I hate lazy people. Also, I am a lazy person.
I hate lazy people. I especially hate lazy writers, because the trick to good writing, like good acting, is to get the most meticulous of inconsequential details correct. It offends me when a writer has so clearly not done his or her research, especially a journalist, a type of writer who's life should be slavishly devoted to rooting out the most minute minutiae and reporting it just so in plain fifth-grade English.
An article in today's NY Times set off this latest bought of hostility towards lazy writers. First off, the headline is "Greenwich Village With Peach Trees." Kill me now. No, really, kill me now. I can just see the desperate-to-be-considered hip Ruth La Ferla (let me take this moment to say I do not know Ruth La Ferla, so I'm just guessing here when I say she's desperate to be considered hip. But I'm probably guessing somewhere near the truth) sitting in some godawful coffee shop somewhere in front of her white Macbook trying to come up with something resembling an idea. "I know!" she says to herself. "I'll take two of the most tired cliches in the world about two places that have more than their fair share of tired cliches and make them the headline. Perfect!"
The rest of the article kept me at a somewhat simmering level of annoyance until I read this sentence and bubbled over completely: "The area, which radiates in several (though not actually five) directions from the intersection of Moreland and Euclid Avenues, languished in the ’70s as a refuge for slackers, students and punks."
There's a lot going on with this sentence that I have issues with, but the main issue is with Ms. La Ferla's patronizing aren't-I-so-clever-for-noticing attitude in pointing out that Little Five Points doesn't really have five little points. Well, Ms. La Ferla, if you'd bother to do any research or, I don 't know, ask anyone in the area, you might have discovered that once upon a time there were five points, but since intersections consisting of five points tend to be dangerous, the five points were rearranged slightly for safety's sake, with one being blocked off completely. Even the Five Points downtown (of Gone With the Wind fame) is no longer a proper five points of complete and total right-of-way confusion; it's radials' convergence was softened decades ago. You CAN still find a proper five-point intersection in Atlanta, but you have to drive back into the older neighborhoods to do so, and even these are something of a dying breed as they are quickly being converted into roundabouts.
So lazy, poor writing all around on Ms. La Ferla's part.
Although this is the point in the post where I must confess that I am something of a lazy writer myself, although in more of the literal sense. Instead of working on my term paper, which is due Monday, I have sufficiently busied myself in writing a blog post lambasting a person I've never met and probably never will meet.
Rock on.
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