JRsec
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RE: Challenges facing sports journalism
(07-20-2023 12:50 PM)bryanw1995 Wrote: (07-19-2023 09:09 AM)JRsec Wrote: (07-19-2023 08:52 AM)ken d Wrote: (07-19-2023 07:13 AM)JRsec Wrote: (07-19-2023 05:08 AM)Gitanole Wrote: I'm glad to see Grantland mentioned. I miss that one.
Quality writing—humane, perceptive. The writers were able to spend more time putting their thoughts together than they usually get. Readers won.
Have you ever heard of Furman Bisher? He was a long time sports columnist for the AJC before Barnhardt grew in popularity in his absence. He wasn't as artful in his descriptions as Grantland Rice but he was a must read Southern voice on Southern Sports.
People wake up today and wonder how corporations gained so much control over their lives. They bought and closed so many wonderful companies and smaller corporations that people loved. They buy what is successful, trim what they call the fat, and lose all the flavor of uniqueness in the process. They are ultimately responsible for the universal blandness of our lives.
Most Americans don't realize there was a time when newspapers gave free coverage to candidates as part of civic responsibility. Yes they would charge for a campaign add, but covering campaigns and debates evenhandedly was a huge draw for their own business. Lay out the statements and arguments, don't take sides and let the people decide. If a paper endorsed a candidate, it was with the editorial section. Corporations bought the newspapers, edited them not for accuracy or for quality of language and readability, but for information which might be sensitive to their stock values. And there's no use arguing that with me as I know the process and observed it nightly. Evenhandedness died there!
Now our local paper is being gutted. 90% of it is cut and paste from the AP and most articles simply aren't relevant to the reader and it is dying. Meanwhile my wife, once an avid reader of the paper, canceled her subscription. My jaw almost hit the floor. She wasn't alive without her breakfast tea and paper. When she let it go, it was awful. Awful in reliable delivery, awful in writing, awful in the use of language, awful in typos, and awful in subject material. As a pragmatist I'm content when lazy and awful businesses die. But in our worse than "brave new world" the local blog she goes to is a pile of unsubstantiated vox populi opinion. It's worse than the awful paper! A lie spreads faster there than at any information source previously and at the core of this technological nightmare is something even worse than that. We have a public so bereft of writing skills and a good vocabulary that anything longer than one short paragraph gets a TLDR. To enjoy good writing, you have to have a good vocabulary, be able to recognize sarcasm, puns, or quotes so famous that people see them everywhere and know why they are famous (which means a common base of knowledge), and because we no longer have a common base of knowledge such quotes are no longer relevant or recognizable. In short education has played a role in this quandary. Education's' product is worse. A plethora of banal readers enables a swath of banal writers and a cadre of banal corporations to "trim the fat" of more expensive creativity, panache, and unique local flavor, and turn that profit by gutting all that is worthy and replacing it with the cut and paste AP story on the cheap.
What I'm saying is it's not one cause, it's both the chicken and the egg, and that hackneyed reference may be googled by the young who didn't know their egg came from a bird and can't relate that to the order of the creation of something, in this case causation of decline.
"But in our worse than "brave new world" the local blog she goes to is a pile of unsubstantiated vox populi opinion."
To your point, I wonder how many people today even get the reference to that phrase. STEM has a valuable place in our education system, but not at the expense of educational tools that teach us critical thinking skills.
Idioms like icons always come down in a culture war. To destroy the clarity of a word's meaning is to undermine the clarity of arguments against what the destroyer is seeking. When the meaning of words is attacked and/or altered as to confuse the original thought conveyed by that word when it was used in that civilization, it is the warning flare of a new dark age marked by the questioning of all language, it's breakdown which inevitably leads to a breakdown of law, beliefs, and principles, and is followed by a re-education which flips the culture. It is also the hallmark of a coming internal conflict or civil war within that nation between the protagonists and the establishment. In either outcome a severely weakened nation and culture is left to opportunists. People need to develop a Pavlovian response to the term "re-imagine". It means little to no consideration will be given to the way things are or the reasoning behind them, and that neophytes will be tearing it all down and reconstructing it based upon their own theories not yet tested in real life. In short KenD, chaos. And chaos in the ancient Hebrew world was the purest form of evil.
