03 October 2002

Maybe someone who knows more about journalism can answer a question for me:

Why to journalists (or their editors) feel the need to change the actual phrasing of pop phrases?

This comes up a lot in blogging, for example, see my "blog-o-sphere" post. However i just ran accross another egregious one. In this NYTimes article on campus sex advice columns someone at the "paper of record" decided that "sexile" needed to be changed to "sexual exile". However, rather than quoting the students actual words and explaining the origin of the term or something honest like that, the article says:

Mr. Stromquist was telling Ms. Krinsky about his life as a sexual exile, with his roommate banishing him from his dorm room whenever his girlfriend spends the night.

"That's rude," said Ms. Krinsky, adding that sexual exiles would make a good column.


Come on people, if you want to present some new hip trend you should actually use their lingo instead of manipulating it and somehow trying to show you're better than the people you're writing on...

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