Sincerely, if you want to see a demonstration of the consequences of tone deaf editing than check out this link.  This is all due to my friend Rachel Manteuffel, who was walking home from work one day and happened to pass by the new MLK memorial on the National Mall. She noticed one of the quotes carved into the granite just didn’t seem right. She wrote an op-ed column about it, and today, the Secretary of the Interior announced that the quote would be changed. Here’s the context:

In a 1968 sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church King told a biblical story of James and John, who ask Jesus for the most prominent seats in heaven. He said that this was an example of the  ‘‘drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade.’’  It was that desire, he warned, that could lead to ‘‘snobbish exclusivism’’ and from there to  ‘‘tragic race prejudice.’’

‘‘Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior . . . ”

Imagining his own funeral, King said he didn’t want to be remembered for all the things that set him apart, like the Nobel Peace Prize he had won, or the accolades  of world leaders. He had no interest, he said, in being remembered as a drum major. Instead, King asked to be remembered as someone who ‘‘tried to give his life serving others’.’

He concluded: ‘Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.’’

Someone charged with editing material for the memorial, which was only going to be CARVED IN STONE, decided that quote would be a great summation of his life. Only it was impossible to carve such a long quote in the granite. So here’s what some public servant came up with as a condensed version:

“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Nice work!

Here are my comments on the most recent Nieman Storyboard Editors’ Roundtable discussion on the very entertaining piece by Jessica Pressler in New York Magazine:

On lively writing:

Jessica Pressler produces a fun read here, and I’d like to focus on how a lot of what is “fun” is a combination of lively, original language and acute observation. Throughout, she manages to surprise the reader with tart but entirely apt images – funny because they are both irreverent and true.

Consider the first description of the subject, Diane Passage:

When she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily.

It’s more original and less vulgar than “tits on a stick,” and it goes somewhere, too – between the laughter and the merry bouncing you start to be predisposed to like a not-entirely-sympathetic character.

Passage giggles again, and the ensuing undulations manage to pull Barry’s attention back from the blonde who’d just passed by.

“Ensuing undulations” works so beautifully because it is a comically high description of such a low phenomenon, very Damon Runyon-esque – but also so true: We’ve all seen enough Barrys to know that head-swivel by heart.

Passage is one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist.

Another great observation – a fun clash of stylish language (“though they thrive”) and straight talk (“male egos and dumb money”) that is also poetry. A repeated one-syllable, two-syllable pattern pairing male with dumb and egos with money. A small slice of language perfection.

This next passage is a great use of what is always a smart writing strategy, which is to just give the readers the sensory info they need to draw their OWN conclusions:

His friend, let’s call him Paul, a tall, paunchy private-equity manager was quiet much of the evening but has become considerably more animated after a trip to the bathroom.

Now here comes another smart idea: wringing the meaning out of things others might pass by without comment. In this case, it’s a pretentious name with a transparent marketing strategy. Here’s how Pressler handles that:

Passage moved with her son from a small walk-up to a $7 million condo on the Upper East Side in a building so sure of its fabulousness that it was called “Lux74.”

Extreme compression is yet another artifact of good writing. Here Pressler finds a way to avoid the yadda-yadda of excessive background and tell the whole story in a phrase. The compression of how the character ended up so compromised is so extreme, and so plain spoken, that it becomes delightful, and hilarious:

As a kid, she’d dreamed of becoming a pop star or a veterinarian, but she couldn’t carry a tune and was allergic to hairy animals. By the time she was 18, all she really knew was that she needed to get the hell out of Detroit.

There are lots more like this to choose from, but I’ll end on one that I love because it cuts so directly to the truth of her character, and does so in a way that makes readers look at something familiar in a new way:

“If I was you, I know what I’d do,” said a male colleague one day in 2004, when she confided her problems. He eyed her curvy figure. “I’d go straight to a strip club.”

Some women might have gone straight to human resources. But Passage is a person who considers all offers.

Since I stopped commuting to downtown DC daily, something interesting has happened: I appreciate the city more. Every trip downtown I see something new and exciting happening — a cool new restaurant, a great neighborhood rising out of space that ten years ago was borderline depressing. Together, the sum of all Washington’s parts is a city vibrating with energy. It may be the Great Recession elsewhere, but for DC it’s boom times– which may say something unfortunate about mortgaging our futures in the name of ever bigger government, but it sure makes for an exciting and beautifully liveable city. I happened to have two dinners to go to this past weekend, both in DC, although in widely dispersed parts of the city. The first dinner took me by a park  I passed every day when I worked at the Post, McPherson Square. The usual Sunday scene of a few homeless men and their bundles spread out on the wood benches had transformed into what at first looked like a field sprouting with Gore-Tex mushrooms, but resolved into a village of domed pup-tents, crowded edge to edge three blocks from the White House. Occupy DC revolutionaries milled about, their fervor swirling around them like fog. There were signs all over, with slogans and whatnot, but my favorite was one that said: WE NEED TOOTHPASTE.  Throw in some deodorant while your at it.

The next night we were heading to Southeast, and that took us on Independence Avenue alongside the Tidal Basin. Suddenly we saw a huge field filled with the aftermath of what looked like another inauguration. There were police barricades and thousands of discarded cardboard boxes and stages and . . . what had just recently happened here?

And then we rolled past these four huge marble slabs, and as we passed by, the mountainous image of Martin Luther King Jr. emerged from one of the slabs, looking sternly down on us. Of course — it was the day of the dedication of the newest national memorial — a very big deal, rivaling in impact Lincoln’s little tribute just down the Mall. And the crowd was still streaming out of there . . . we’d missed the ceremony by an hour.

So two nights out in the nation’s capital, and two serendipitous brushes with history — the kind of things that will appear as iconic images for generations to come; a park populated with young people in need of toothpaste who believe that their beliefs alone have the power to change the world; a gathering to inaugurate a shrine to a man whose belief DID change the world, a shrine that had waited half a century for this one day of dedication.

And oh yeah, both dinners — one at a New Orleans place, one at a Greek place — were superb.

I’d love to live in Paris some day, but living in DC ain’t half bad.

Politicized language can be annoying. “Politically correct” is not exactly a term of admiration. That  irritation is justified to the degree that a change in language is meant to alter, rather than reflect reality. A perfect example of the bad kind of politically correct: “Deferred success” in place of “failure.” Very 1984 “War is Peace” type of thinking there. On the other hand, “Native Americans”  for “Indians,” is inarguably an example of the good kind of linguistic shift — mistaking the Americas for India was the biggest geographical gaffe in history, and its stubborn perpetuation is a metaphor for European arrogance and ignorance.

But recently I encountered an even more potent word change –all the more powerful because the word in question did not stick out as absurdly as “Indian.” It was a short, common word that I had never thought to question: “slave.” My wife and I were walking around a preserved colonial plantation when I noticed an interpretive sign that repeatedly used a novel (to me) phrase that almost knocked me over. Although this had been a Southern plantation, the word “slave” never appeared. It had been replaced, in all instances, by some form of  “enslaved man.”

My bias is always in favor of plain speaking. And slave, as ugly as the concept is, was at first glance a very honest word. But the more I thought about it, the more of a lie it became — a pernicious one at that.

Being a slave is something you are, an intrinsic state of being. Being enslaved is something that has been done to you, and has no bearing on your essential being. Calling someone a slave is instantly rendering that person as something other. The constant repetition of the alternative on the historical plaques — enslaved man, enslaved woman, enslaved people — had a surprisingly compelling effect. It made the condensed history of that plantation anything but the boilerplate that would have issued forth without that subtle edit — exponentially more awful, more real. 

And that’s exactly what words should do.