Soy milk, New York Times, and Wikipedia

The New York Times ran an article earlier this week on beverages and health. It turns out to have contained wildly inaccurate statements about soy milk, as volunteers at the Wikipedia Reference Desks have established. Did the Times acknowledge its errors? No. Instead, the article was silently amended.

Before:

"Fortified soy milk is a good alternative for individuals who prefer not to consume cow milk,” the panel said, but cautioned that soy milk cannot be legally fortified with vitamin D and provides only 75 percent of the calcium the body obtains from cow’s milk.

After:

"Fortified soy milk is a good alternative for individuals who prefer not to consume cow milk," the panel said.

I remember reading the original sentence and thinking "That can't be right." Sure enough: the soy milk and "cow milk" in my fridge, as I just discovered, have the same amount of calcium, and the soy milk has more vitamin D. (And who, aside from "the panel," calls it "cow milk"?)

It's difficult to disagree with Wikipedia contributor Jfarber, who brought these errors to the attention of the Times (and has received no acknowledgement from the paper): "for all the bad press about Wikipedia, there are some ways in which it works very well indeed."

Soy milk + Vitamin D? (Wikipedia Reference Desk)
NYT changes, back-dates article (Boing Boing)
You Are Also What You Drink (New York Times)

Related posts

I've spotted two significant errors in the Times, both about recording technology:

Correction
VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

A New York Times correction

The Corrections page of the New York Times is semi-reliably entertaining:

An article last Sunday about Sandra Boynton, the children's book author and greeting card creator, quoted incorrectly the final part of a passage from her book “Barnyard Dance!” It is “Bow to the horse. Bow to the cow. Twirl with the pig if you know how,” not “Bow to the horse if you know how.”

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A correction (Yes, another)
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"I'll take the soup"
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Soy milk, New York Times, and Wikipedia
VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

Which Joe Turner?

This photograph from an excellent New York Times feature caught my eye:


[From “Before and After Chuck Berry,” New York Times, March 23, 2017. Click for a larger view.]

I called the Times today to suggest a correction. Though I can’t be certain, I’m virtually certain that the photograph above is of the pianist Joe Turner, not the singer Big Joe Turner. Notice especially the shape of the hairline, eyebrow, and mouth. Big Joe Turner, or Joe Turner?

 
[Big Joe Turner and Joe Turner. Click either image for a larger view.]

I differ with the Times in omitting the quotation marks from “Big Joe.” Big Joe Turner was big, not “big.” I sat next to him once in a bar where he was performing. Trust me.

If the Times makes a correction, I suspect that Orange Crate Art readers will be among the first to know.

[That the Times photograph is from Getty Images doesn’t mean that it’s correctly captioned. At least one other photograph from Getty misidentifies Joe Turner as Big Joe Turner.]

*

March 30: The Times replied and let me know that “Before and After Chuck Berry” now has a photograph that is unmistakably of Big Joe Turner. Hurrah!


[Click for a larger view.]

Big Joe Turner is one of my earliest musical memories. I highly recommend The Boss of the Blues, a 1956 album with a stellar cast (Lawrence Brown, Pete Brown, Pete Johnson, et al.) and a memorable catalogue number: Atlantic 1234. “What makes grandma love old grandpa so? He can still do the boogie like he did forty years ago.”

*

Later that same day:

The Getty photograph that the Times first used was taken at the Cannes Jazz Festival, July 12, 1958. Joe Turner the pianist played at that festival. His name appears in a Library of Congress description of a television show about the festival. And Turner appears in this compilation of performances from the festival. I think it's unmistakably Joe Turner the pianist in the first Times photograph.

A description of the 1958 photograph in the book 1950s (Getty Images, 1998) manages to turn the two Turners into one person, pianist and singer: “an expert in the hard-driving ‘stride’ piano style, Turner was also known as the ‘Boss of the Blues.’” Yipes.

Erica, Erika

The New York Times Corrections column makes for unpredictably enjoyable reading:

An article on Jan. 11 about the television show United States of Tara, whose protagonist has dissociative identity disorder (once known as multiple personality disorder), misidentified a soap opera character who has the illness and the actress who portrays her. Viki Lord Davidson, a character on ABC's One Life to Live played by Erika Slezak, has the disorder — not Erica Kane, a character on ABC's All My Children portrayed by Susan Lucci.

The Four (at Least) Faces of Tara (New York Times)

My friend Stefan Hagemann caught this mistake last month. Stefan, feel vindicated!

[The Times correction links to the wrong article; I've linked to the right one above.]

"I'll take the soup"

The New York Times gets the punchline right:

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Sid Raymond, a comic actor, rendered one of his jokes incorrectly. It was about a son who sends a prostitute to his widowed father, still a self-proclaimed ladies' man in his 90s. The prostitute tells the father that she is his birthday present and promises to give him "super sex" (not that she promises to give him whatever he'd like). The father replies, "I'll take the soup."

