An altercation seems like something you might witness on the subway when too many passengers are jammed onto the 1 train: a few harsh words and a mild shove. In other words, it seemed like a significant understatement for Mr. Rice’s violent assault on Ms. Palmer. But a dictionary definition backs up Room for Debate’s choice pretty well. It’s “a heated, sometimes violent, quarrel or conflict.”
But word choice is a constant source of reader email to my office, and often the readers make very good points. It matters – sometimes a lot.
For example, are the hundreds of military personnel being sent to Iraq really “advisers,” as the White House describes them and as The Times reports it? Or is that a euphemism? Here’s what CNN had to say about that recently, quoting a retired Marine sergeant:
They are high-ranking officers. They are Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, said retired Marine Sgt. Adam Banotai.
Banotai, who scrapped through the brutal battle for Falluja during the Iraq war, thinks the term “adviser” is misplaced.
“It is political semantics,” he said. “We are calling them adviser now … instead of combat troops or boots on the ground,” he said.
“They are the most elite fighters we have,” he added. “So, if they aren’t going to be combat troops, I’m not quite sure who the President is going to refer to as combat troops.”
Should teacher unions be described as having a “stranglehold” over education reform and being “intransigent”? (Some readers complained that these are loaded words that unfairly reflect negative stereotypes about unions.) That was amid the flood of response to a piece about Eva Moskowitz in last Sunday’s magazine, much of which saw it as too sympathetic to the head of Success Academy Charter Schools.
And was it right to describe the push by a Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate, Gina Raimondo, the state treasurer, to cut government pensions as “responsible policy” as an article this week did, or was it a clear piece of opinion within a news story? Some readers certainly saw it that way, and they were articulate in saying so. I’ll let them make the case here and simply add that I agree:
Robyn Schroeder: “I’m concerned with the editorial voice of the Times in yesterday’s article on the New England primaries. The notion of that it’s ‘responsible policy’ to cut the pensions of people whose contracts (let alone personal livelihood) rest on the promise of the pensions that they earned — rather than the host of other cuts and revenue-generating options that remain available, here in cash-strapped Providence — is a sloppy form of bias that ignores the extreme controversy that Raimondo has generated, in favor of an odd universalized notion of ‘responsibility.’ I don’t subscribe to Raimondo’s idea, and I’m disappointed that the Times missed this phrasal problem.”
Alex Campbell: “I’m disappointed in the NYT’s reporting and tone in its overview of yesterday’s primary elections in New England, ‘Primaries in Northeast Set the Stage for the Fall.’
“Of course, the sentence that bothered me was this one: ‘Analysts were already predicting that if she won in November, Ms. Raimondo could go on to become a national star in the party, showing fellow Democrats that responsible policy is not necessarily bad politics, although organized labor may choose to differ.’
“Leaving aside whether or not it constitutes a great political achievement for the sole statewide office holder in a gubernatorial primary to get 42 percent of the vote against split opponents, ‘responsible’ seems like a particularly bad choice of words here. It sidesteps a large political debate about where wealth should be going in this country and obscures important policy questions about state finances and defined-benefit retirement plans.
“Is it responsible to put the deferred income of retirees in elaborate funds with little disclosure and high fees? Is it responsible to deny people income they have earned? And these questions can’t be answered without answering a third: Who is the state responsible to, anyway?”