WACKY WEDNESDAY WISDOM- I'm Ticked at the Ticker Scroller Thing

     If, in your gluttony for punishment, you've read any of my columns- you know this much already- I don't spell things right at times. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's because I am a moron. Mistakes slip past my pea sized brain, sometimes even when spellcheck highlights them in red on my computer screen. Guilty as charged. I am the master of run-on sentences, improper grammar, and the invention words to suit my own devices at times. If I were a budding journalist, syndicated columnist, or beat reporter, my proverbial ship would be sunk.
     Or maybe not.
     I have noticed lately that there seems to be an epidemic spreading in printed new items- they are full of mistakes. I'm not referring to the factual ones (that's a problem as well) but rather the mistakes in sentence structure, grammar, and subject-verb agreement. That sorta thing. I have a theory about that which I will share in a moment. These mistakes appear in many shapes and sizes and though I'm nobody's English teacher, I am able like most common folks to spot them because they stand out like a donkey in the Kentucky Derby.  Take for example, how often words are misspelled in those little ticker scroller captions on news channels that run across the bottom of the television screen while the anchor/reporter above is yapping about the story. Some poor copy person is sitting at a computer trying to type in those highlights within seconds of the news breaking. And the spelling is often atrocious. (Incidentally, I spelled atrocious just now without the red underline warning from my computer spellcheck).
     It seems to me that most folks get their news with their thumbs these days. News items pop up on our phones from Google, Yahoo, Flipboard, Fox, CNN , etc. 24 hours a day. And we the want-to-know-it-all- now public read the news almost as it happens. But English teachers across the globe are regurgitating when they read some of these items, not because the news makes them sick, but the spelling and grammatical errors do. (I wanted to say that English teachers vomit or throw up, but that sounded a little harsh, so I used a fine professional word like regurgitate, which I also spelled correctly on my first try).
     Consider, if you will, a headline I witnessed recently while thumbing through sports news on my phone after the most recent UNC-Duke basketball game- DUKE VS. NORTH CAROLINA SCORE: BLUE DEVILS STORM BACK IN THE SECOND HALF TO TOP THE BLUE DEVILS. (Read that again if you didn't catch the error the first time). Let me set the record straight before good and decent folks commence to commenting and taking shots at each other based on which color of blue they pull for. My intention is not to make any type of statement regarding the quality of either basketball program compared to the other. I'm simply pointing out an obvious headline faux pas.
     Whoever typed the headline obviously: 1) was intoxicated 2) did not have a proof reader 3) has a bad sense of humor 4) was picked last in gym class 5) had to go potty 6) was having a bad hair day or most likely of all, 7) was in a hurry.
     There exists in life a phenomena known as the fog of war. It's an expression indicating that most of the time in an intense situation, the first information that gets out is later proved to be inaccurate. I can personally think of three instances from the past right off the bat- none of which are funny, but do help to make the point:

1)Back in 1991, on the night the Persian Gulf War officially began, Dan Rather of CBS News came on the air and said to me in my living room- "Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, the Middle Eastern War has begun". A few minutes later he referred to it as the Gulf War, and by the end of the night, he was calling it the Persian Gulf War. At no time since has anyone ever acknowledged that he or anybody else initially referred to it as the Middle Eastern War, but I know I heard him say it. I actually taped it, believe it or not, and on the old VHS label of the tape, at the time I wrote- "The Beginning of the Middle Eastern War."

2) In the wacky presidential election of 2000, we all held our breath when the Supreme Court met on a mid December evening to decide who had actually won the election. NBC reporter Dan Abrams came running out of the courthouse with a document in hand and quickly attempted to interpret it on live television. One of his first sentences was: "It's going back to Florida. They're sending it back to Florida and they will have to decide themselves who won and who lost." Immediately the little ticker scroller thing across the bottom of the screen read: "It's going back to Florida." But it was not going back to Florida. (It kinda sorta did go back to Florida but it was a technicality. The deal was done). I never heard any more about that initial inaccurate report.

3) My family watched anxiously as the breaking news of Lady Diana's car accident began to appear on our television that late August 1997 evening. We were temporarily relieved to hear a reporter say that her shoulder had been injured in the accident and she was being treated at the hospital. Oh how we wished that was true a few minutes later when he broke back in and said her condition was grave and that she wasn't expected to live.

     I promised I would share my theory on all this so here it is: People are in too big of a hurry. Getting news out quickly has become more important than getting it out accurately. And we the news consumers are equally to blame. We want to know everything about everything as soon as it happens. Forget accuracy, forget due process, forget the fog of war, forget discretion, forget proofreading and grammar. We want to know and we want to know now!
     The Bible doesn't say much about proper grammar but it does have something to say about being patient and not being in too big of a hurry. Psalm 46:10 reminds us to "Be still, and know that I am God." Romans 8:25, Isaiah 40:31, and James 5:7 are just of few of the many verses that extol the virtue of patience as opposed to haste. A lesson all of us including me could use some reminding about occasionally.
     Now please excuse me while I finish reading my phone. It just now beeped to let me know my favorite team scored a basket. Hold on, it was the other team that scored. Darn those typos.