I’ve finally gotten around to the June 5 issue of the LRB, and in a Paul Laity review of a biography of George Steer, a war correspondent of the 1930s, found an excellent story about Evelyn Waugh. Steer and Waugh were both in Ethiopia for the Italian invasion of 1935; Steer, like most journalists, was against the Italians, while Waugh (predictably enough) took the imperialist side. Laity says:
But then Waugh was a hopelessly unsuccessful reporter. (He did send one significant cable to the Mail, informing the editor that the Italian minister in Addis was withdrawing his staff—a sign that the invasion was imminent. To keep the story from competitive colleagues, however, he sent it in Latin, and a puzzled subeditor in London was still trying to work out what it meant when the fighting began.)
Had he been working for the Times, of course, he wouldn’t have had this problem, but Steer had beaten him out for that job.
Addendum. I should add, for curious non-Latinists, that the title of this entry is line 850 of Seneca’s Oedipus (spoken by the impatient eponymous king, who is about to learn distressing facts about his ancestry) and means ‘Why do you look for words? Truth hates delay’; the latter hemistich is used by Denis Dutton as the motto of his Arts & Letters Daily.
Yeah, unfortunately that trick rarely works 😉
I’m glad the Dictator [Mussolini] did not read it, he may have been flumoxed too:
O. Henry’s “Calloway’s Code” was far more successful at getting its message through wartime censorship. Unfortunately, all the online copies seem to print the crucial two-column table as an ordinary paragraph, so I reproduce it here correctly formatted despite being a partial spoiler. Just substitute it mentally for the paragraph after the words “Thus had Vesey set forth the reading of the code:”
Foregone – conclusion
Preconcerted – arrangement
Rash – act
Witching – hour of midnight
Goes – without saying
Muffled – report
Rumour – hath it
Mine – host
Dark – horse
Silent – majority
Unfortunate – pedestrians
Richmond – in the field
Existing – conditions
Great – White Way
Hotly – contested
Brute – force
Select – few
Mooted – question
Parlous – times
Beggars – description
Ye – correspondent
Angel – unawares
Incontrovertible – fact
It’s interesting to note that “silent majority”, made famous by Nixon in 1969, was already a newspaper cliche in 1921 when the story was written, and perhaps in 1905 when it is set. Note also that newspaper reporters formerly distinguished between a beat, getting first publication of a story through resourceful but honorable means, and a scoop, which involved breaking embargo dates, stealing another reporter’s copy, or equally reprehensible activities. Scoop now carries no such connotations.
It totally does – in science.
In science, I’ve only encountered usage as a verb, not a noun; and there is no expression for “beat”, because if you know other people are already working on the exact same thing, you’ll either try to join them or give up and work on something else.
@David Marjanović: I am not aware of any negative connotations for scoop in the sciences. You are right, though, that in that context, the word is predominantly used as a verb (as opposed to in journalism, where both the noun and verb are common, and I would guess the noun is actually more so).
A delightful O.H. squib. “And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary notices them do part.”