ABSTRACT
There is a paradox in the increasing use of the street-natural demotic in newspaper journalism. Quotation marks are used when the ascribed remarks are contrived fictions, and they come to be omitted when the actual speech is recorded. In this way, journalism maximizes its sympathy and solidarity with the common man and woman, with their simple feelings and responses. Thus, the New York Times reports: Many secretaries complain that E-mail has meant less personal contact. All discoveries of "true paths" are fated to take their wayward turns. If, by accident or dialectic, followers of William Wordsworth's populistic instructions have in the course of time proved themselves to be gross, gaudy, and inane, his original example had a potential self-critical sense which could point the way to find sounder bearings. From a variety of causes this distorted language was received with admiration. The true and the false became so in-separably interwoven that the taste of men was gradually perverted.
