Getting her facts straight... the word from Patricia Kennedy

 HALLIE EPHRON: One of my oldest and dearest friends is familiar here on Jungle Red: Patricia Kennedy. She and I have been friends since we met, standing on line waiting for our orders at a food coop back in... mustabeen 1976 because I was carrying my daughter in a Snugli. Pat would soon be starting her very successful public relations firm and I was starting a stint teaching at a local college.

Out of the gate, she and I loved to talk about writing and writers, words and grammar, and today she's always reading several books and actually keeping up with The New Yorker. She thinks a lot about words, grammar, and spelling, and getting it right. She might, in another life, have been an editor or a fact checker. In fact, she's been a star publicist whose job description included spinning facts, though never making them ip.

PAT KENNEDY: I started reading The New Yorker obsessively (or should that be “fanatically” or perhaps “compulsively) in 1966 when my then mother-in-law handed me my first issue which was devoted to (or “which contained the first installment of….”) Truman Capote’s genre-bending In Cold Blood. I have read every issue since. (“Can you verify this fact -- every issue? Really?”)

I am also the person who silently (mostly) corrects spoken grammar in my head unless it is egregiously stupid. I cannot bear the pervasive use of “Me and Kathleen are going to the store.” 

My grandchildren know how I abhor that. “Dear, you wouldn’t say, “Me is going to the store. So why do you say, ‘Me and Kathleen are going?”

The September 1 and 8 New Yorker issue has an entertaining and enlightening article about the magazine’s celebrated grammar and fact-checking (hyphenated?) titled: “Vaunted: How this magazine gets its facts straight.”

Zach Helfand mentions in his lead paragraph that the article’s draft that he turned in to the magazine’s checking department had seventy-nine errors. And that a New Yorker published in the eighties contained a thousand of them. (Helfand gleefully mentions that this fact wouldn’t survive a fact-checking today.)

I can’t tell you how relieved I was to read this. New Yorker writers make mistakes! Lots of them!

I so hate it when a reader points out a stupid mistake I made in a published piece – factual or grammar related. I can feel myself blushing as I have written some real “boners”. (Oh, gosh, here I go again. “Is a boner a vulgar term or a stupid mistake? Better come up with a better word.”)

Here's a doozy of a sentence I wrote once when I meant to use the word “cushions” but wrote “the boat was fitted out with cushy, white Christians.” I’d like to blame auto-correct for that, but I proofed the copy several times and never caught it – until the emails started coming in.

Even more embarrassing is when I finally noticed that the footer on my website page had a typo in my telephone number. Area code 671 instead of the correct 617. So careless. I hate it when I glaze over “facts” and get things wrong.

So, dear Reddies, let’s hear from you about your humiliating experiences with poor word choices, grammatical slips (Oxford comma or no?) and error prone facts. Surely, you have some great (and factual) stories to tell.

But before I go, read The New Yorker article. It is so fun to read – and reliably true. The fact checkers made sure of that.

HALLIE EPHRON: Confession, as they say, is good for the sole... er soul. Looking forward to reading your mea culpas.

Patricia Kennedy is a retired marketing communications professional who runs a bed and breakfast at Long Pond, Massachusetts and Key West, Florida for grandchildren, other relatives and friends. Rooms are fully booked.