Someone else can critique Thomas Friedman's content; I'm reaching for the red pen this morning. Poor Mr. Friedman seems to have swallowed something he shouldn't have and it's giving him a tummy ache:
Watching the Arab uprisings these days leaves me with a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach. The smile comes from witnessing a whole swath of humanity losing its fear and regaining its dignity. The pit comes from a rising worry that the Arab Spring may have been both inevitable and too late. If you are not feeling both these impulses, you’re not paying attention.And you're not paying attention to your usage, Mr. Friedman. The correct expression refers not to an ingested foreign object causing gastric distress, but to a bad feeling "in the pit of one's stomach." Paul Brians:
Just as you can love someone from the bottom of your heart, you can also experience a sensation of dread in the pit (bottom) of your stomach. I don’t know whether people who mangle this common expression into “pit in my stomach” envision an ulcer, an irritating peach pit they’ve swallowed or are thinking of the pyloric sphincter; but they’ve got it wrong.
Mangling common expressions isn't unusual. We've all done it. Many moons ago when I taught freshman comp for a couple of semesters, I came across some entertaining errors in students' papers, among them "far and in between" instead of "few and far between." Good try, and poetic, in a way. But readers expect a bit more from three-time Pulitzer winners.
(Paul Brians' Common Errors in English Usage is a highly recommended resource.)
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You taught freshman comp to three-time Pulitzer winners??
ReplyDeleteFriedman may have confused the 'pit of my stomach' with the 'pit of hell.'
LOL, thanks for the link. I laughed when I saw the Brians quote. I loved teaching the book, as my students always found it hilarious and discovered the art of good usage as well. Many moons later, I still have kids email or facebook to say they've caught college profs making usage mistakes. ; )
ReplyDeleteActually, I am praying that Friedman has not one but a baker's dozen pits in his stomach and that they all pass in a horizontal and very slow manner.
ReplyDeleteWell, we love for you to be red marking up the hapless Thomas Freidman's poorly fleshed out idioms, but the bulk of the work remains in the content aspects of the piece, starting off with its unsufferable arrogance:
ReplyDelete"As I’ve tried to argue, this uprising, at root, is not political. It’s existential. It is much more Albert Camus than Che Guevara. All these Arab regimes to one degree or another stripped their people of their basic dignity. They deprived them of freedom and never allowed them to develop anywhere near their full potential."
This guy is clueless. He is just now noticing this? Does he have an idea of where this is going? Look, the man has little feel for the Arab Spring, as it were, as even the Arabs aren't sure what road they're headed down, but this bit of dribble of Tom's is best wiped away with the burp towel. The problem is he has very little sense for what it is he doesn't know. He should have paid better attention when Mr. Rumsfeld was pointing out the limitations we all face in life.
As to the Times, this is the same news source that reported on the Iraqi elections in 2002, about the surprising support that Saddam held with his people:
"One grandmother in a black cloak stormed onto one of the reporter's buses holding aloft a 10 day old baby boy with a Saddam button pinned to his swaddling clothes and shouted "Yes, yes, yes to Saddam!" so forcefully it seemed she might faint."
The Times did grudgingly concede that the 99.9% voting returns in favor of Mr. Hussein could not be taken at face value, but only after dutifully reporting the election results as if it was the first Tuesday in November.
PS Thanks a ton for the feature status last week, Jill. It was good fun!