8 ms·
Unfortunately for the Star, that person was their fashion editor
- theprincess 4y agoI honestly admire the fashion editor. Her life is laser focused on looking great and tracking the developments of high fashion. Events that shake the hoi polloi to their core barely even register to her. A queen.
- FredPret 4y agoI was going to nitpick about your usage of the hoi polloi, because “hoi” means “the.” But this is the wiki entry: “Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[11] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar.[12]”
- giraffe_lady 4y agoIf you're learning linguistics from wikipedia maybe check out "prescriptivism" and see how many contemporary mainstream linguists work within that framework for native speaker usages.
- bee_rider 4y agoHow does prescriptivism interact with wikipedia? Since wikipedia can (in the ideal at least) be edited by anyone, I'd expect it to match common usage more closely than a normal encyclopedia.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI mean just reading the article about it would tell you how useless it is try to nitpick things like this.
- bee_rider 4y agoIt is useless because it is nitpicking. But still, descriptive rules for a language can still be pretty specific and complicated, so even if we toss out all prescriptivism that won't free us from corrections I think.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoIt will because no "correction" is necessary. If the speaker's intent was understood by their audience then their usage was correct. If it was not understood, the audience will seek clarification and the intended meaning will emerge that way. This sort of unsolicited "correction" of other people's language is unnecessary and basically never helpful outside of an explicit educational/language-learning context. The goal isn't to perfectly communicate according to a specific set of rules, and trying to ossify the descriptive "rules" in that way is just prescriptivism but slower. The goal is to understand and be understood, which will always be a context-dependent moving target.
- bombcar 4y agoWe say "The La Brea Tar Pits" without a second thought.
- NobodyNada 4y agoBut the “The” applies to “tar pits”, not “La Brea”, as in “The Panama Canal” or “The Seattle Seahawks”.
- ectopod 4y agoIt translates as "The The Tar Tar Pits".
- NobodyNada 4y agoAh, yeah that makes sense. I just assumed La Brea was a nearby city or area; I didn’t know it translated to “tar”.
- bombcar 4y agoI think you may be on to something however - but we do still say “I’m going to drive the El Camino down to the El Camino Real.”
- kej 4y agoThis is one of my favorite Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...
- 4ndr3vv 4y agoGenuine question: When have you ever heard Hoi Polloi being used without being preceded by "the" ? Seems to universally be used as "the hoi polloi" (albeit, in English)
- theprincess 4y agoI just want everyone having this wonderful discussion about how to use 'hoi polloi' correctly in a sentence to know that 1.) I love you and 2.) I learned that word literally last night while watching "Better Call Saul". I'm very educated.
- troelsSteegin 4y agoThe suggestion is that in the face of something overwhelmingly weird, you cling to whatever structure you've got.
- Angostura 4y agoI think that's an insightful thought. This is a person, who like the rest of us that day, was scared and pretty shocked
- something2 4y agoI actually think it's unfortunate that she didn't focus more on fashion. There are so, so many accounts of 9/11 that focus on the facts and the immediate tragedy. But I'm willing to bet that 9/11 impacted industries and people significantly even if they weren't directly involved. I have little to no interest in fashion, but I'd find an article on the impact of 9/11 on the fashion capital of North America a much more interesting read than another collection of facts.
- bastawhiz 4y agoI think the point was that she was so bad at her job that she wasn't going to write anything about the attack, at all, whatsoever. She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone. She didn't have the initiative to walk to ground zero. And then what she did write was a story about how she was sad the fun events were cancelled but she wasn't that sad because she had appletinis. She just didn't care. Her focus was on the fun events that she had planned to attend and absolutely nothing else.
- draw_down 4y ago
- something2 4y agoI mean she's a journalist, but not all journalist sign up for in-the-trenches investigations. I doubt anyone here would expect Marques Brownlee to write about a terrorist attack and be disappointed he didn't try to find his way past police barriers.
- bastawhiz 4y agoBut she didn't even have to do in-the-trenches investigations. Like you said: you wished she had written more about fashion in the context of the attack. She didn't. She wasn't looking at how people dressed or how they used their clothes after the attack. She really didn't even try. The best she did was note that the stores on Fifth Avenue were closed before describing an expensive limo ride. I would bet that if she hadn't been pressed by her editors, she wouldn't have mentioned 9/11 at all. To be placed front and center to write one of the most important stories of your career and then do the absolute bare minimum at the behest of your bosses is either laziness, apathy, or profound ignorance.
- danrl 4y agoShe is focused on a level I envy. Just our interests differ. Won’t judge that.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI suppose you can't really fault a person whose professional life requires her to view every event with the question, "How does this affect the fashion industry?" for viewing the attack on the twin towers in exactly that way — especially in this article, which was published as the "Fashion Notebook" column. The tweetstorm blames her for not relating what was told her by survivors and first responders, but those stories were probably passed on to her editors and used in other articles. This article is, obviously, shallow, which is not a fault: fashion is literally not even skin deep.
- vitiral 4y agoI mean, there's tattoos and piercings... those are at least skin deep.
- michaelt 4y agoIt surprised me because I'd always assumed a lot of people in a newsroom were extremely similar, despite their different beats. In my mind it's interchangable whether that report on Ukraine counts as world news, war, current affairs, or politics. I assumed this was the 'journalist' skill set in action. But perhaps being fashion editor is no better a current affairs reporter than the crossword setter or cartoonist would be.
- kevinventullo 4y agoI think crossword editors and cartoonists necessarily have a broader world view, albeit with less experience in long-form writing.
