The lead editorial in Tuesday’s print edition of The New York Times contained a grammatical error so bad I read it four or five times trying to figure out if my eyes or my knowledge of the King’s English were failing me.
The editorial, titled “Drop the Bluster on North Korea,” urged the Trump administration to reach out to North Korea in an effort to initiate talks regarding North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
The last paragraph of the editorial went like this:
“Are the North Koreans even interested in talks? American experts who study the issue say there have been repeated signals in recent weeks that they is.”
The italics are mine because those are the two words at issue. “They” — as everyone with an eighth-grade education knows — is a plural subject, while “is,” is a singular verb.
Like I said, I was so confounded I read that sentence over and over to see if I was missing something. But no, there it was, clear and simple, a classic and embarrassing screw-up.
The next thing I did was read the paragraph to our daughter Brooks, who is also an avid Times reader. After reading it to her, I said, “That’s pretty funny, isn’t it?” And she replied, “It are.”
Today I put in a call to Phil Corbett, standards editor for the Times, to see if he knew about the screw-up and what his reaction was. He didn’t pick up, so I left a message. A few minutes later, he sent this email:
“Thanks for the call. My reaction: ugh. I assume something that egregious must have resulted from a last-minute editing change where someone didn’t read it over one more time. Glad they fixed it online, but ouch. Bear with us, and I hope that won’t happen again.”
…It was a bad error, but you gotta like it when the standards editor’s response is “Ugh.”
**
For almost a month, I’ve been wanting to follow up on the July 6 crash at K-7 and Parallel Parkway crash that killed Paul W. Scott, a 68-year-old Tonganoxie resident. Scott, a retired Johnson County firefighter, was sitting in his tan SUV that Thursday — stopped at the Parallel Parkway intersection — when a white SUV plowed into the rear of his vehicle. Scott’s SUV was pushed into a box truck, which, in turn struck a third SUV.
Paul W. Scott
Scott was pronounced dead at the scene, and the driver of the white SUV was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. The drivers of the other two vehicles escaped with minor injuries.
In a July 8 post, I said it was very likely the driver of the white SUV was not paying attention, and I speculated he might have been texting or dialing up a song on his phone. A week or so later, I called Officer Cameron Morgan, the KCK police public information officer, to see if charges had been filed. He told me a detective had the case and was investigating. I checked with Morgan a week or so later, and the answer was the same. Another week went by, and the answer was the same.
By the third check, I was starting to get suspicious…Could it be the driver of the white SUV was someone important? Or someone with connections, and law enforcement was playing the delay game or even trying to make the case go away?
Today I requested another update, and Officer Morgan sent me this response:
“The subject causing the accident has died so no charges will be filed.”
That’s about the last thing I expected to hear, but it didn’t answer all my questions.
I sent Morgan another email, asking for the driver’s name, age and city of residence. He replied:
“I’ll have to ask the detective but he’s not answering my call right now. I believe he died in Nebraska so you would have to check with that city if they released his name. I don’t believe they will though.”
Realizing I had assumed the driver had died of the “serious injuries” from the crash, I sent Morgan another email, asking if the man (note that Morgan used the word “he”) died as a result of injuries suffered in the crash and if he was a Nebraska resident.
Morgan answered one of my two questions…
“No, he didn’t die from injuries in the crash. I believe it was possibly suicide but you would have to confirm that with them.”
One of the things I love about the news business is the element of surprise. Not only will there be no charges but the man responsible for the crash is dead, in all probability having killed himself.
I would still like to know more: Who is this guy? Where did he live? How old was he? But with suicides, the information flow often dries up. What was a public case becomes a personal, family matter, and what he was doing behind the wheel on the morning of July 6 becomes moot…I think it’s fair to speculate, though, that the Parallel Parkway crash took not one life but two.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Didn’t the Times drop a number of copy editors? I think so. I too had a good experience one time when I questioned the use of “Hispanic” rather than “Latino” the preferred reference here in California. (The Times allows the use of Hispanic although the person in reference might be from Latin America.) But the response was prompt and thoughtful.
Yes…The paper either has or is in the process of eliminating its stand-alone copy desk, which consisted of more than 100 copy editors. Those editors were invited to apply for about 50 available positions, which will be structured differently. The Star eliminated its stand-alone copy desk several years ago.
A newsroom study issued in January led to the changes. It urged a restructuring to make the Times more nimble and more flexible as the paper’s online report became more important. The report said in part:
“Every story feels like a fire hydrant — it gets passed from dog to dog, and no one can let it go by without changing a few words…Hire editors and reporters who don’t need to have their hands held. Honestly, how can we still afford to have five editors arguing for hours over a routine day story? The print mentality still rules the newsroom, from the top down.”
This error — “they is” — came at a particularly bad time…
The definition of juxtaposition fits this post perfectly. On one hand you have, in the great scheme of things, a relatively unimportant piece of information. On the other, a sad study in human drama. Like you, I am curious about “the rest of the story.”
The evolution of the “human drama” dimension of the post was interesting and unusual. I was sending and exchanging the critical emails with Officer Morgan after I had begun writing that segment. I was going to write something one way or the other — even if the case was still “under investigation,” as I’d been told several times. I reported it pretty much in real time, as the new information came in. In the end, I liked the way it unfolded.
It will be interesting to see if The Star reports it and if so, how…For the record, my bet is they will let it go.
Amazing! So scary!
I make errors of that nature quite frequently. I write something and then either decide to add, eliminate, or change something and now verbs don’t match up, or there are multiple ands, or connecting words are now missing. It happens and without copy editors it’s going to happen a bunch. Adding to the issue is the fact that as digital becomes more and more dominant, errors become less important given the ability to correct them on the fly later. One of my frustrations with wordpress is that we can’t edit our comments.
Thank God people can’t edit their comments. It would be a nightmare for the blogger.