What you're describing could also be described as the natural evolution of language as younger generations start to use slang so much that the words become accepted usage in the official or "proper" version of the language. A "fag" used to be a cigarette, until it wasn't. "They" used to be plural, until one day we looked up and it could be singular, too. The changes are happening quite slowly now because it's so easy for someone in New York to remain in contact with a buddy in LA, another in Sydney, another in London, and a 4th in Mumbai, but the changes are still happening. Our language will continue to evolve, perhaps to the point that it would be tough to get around if you could freeze yourself in a time capsule for a couple hundred years. That's not a harbinger of the end of the world, it's just a harbinger of our continued evolution to "grumpy old men" from "young" and "middle aged".
It doesn't matter the reason, the breakdown in the precision of language (specifically the meaning of words) is a benchmark in the decline of any civilization. That can be through the adoption of foreign terms, miss association of meaning due to hearing and spelling a word incorrectly eg "supposeably instead of supposedly" a common error among the generations who do not read and instead listen to information, the misappropriation of words in slang like the cigarette illustration you gave. Or by the intentional politicization of words.
The issue is it obscures the precise transmission of meaning from one generation to the next and therefore reasoning behind explanations be they scientific, historic, or political become subject to wholesale misinterpretation, either by accident or design. For instance, in the King James version of the Bible a Hebrew word more closely associated with manage was replaced by the English monarchical term, subdue. Therefore, God's instruction to Adam was to subdue nature, not manage it. I'd say that translation easily led to a wholly different mindset with regard to humanity's relationship to nature than was intended for the English-speaking people. and subsequently for any language group which translated the KJV version of the Bible.
Cultural maladaptation also occurs. The Christain understanding of passivity in the face of hostility is an example of that. A professor of Ancient Hebrew Law in Tel Aviv enlightened me as to its origins. When a civil case was called before the elders who sat at the gates of the city an accusation was leveled by the plaintiff taking the open palm of his right hand and striking lightly the cheek of the accused. He would then level whatever charge he was making. The accused could respond in one of two ways. They could use the open palm of their right hand to strike the accuser and accuse them of false accusation and then the elders would hear the case and render a decision, or they could turn their other cheek. The turning of the cheek stated their innocence before the highest court (God) and rendered all judgment unto the deity. In short for the sect that would become Pharisaical they were stating their life to come was forfeit if they lied. It wouldn't mean as much for those who would become Sadducees because they didn't believe in a life after death, but in early Hebrew life the concept of God's judgment being against one indicated catastrophe in this life or the next so it was a serious statement. And if the accuser still wanted to press charges the only way they could do so was to strike the turned cheek with the back of their right hand which placed the judgment of God against them because you are forbidden to strike someone with the back of your hand or with the left hand. This is why the gesture of turn the other cheek was final. It was never an act of passivity and it did not mean to allow someone to abuse you either by false accusation or striking. Failure to understand the origin has led people to believe that not defending themselves is a Christian act. It's not. It's cultural ignorance. And the following verse which says if someone compels you to go a mile with him go two. That is actually a means of humiliating the Roman soldier who could legally compel anyone to carry belongings for him for a mile. The act of going beyond that turns the act of the subservient conquered person into a statement of superiority. As it effectively says to the Roman I can handle anything you dish out and then some. There was nothing docile about either of those things which Christ told his disciples.
My point? How we use language, if imprecise, can change the meaning 180 degrees from what was intended and lead to needless pain and suffering. The stupid is on us! Not the instruction. The real danger is when the misunderstanding becomes wrote, is passed down in scholarly study not of the original language and culture in which it was issued, but of the present culture's misunderstanding, and thesis and dissertations are based upon it, and those with the PHD enter teaching at seminaries and law schools and predicate their careers on perpetuating what was a mistake. Pride and defense of status quo then sets in and ignorance is enshrined as truth. And it happens all the time whether it is history, geography (ignoring of ancient boundary markers), literature, and even science (though thankfully to a lesser degree).
Therefore, the breakdown in the meaning of words is a warning sign of the decline of a civilization because truth is precise, and anything else is less than the truth.
(This post was last modified: 07-20-2023 02:16 PM by JRsec.)
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Challenges facing sports journalism