- bombcar 4y agoI actually kind of like this; she's honest about what she experienced and she recognizes that fashion will take a back-burner for awhile. People experience shock in various ways and not everyone tries to make everything directly about whatever is happening; most of America at least pretended to plug away at their jobs that day.
- ianai 4y agoIt's also inappropriate to expect someone in the moment to be capable of fully comprehending the ultimate/long term ramifications and appropriate reactions to things. That's often just not possible - for even physiological reasons outside their control. i.e. Shock. Someone who survived being stabbed multiple times during a robbery told me, at the time, they didn't even know they'd been stabbed until they got home. I think it had been dark (possibly pitch black), amongst other things. So yeah it's possible to go back to major historical events and find immediate responses that don't age well. I would argue it's not worth dredging up decades later with an eye toward public persecution - which is front of mind in any twitter thread.
- yabqk 4y ago
- epc 4y agoHonestly, kind of enjoyed that. So many stories of that day have been left out of the historical record because they don’t fit the narrative of heroic deeds in the face of terror (writing only from an NYC perspective).
- tinalumfoil 4y agoA lot of journalists covered 9/11, so I'm not sure that this particular fashion reporter didn't seem to care is all that interesting. I do think it's an interesting case in the level of acceptability in the actions and admissions of semi-public figures like journalists. Today there's lots of commotion about people posting their hot takes on the Queen's death, a lot of which obviously regrettable. There's lots of events over the last few years point to a high level of self and contextual awareness being necessary to keep your job in semi-public roles. Yet, in 2001, days after September 11, you have a journalist that published, after I presume being edited and approved by multiple other people at the paper, about celebrating with Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo ride driving away from the terrorist event (I'm I reading that right?). And nobody during the editing process thought, hey, this is a pretty inappropriate thing to publish? Such a completely different world.
- xani_ 4y agoWell, you can't get much more vapid than fashion world
- RubberbandSoul 4y agoDepends on the context, I think. She took the limo ride because it's was available. Alcohol is alcohol. What if it was another person sitting in an ordinary cab drinking whiskey straight out of the bottle saying to his/her friends "Thank God we're getting out of THAT, right?"
- tinalumfoil 4y ago> Alcohol is alcohol The reporter could've left out that they were toasting Sour Apple Martinis in a $2,000 limo, but she didn't, so we know they weren't somberly drinking from whiskey bottles. That might be the craziest part to me. They could've not included the limo ride or passed it off as something else, but it's explicitly pumped up as something luxurious.
- mbreese 4y ago> explicitly pumped up as something luxurious I read it as something deliberately escapist. It didn’t matter what it was, there was too much to process and focusing on a limo and drinks meant they didn’t have to focus on what had happened. She included details because that was her job to describe the scene. People process grief/stress/trauma differently. I wouldn’t read too much into the details.
- motohagiography 4y agoIt's quite an artifact of its time. Someone appears to be making a play for her magazine editor role and this is basically oppo-research on behalf of whomever they want in place. This kind of scandal playing is sort of how the media game is played, where these were society plum jobs, and journalism in Canada has been a traditional stepping stone to parliament. I was distantly acquainted with some of that crowd, and there was an incentive from editors at the time to be provocatively glib because the conflict and outrage sold papers, when those were still a thing. Some people were just naturally (or dubiously) gifted at making a spectacle of themselves, and the papers hired them (us?) to write. Internationally, Toronto was a relative backwater full of people who had come from other relative backwaters to reinvent themselves in the reflected images of magazine covers. The article in question was written by someone trying to become the reflection they saw. This was in a time when Sex in the City represented feminine success, and many women I knew would follow magazine and newspaper columnists as a kind of rage-read, and I think they related to those figures in fairly complex ways. Vogue at the time functioned as a kind of ministry of desire that told women what they wanted. However, that no one seems to have written critically about this doesn't so much ignore a decade when womens' media dominated the culture, as it mercifully overlooks its excesses. Having known several fashion editors and writers, their craft is a narrative of cohering symbols of power and desire, and the art is walking a tightrope above a pit of firey cringe. This article was definitely one of those cringe-hell fails that wise old-timers use to scare interns over drinks. If you took the series Mad Men from the 1960s era, transplanted it to the late 90's and made it about women working at fashion magazines and relegated to the style sections of newspapers, you would get a fairly nuanced view of how, like we take for granted the influence of advertisers on our thinking, we might also understand what the women shaping narratives of desire in the 90s did. Terrible article, but maybe enough time has passed to look at what all that really was.
- tantalor 4y ago> Someone appears to be making a play for her magazine editor role and this is basically oppo-research on behalf of whomever they want in place. What, are you just making this up?
- 4y ago
- nathanvanfleet 4y agoI read a bit of it and just thought "okay I guess she wasn't prepared for 9/11, just like everyone else." Is it supposed to be funny that this single person who didn't work in that kind of journalism was somehow not ready to walk to ground zero?
- nineplay 4y agoI hate to make everything gendered but I have to wonder if a sports reporter who wrote about the impact of 9/11 on the baseball and football seasons would have received the same level of derision. This twitter thread boils down to "person who doesn't care about <subject> derides article written about <subject>". Why has this taken up so much of his headspace?
- 1123581321 4y agoI like her piece much more than the commentary from that twitter account. I’m not sure they understand what it was like that day. Most of us were helpless, regardless of proximity, and just got on with our pre-siting assignment if we weren’t able to or allowed to fixate on the TV or hold a vigil yet. It happens that she was able to document her helplessness—so what?
- kstenerud 4y agoI don't know what sickens me more: That someone is digging up a 20 year old article to throw tomatoes at some poor woman, or that this is front page on HN...