I'm glad that the Times made this correction, in what it calls one of Sid Raymond's last jokes.

Sid Raymond, 97, Actor With a Familiar Face, Dies (New York Times)

A Honeymooners correction, still needed

Three weeks after publication, a factual error in the New York Times obituary for Joyce Randolph stands uncorrected:

As Trixie, Ms. Randolph played the upstairs wife who crossed her arms and commiserated with her best friend, Alice, over addlepated husbands who somehow got drunk on grape juice, found a suitcase of the mob’s counterfeit cash, invented a “handy” kitchen tool that could “core a apple” and, after waiting all year for the convention of their International Order of Friendly Raccoons, took the wrong train.

Those choice — or, in Brooklynese, cherce — details make me think that the writer, Robert D. McFadden, loves The Honeymooners , so much so that he may have been writing from memory. But in the Honeymooners episode “Better Living Through TV” (November 12, 1955), Ralph and Ed do not invent the Handy Housewife Helper. The brother of one of Ralph’s fellow bus drivers has a Bronx warehouse in which someone left 2,000 of the gadgets. Ralph and Ed buy the lot for $200 and try to sell them via a television commercial.

I’ve written to the Times twice about the error. I included a link to the episode at Dailymotion, pointing out where the relevant dialogue may be found (at the 3:35 mark). Still no correction.

As Edward L. Norton might say, Sheesh.

*

July 19, 2024: I wrote to the Times again yesterday, and this time I received a non-automated reply. Long story short: the error will stand. The person who wrote says that the Times can correct errors if they’re pointed out in “a reasonable amount of time.” After that, errors stand, as the paper lacks to resources to to “re-report” old articles. The writer also noted that the Times never heard from me before yesterday.

In reponse, I sent screenshots of previous e-mails to and automated replies from NYT Corrections (January 14 and February 3). I also pointed out that changing one word — changing invented to, say, marketed, is hardly a matter of re-reporting an article. No reply.

As Edward L. Norton might say, Sheesh.

Related reading
All OCA Honeymooners posts (Pinboard)

David Brooks and SNOOTs

Writing in The New York Times today about a forthcoming book by Alan Jacobs, David Brooks mentions David Foster Wallace:

Jacobs notices that when somebody uses “in other words” to summarize another’s argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team. David Foster Wallace once called such people Snoots. Their motto is, “We Are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”

No, Mr. Brooks, no.

In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT (all caps) as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.” SNOOT has nothing to do with caricaturing other people’s arguments and winning favor with a team. The acronym applies to those who obsess over matters of grammar and usage, those who know how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and who sneer at “10 ITEMS OR LESS.” As Wallace points out in the essay, “the word may be slightly self-mocking.” Wallace identified as a SNOOT, and his spoof of the USMC slogan (“the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else”) is further evidence of self-mockery. He wasn’t calling other people SNOOTs. He was writing about himself.

And as Wallace said in a radio interview, “to be a SNOOT is a lonely, stressful way to be.”

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[“Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay appeared in a shorter form in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” The examples concerning phrasal adjectives and supermarket signage are from the essay. Using Amazon’s Look Inside tool to search How to Think returns no results for david foster wallace or snoot, so I’m ascribing the error to Brooks. And yes, I’m sending a correction to the Times.]

Ginsbergs, Ginsburgs

A correction in the New York Times:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University's plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published.

The Times has often misspelled Allen Ginsberg's last name too.

A correction

In today's New York Times: "An obituary of the jazz pianist and composer Joe Bushkin on Nov. 5 misidentified the technology used at a recording session in the early 1930's when Mr. Bushkin, who was 14, nearly made a record with Benny Goodman before the scheduled pianist finally showed up. It was a disk cutter and wax disks; magnetic tape was not used regularly for recording music until the late 1940's."

I emailed the Times about the error on November 5. I'm glad that there's finally a correction. It's amazing though that someone writing for the Times (the Times!) would think that magnetic tape was in use in the thirties.

“No Worries if Not!”

What’s happening to The New Yorker ? The styling of a title for a cartoon piece: “No Worries if Not.” The title is all-caps on the page, but in the browser tab and in two New Yorker e-mails (May 23, May 24), if  is styled with a lower-case i. Look, here’s proof:

  [Left to right: May 23, May 24.]

A year ago, The New Yorker capitalized if in titles. As recently as December 21, the magazine capitalized its if s. But by December 28, the capital was gone. It’s still gone, as this April title shows. It appears that in lowercasing if, The New Yorker has ditched The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook and cast its lot with the Associated Press and The New York Times.

