ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the splendours and miseries of slang in journalism; but the balance in this context—the search for significance in the reported events, the quest of meaning by the so-called pundits—this balance-sheet is almost totally negative. Whatever connotations the “punditry” of “the Pundits” may have that which journalists get served up in their newspapers is a mixed bag of commentaries that try to make out the meanings of war, and editorial paragraphs that mark out fine-principled attitudes. As Oliver Wendell Holmes famously remarked, original thoughts need to be stated obscurely before they can be put clearly. But the newspaper is enjoined to clarities and indeed to simplicities, and over-simplification can be the scourge of journalistic style in newspaper culture. The New York Times has never been a vehicle of subtleties. The Times’s mediocre report over long years from Hitler’s Berlin and Mussolini’s Rome by Otto Tolischus and Arnaldo Cortesi and indeed all of Europe.
