Archive for the ‘Rants’ tag
Banned for Life: “Cat’s Meow”
I created my first blog in 1996 — Banned for Life, devoted to removing annoying cliches from the rhetorical toolboxes of the nation’s newspeople. One of my motivations: Every time CNN or ABC News or the New York Times parachuted one of their star journalists into my hometown, there’d always be a grating reference to how things are “playing in Peoria.” I just wanted to smack ’em.
I thought of Banned for Life when I happened upon this list of headlines on Caterpillar-related stories at Forbes.com. Not one but two “Cat’s Meow” headlines in the past six months. Ugh. You kids got a month to put the magazine out and that’s the best you can come up with? Even at the daily fish-wrap factory where I work, we check the archives to see how many times our attempts at cleverness have been published before.
OK, I’ll get back to blogging about tractors now. Just had to get this one out of my system. I hate cliches with the fires of a thousand suns.