I must point out: the April title I’ve linked to in the preceding paragraph — “I Am Trying to Decide if I Should Buy Two Rolls of Paper Towel or Three” — is in need of correction. It should read “I Am Trying to Decide Whether I Should Buy Two Rolls of Paper Towel or Three.” How do I know that?

Garner’s Modern English Usage on if and whether:

It’s good editorial practice to distinguish between these words. Use if for a conditional idea, whether for an alternative or possibility.

Merriam-Webster is particularly helpful:

There is a grammatical hint that calls for whether instead of if. Whether is the one that precedes an infinitive, which is the verb form in the collocation “to + simple verb,” as in “I am wondering whether to change our reservations.” Whether, in this case, refers to the making of a choice, whereas if states a condition, as in “If the contestant spells the word wrong, he or she will be eliminated.”

Read “whether I should buy” as “whether to buy,” and the choice is clear. Or you could think of Hamlet: “Whether ’tis nobler,” &c.

Why did the if in the April title make me think about whether ? Because if and whether often confound me when I write. So I keep an entry about the two in a notes app.

But let’s leave rolls of paper towel alone. I think the writer is being arch. No worries if not!

[See also pant. And Apple’s approach to pluralization.]

VINYL GAFFE, LEDDY CHARGES

Last year the New York Times published an obituary of the pianist Joe Bushkin that made reference to the tape beginning to roll at an early '30s recording session. Oops. I e-mailed the Times, and almost a month later, a correction finally appeared.

In this morning's Times, Jane and Michael Stern's review of Bob Spitz's book The Beatles includes this description of the Quarry Men recording "That'll Be the Day":

for the money they were paying, they could not record on tape. And they got one take, straight to vinyl.

Oops. The Quarry Men recorded an acetate. As the booklet for volume 1 of the Beatles' Anthology says, the five musicians passed around "a very-breakable 78rpm record."

This sort of mistake--the casual rewriting of musical history--drives my dad crazy. Me too. Time for another e-mail to the Times.

Yes, that's a fake headline above.

It is the correction that matters

A correction in today's New York Times addresses the question of who said "It is the journey, not the arrival, that matters":

An article on July 20 about the economy's effects on Americans' vacations misattributed the saying that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters. Although it has been attributed through the years to T. S. Eliot — as the article did — Leonard Woolf, the author and the husband of Virginia Woolf, in his autobiography, "Downhill All the Way," cites Montaigne, the 16th-century essayist, as having written, "It is not the arrival, but the journey which matters."

The Times did better than me (as well it should, right?) by tracking down the work in which Woolf attributes the statement to Montaigne (I just confirmed it via Google Book Search). The correction makes no reference to Woolf's own The Journey Not the Arrival Matters and (perhaps wisely) avoids the question of whether Montaigne is the source of this aphorism.

Related post
From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne

Zippy and Trixie

Today’s Zippy remembers Joyce Randolph. What other comic strip would go there?

And I have to add: more than three months after publication, the New York Times obituary for Joyce Randolph still has a factual error still in need of correction. I’ve written four times.

*

July 19, 2024: The Times will not be correcting the error. Details here.

Related reading
All OCA Honeymooners posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

From Eliot to Woolf to Montaigne

A July 20 New York Times article on downsized travel plans begins

When T.S. Eliot said that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters. . . .

Did Eliot say that? It rings no bell for me. Google and Google Book Search turn up many attributions to Eliot but none with a source. The Journey Not the Arrival Matters though is the title of an autobiographical volume by Leonard Woolf (1969). A 1989 Times review of Woolf's letters attributes the title observation to Montaigne. I'm unable to find anything in Montaigne that concise, but in the essay "Of Vanity," Montaigne did write (in this 1877 Charles Cotton translation)

"But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey." What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me; I only walk for the walk's sake.

Yes, I've e-mailed the Times, for the walk's sake.

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It is the correction that matters

Recently updated

A Honeymooners correction, still needed The New York Times won’t be making a correction.

Nancy Malone in Life magazine

To my knowledge, she made three appearances.


[Life, November 25, 1946. Eleven-year-old Nancy Malone on the cover of Life ’s tenth-anniversary issue. She is identified on page 3 of the magazine as “Nancy Maloney of Long Island,” “one of the most successful younger Powers models.”]




[“Hokum and More Hokum,” Life, December 22, 1952. Ronald Alexander’s comedy Time Out for Ginger ran for 248 performances on Broadway. Notice that Nancy Malone’s character, a high-schooler who wants to try out for the football team, makes the cover of Life.]


[“Stubborn sinner Bill Walker (Eli Wallach) wallops a Salvation Army lass (Nancy Malone) to show his contempt while meek down-and-outers watch.” “Handsome Soapbox for Shaw,”Life, December 10, 1956. The scene is from a Broadway production of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara.]

