacement.

So I left it alone.

When I started in this business I was told that optimally, I should communicate with readers by writing at a 9th or 10th grade level. Of course, the people telling me this couldn’t exactly relate what 9th or 10th grade level should be, or even what parameters a so-called “expert” might use when assigning grade levels.

So I just ended up writing how I write, and you can blame the whole canon of alcoholic American writers (Thompson, Bukowski, Hemingway, Brautigan, Carver, John Kennedy Toole, Terry Southern) for their influence.

Blame Joe Heller, too. But his bad habits were not as well-publicized so I don’t know if he should be lumped in or not with the above.

But back to communication. I was reading last weekend’s edition of Barron’s and in the weekly news roundup, they led with a little part which analyzed at what grade level certain presidential candidates communicated in their speeches.

The range was Donald Trump (4th), Ben Carson (6th), Hilary Clinton (7th), Bernie Sanders and Mike Huckabee (10th).

Why is this not surprising?

In regard to media communication, I think it’s far more important to be curious and thorough and get the story (which requires actual legwork as opposed to slapping one’s name on a press release). Even if your writing skills are nothing but ruffage, that’s secondary so long as the information is good.

There’s a reason we don’t publish the police blotter in these pages. It’s because the police blotter is not vetted, not fact-checked and often not followed up on. But it takes up space and it provides a great way for the humorless to make fun of people under the pretext that it’s “news.”

A good example of this is Rea’s follow up on a police blotter published last week in the 50, which described a woman who totaled her car after “hitting a bunch of trees.” The 50 offered this commentary: “She also said the ‘placement of the trees are hazardous.’ Huh?”

Turns out the driver, Betty Hylton, hit a pile of logs that she maintains were dangerously placed partway in the icy road with no warning signs. The U.S. Forest Service had contracted thinning to GC Forest Products, which is why the logs were there.

A little legwork, and Rea came up with a very different story. See the story ‘Driver totaled car on logs, not trees’ for more on it.

And hey, you may still find some typos.