Tom Maurstad writes a nice piece about one of my Season Pass shows, Best Week Ever. That’s all well and good. But someone over at the paper worried about using the word “ersatz” in the subhed. The solution the editors came up with? Start the piece off with a definition of the word. Hunh? Look, if I’m a newspaper reader, I think I’m going to either a) know that word, b) figure it out from the 23 incidents of context in the story, or c) take 30 seconds out of my day to sate my intellectual curiosity and look it up. But if the editors fear most newspaper readers aren’t like me, then don’t use that word. I may very well be dumb and/or lazy, but I don’t want my newspaper assuming that I am.
Related Articles
Hockey
What We Saw, What It Felt Like: Stars-Golden Knights, Game 6
Dallas came up on the wrong end of the smallest margins.
Dallas History
D Magazine’s 50 Greatest Stories: When Will We Fix the Problem of Our Architecture?
In 1980, the critic David Dillon asked why our architecture is so bad. Have we heeded any of his warnings?
Healthcare
Baylor Scott & White Waxahachie’s $240 Million Expansion
The medical center is growing to address a 40+ percent patient increase in the last five years.