ABSTRACT
The order-of-battle persists even if the hostilities on the front line appear to have given way to an ethnic armistice. Still, the over-critical or ultra-sensitive New York reader is always on the alert for every suspicious movement along the long frontier between the New York Times’ formal “house-style” rules and the freshly fashionable demotic. The deeply rooted antipathies among the immigrant tribes, especially in the Bronx and Brooklyn, are too outlandish to be simply assimilated, integrated, and finally closed out. One example, a story suggestively headlined (and thereby reopening yesterday’s unhealed wounds):
ON THIS OLD TURF, A TREASURED PAST IS STILL A PRESENCE
