The Golden 80s

 Our newspapers still contain mistakes that could have been avoided with some rechecking.  Here's one from The New Indian Express , Bengaluru edition dated August 12. Even after five days, the same headline was seen on the web page.  This is another one from a Malayalam newspaper Kerala Kaumudi where the chronological order on a report on the Thiruvananthapuram Airport's history appeared incorrect:

A missing vowel, O, creates a new virus in Times of India, Bengaluru, story titled Disinfection: Businessmen in Bengaluru make killing amid scare .

A lazy Sunday prompted a quick review of the The Hindu newspaper's new look. But on page 19 of today's Bengaluru edition, there is a broken headline. Australia's spinners get a...? says the headline about the visiting Aussies tour against India A. The Chennai edition accessed online had a different headline for the same story: Shreyas leads India-A reply. It has to be assumed that someone tried to add a different headline based on the story's intro and forgot to adjust the space or recheck the proof.  The Sunday edition seems to have some interesting content to look at. While the body text font, Publico, looks OK, the Guardian Sans font used for the briefs looks too small for the eye. The brief news looks a tad too smaller compared to the body font on other stories. May be it is an individual opinion.  I will post a review of the content later. So far the weekend content does not look that impressive. 

The barbaric act of Hartal was enacted by Marxist-led political parties in my home state of Kerala , in the name of protest against high food prices. The Word MVPs site I frequent regularly has an interesting and long article on Conditional Cross-Reference Labels for Numbered Headings , while PowerPoint earned some flak from the US military. Alternet ran an excellent article on the deleterious impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment and Bangalore daily Deccan Herald published a dubious article supporting GE crops. It was refreshing to read about the rise of new generation of British poets (I am currently reading poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy's poems anyway) and an interview with well-known science fiction author Ray Bradbury , who has never been to college. Noted defence analyst K Subramanyam writes on Communication intelligence in the backdrop of the phone tapping allegations by opposition politicians in India.

Cops relax timings for cafes, eateries , said a headline in one of the Bangalore newspapers. At first, I did not bother about the headline. A little later I wondered what exactly is the difference betweeen a cafe and an eatery. The Oxford Dictionary I have says that a cafe is a small restaurant selling light meals and drinks. In North American English, it also means a bar or nightclub. Eatery, on the other hand, is an informal expression for "a restaurant or cafe." So, why did the newspaper use this headline? The news report has another word " eating houses". A little research did not show any discerning difference between the two words. Which means this is bad sub-editing. The only explanation for the error is the need to fill the 'white space' for the two-line heading. It is a fact that the quality of English in Indian newspapers are really pathetic. While it's not my case that newspapers should follow Strunk and White, it is really sad to see lack of...