I actually did misquote LeBron James last week by typing “You good good, you play good” instead of “You look good, you play good.” Well, having turned 65 this month, I am entitled to a senior moment once in a while.
The only other error that jumped out in the lip balm issue was the failure, again, to italicize a title, in this case South Pacific in Mr. Trottier's piece on “the new 65.” That, as those of a certain age immediately recognize, is the musical drama adapted from James Michener's volume of short stories entitled Tales of the South Pacific.
I mention this again because that sidebar on LeBron James referred to GQ Magazine and because the Monitor last Tuesday told us that “The Economist magazine listed just 30 full democracies in 2008. . . .” Both of these references should have lost the word “magazine,” whether italicized or not (and if it is italicized, you get “GQ Magazine magazine” if you follow the Monitor's lead.
To offer another example, consider the difference between these two statements: (a) The warden read the pardon in time to cancel the execution. (b) I read about presidential pardons in Time last week. The upper case T and the italics tell my readers that Time in the second sentence is indeed the magazine. I don't need to say, “I read about presidential pardons in Time magazine last week.” Writing “magazine” there creates a redundancy, just as the Monitor did with “The Economist magazine.” Sometimes additional identification is needed: Macbeth the play is by Shakespeare, but Macbeth the opera is by Verdi and Piave. However, putting “magazine” into the examples above suggests two doubts on the part of the writers: that their readers don't know what GQ and The Economist are, or that their readers don't understand conventional usage to indicate titles.
I offer these remarks not to harp on the issue, but to emphasize that conventional usage is not so much a matter of rules, but an agreement between writer and reader that things work a certain way. As the conventions of written language break down online (one needs only to look at the Insider's excerpts from Craig's List for ample evidence of unconcern for spelling, capitalization, and syntax), perhaps print journalism should be especially attentive to preserving them in newspapers.
And this is my last word on the subject. Oh, wait a minute! Should that be Craig's List?
Ed. – Let the Insiders make their stance known to the world, and then let us be done with this infernal conversation: We will put quotes around movie and book titles and the like, but publications such as the Monitor and the Insider will never be italicized in our little rag. It looks pretentious. Readers know what we're talking about without the dang italics, dang it.