*

May 16: A correction: when I made this post, I wrote that Malone was not identified by name in the November 25, 1946 issue of Life. I came to that mistaken conclusion by reading the issue’s photo credits. But a description of the cover on page 3 of this issue identifies Malone (then Maloney) by name. The New York Times may have borrowed my mistake. I’ve made a correction above.

Related reading
A letter from Nancy Malone
Nancy Malone (1935–2014)

Bye, Will

I’ve finally acknowledged that The New York Times crossword puzzle sparks, for me, no joy. I ended my subscription and switched to the syndicated puzzle some time ago, after TORME, Mel Tormé, was clued as a “cool jazz pioneer.” No, he wasn’t one. I wrote to Will Shortz, the crossword editor, to make that case. I even sussed out the likely source of the mistake (which I suspected was Shortz’s) — the Times obituary for Tormé, which misinterpreted a statement about Tormé and cool jazz in a book on jazz singers. Shortz wrote back to say that I obviously knew more about jazz than he did (well, yes) but that he had “several sources” to support the clue (sure, sure). No correction appeared.

Fast-forward to today’s syndicated puzzle (published March 1). The clue for 54-A, seven letters: “Informal ‘Ugh!’” The answer: NOLIKEY. Ugh, indeed. Here’s a different kind of cluelessness, the same kind that let BEANER appear as a puzzle answer last year, even after Shortz had been told that beaner is a derogatory term. If there’s any doubt that “No likey” is blatantly racist stuff, a search in Google Books will return ample evidence. An additional element of cluelessness: in no universe might “No likey” be regarded as less formal than “Ugh!” Ugh, indeed, again.

In a comment on my Saturday Stumper post yesterday, blogger Zhoen recommended of The American Values Club crossword. Her recommendation couldn’t have been more timely. I’ve started a trial subscription.

Corrections of the Times

I like the straight-facedness with which the New York Times makes corrections:

The Well column on Tuesday, about the potential dangers to children who focus early on one sport, misstated the coach-to-athlete ratio recommended by Dave Peterson, the owner of a sports center in California. Mr. Peterson suggested a coach-to-student ratio of 1 to 6 in preschool and about 1 to 8 for older athletes, not 6 to 1 and 8 to 1.

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Fit to print

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Stan Newman, is a good one, more difficult than last week’s but still in the realm of Yes I Can. That, by the way, is the title of Sammy Davis Jr.’s autobiography. My dad had the paperback when I was a kid, with the title in big yellow capital letters on the cover. And remember when the edges of paperback pages were stained red or yellow? When did that practice end?

But I digress.

I especially liked the design of this puzzle’s center, with three eleven-letter answers descending a staircase. My only region of difficulty: the southwest corner, where 45-A, five letters, “Old-time nickname for Elizabeth” and 43-D, five letters, “Legalese, for instance” got me into difficulty. For 43-D I tried two wrong answers before hitting on the correct one.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

10-D, nine letters, “Script step.” Because I knew it.

15-A, nine letters, “Some dough, but not much.” What kind of dough?

31-D, nine letters, “Arrived with a bang.” Or several.

33-A, eleven letters, “Type of wooden siding.” The noun helped me better understand a verb.

34-D, eight letters, “Psych out.” Psych instantly puts me back in high school, when one was psyched up or out or just plain psyched, with up implied.

44-A, three letters, “Shake, rattle and roll.” I once sat next to Big Joe Turner at the bar in Tramps, where he was relaxing before doing a set. I

a. wanted to give him his privacy, or

b. was too shy to say hello.

Your choice. Either way, this clue adds value to the answer.

45-A, five letters, “Old-time nickname for Elizabeth.” My first guess was off by a letter.

48-D, four letters, “My Way autobiographer.” Aah, so this must be why I started thinking about Yes I Can.

56-A, five letters, “Word from the Greek for ‘apple.’” I feel I should know this.

57-A, nine letters, “Talk host whose full first name ends in ‘let.’” Fun trivia, though it’s not trivial to the name’s owner.

One clue-and-answer I’d quibble with a little: 28-D, five letters, “Odyssey king.” Well, yes, he’s in there, but I think the clue is more than a little arcane.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

A related post
Which Joe Turner? (Getting The New York Times to make a correction)

Paul Tanner (1917–2013)

From the New York Times:

Paul Tanner, a former trombonist for the Glenn Miller Ochestra who played an unlikely role in the history of rock ’n’ roll when, using a device he helped invent, he performed the famous electronic accompaniment on the Beach Boys’ signature recording “Good Vibrations,” died on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

The Beach Boys’ Mike Love called that device, the Electro-Theremin, a “woo-woo machine.” But it is better known as the Tannerin.

Correction, thanks to Andrew Hickey: Mike Love played a synthesizer, not a Tannerin.

[Mike Love at Michigan State University, October 26, 1966: “Hey man, they expect me to play this woo-woo machine.”]