I know you’re busy, Santa, and I don’t presume to ask anything for myself — as you know, an ombudsman is about as popular as a pebble in a watch — but a number of readers have asked me to submit a Christmas list of suggestions they think would make the Globe a better newspaper.
What we need most, Santa, is a big, fat dictionary, because readers like Cynthia Iris of Wellesley hate it when we mix up nauseous and nauseated, and principle and principal. When we referred to politican science, Bob Trott of Weymouth wondered if it was a new field that explored the relationship between politics and pelicans.
Misspellings irritate people. Reading that a driver had slammed on her breaks, Newton’s Paula Porter pleaded, ”Give me a brake!” And sexism. When science writer Doug Bailey described author Dava Sobel as a diminutive woman writer,Bernice Buresh of Cambridge wondered if we’d now refer to John Kenneth Galbraith as a tall man writer.
A new Oxford dictionary would would make Miriam Brooks of Cambridge happier because David Arnold would no longer write about ascending into an underground cavern, and it would delight Norm Girard, who winced when Larry Tye wrote about ringing our hands, and everybody’s favorite sportswriter, Michael Holley, might refrain from writing ”too big for … he,” which prompted Ed Valcarce to declare ”it’s too much for I.”
Keith Page would be joyous if we had a thesaurus for synonyms to overcome our obsession with probe. And could you include a street directory so that we don’t write Forrest when we mean Forest Hills, and so that reporters in South Boston don’t write about turning from West Broadway to West Fifth? ”Impossible,” said Arthur Mattos. ”They don’t intersect.”
Also, Santa, a new atlas would bring a smile to professor Sam Kauffmann of Boston University, because we’d no longer publish maps of South Africa with provinces that no longer exist. And Miriam Achenbach won’t wonder if we’ve lost our compass in writing that Baxter State Park is in Camden when it’s four hours north, and Stan Horzepa won’t stay up at night wondering what route Dan Shaughnessy takes to write that New York is 400 miles from Boston instead of 230. With a map of the hemisphere, Larry Whiteside won’t write that Bermuda is in Latin America.
Also, we need a chart of the heavens so that Health/Science reporters don’t write that Centaurus A is near our solar system when, as Paul Castonguay of Woburn points out, it’s 64.5 quintillion miles away, or as distant as a dream.
And find a place under the tree for a copy of ”The Elements of Style.” That will make Murray Swerdlove a happy boy because it will remind us of E. B. White’s admonition not to use a $20 word when a 10-center will do. Then columnist Martin F. Nolan, who has been around longer than Velcro, won’t use words like docents and tabula non-totally rasa and the ombudsman, for that matter, will stop showing off with words like logomachy. As Vito Corleone once said, ”That I do not forgive.”
With a new Cassell’s Dictionary of Catch Phrases, Ellen Goodman might not write ”hoisted on one’s own petard,” because, as Marv Atkins points out, forgetting the glitch in the participle, the verb takes the preposition ”by,” not ”on.”
If we had a copy of Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide, we wouldn’t write that Richard Dreyfuss drove a Volkswagen in ”American Graffiti” when it was a Citroen, and we’d stop running Jerry Garcia’s photo with Stanley Kubrick’s name. And Harry Alexander of Wellesley wants you to remind Michael Blowen that in theater in the round, all the people look at the faces of the actors half the time, not half the people half the time.
Beyond that, Santa, a few stocking stuffers — cherubic Jim Roosevelt of Cambridge would like us to list guests for Sunday talk shows, and John Miller of Jefferson, N.H., wonders if folks upcountry can start getting TV Week with their Globes.
If you have any influence in the advertising department — I don’t know anybody who does — could you get them to drop those scented soap samples that have Maya Hasegawa of Dorchester sneezing through the news? Also, Mark Murphy of Sudbury says we need something to reduce typos like the Metro headline about a tea party that referred to a teat party, which he conceded sounded like more fun.
Beyond that, Santa, be generous to those who deliver the Globe in vile weather at ungodly hours, and help their aim so that every paper ends up in the box or on the porch and not under the snow, in the bushes, or blowing over a neighbor’s lawn.
For myself, I ask only that Globe readers keep a sense of humor, like Malcolm McPherson of the Harvard Institute for International Development, who was stunned to read a forecast that predicted snow would fall from the sky. ”This really blows it for me,” he wrote. ”I always thought snow came from a big snow maker in a swamp near Marshfield.”
