I Was Reading the Globe…
Posted on October 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »
…and its coverage of the Yankees’ victory last night (whoo! whew!)—something about the Glove having to cover a Yankees’ World Series win makes me feel good about the world—when I came across a particularly odd way to describe a home run by Hideki Matsui.
Two innings later came the splashes of beer in the right-field stands, the liquids arcing over the fans grateful to receive yet another baseball into the place where popups become homers.
And I thought, wait a minute! Could it be? Dare I hope?
Only one person could torture the language like that.
So I checked out the byline and it was!
Only Amalie Benjamin could write so weirdly badly—by which I mean not just badly, but badly in a weird, hard-to-explain-why-it’s-so-bad-but-still-it-makes-you-wince kind of way.
I should have realized it was she before, when she wrote of Mark Teixeira’s monster home run to right-center field,
And the life continued, as the ball off Teixeira’s bat flew out to open the next inning, on the second offering from Martinez.
As the ball off Teixeira’s bat flew?
14 Responses
10/30/2009 9:44 am
Hi Richard,
If you’ve been reading the Globe recently I thought you might have commented on this:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2009/10/28/allston_shouldnt_suffer_on_harvards_account/
It would be interesting to know what you and your readers think about it.
10/30/2009 10:07 am
The Globe writer’s description of the Matsui homer is so lusciuosly fluid-filled I can’t help but think she has a career ahead of her in soft-porn romance novels.
10/30/2009 10:38 am
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. That is, why do you keep inflicting her prose on yourself? Wrong form of self-abuse, eh?
10/30/2009 12:20 pm
Richard, if you’re going to post after Yankees victories, i think you owe it to the Red Sox fans in your readership to also post after their losses (if they have anymore this season, that is).
10/30/2009 1:15 pm
To Anon 10:38 - you either need to eat your Wheaties or take your meds. You’re overthinking.
10/30/2009 3:10 pm
My charitable thought has been for some time that she may be a non-native speaker of English. That kind of weirdness is often the result of uncertainty with the language. But it seems that she was born in Newton, Massachusetts. That doesn’t mean that English is her native language, but it does suggest that she has been educated in America from the outset. The idea of the ball “flying” off the bat is something that might well be said in a European language other than English. The other sentence is even more weird, though.
Given what I now know about her birthplace, my revised view of the mysterious Amalie Benjamin case is that she’s simpy trying too hard to write something stylish. And alas, it just doesn’t work. Someone needs to tell her that simplicity is always the best strategy.
Or, indeed, she could turn to writing soft porn.
10/30/2009 3:17 pm
Give it a rest, Richard! If it isn’t A. Benjamin, it’s D. Faust. If it isn’t D. Faust, it’s L. Summers. Or D. Ortiz. It seems all too easy to push your buttons for the predictable response!
10/30/2009 3:57 pm
Hello?!? It’s clear that Richard has the hots for Amalie. This is classic 6th-grade boy behavior. He teases to cover the lust.
10/30/2009 6:23 pm
What writer would ever marry or even date an editor? Wouldn’t that be typical sadist/masochist behavior? I think so… Rich, maybe you shouldn’t “fly off the handle”. [squeaky voice] Help me! Help me!
Oh come on, it’s halloween. Boo!
10/30/2009 9:03 pm
She was an English major, too, I’m afraid. I think Judith’s final theory is right: she’s just trying too hard. I think she’s aiming for the kind of colorful writing that Bud Collins is known for. In this case, in a number of ways, less is more!
10/31/2009 9:31 am
Mexican D V, you will enjoy this:
http://www.survivinggrady.com/2009/05/desperately-seeking-amalie.html
11/1/2024 9:52 pm
You have to admire the creativity of Harvard’s leadership…
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529848
We should soon expect an editorial in Bloomberg on how Harvard stands aside from other Universities in raising money for current expenditures.
“Can’t balance the budget. Can you give me some?”
11/4/2024 2:10 pm
Come off it Richard, and you too Judith; you want all beat writers to write like hacks so you can display your superiority. Fact is, the turn of a phrase makes these stories far more interesting than the mere recitation of the who, what and where of each pitch.
12/8/2024 4:28 pm
Cut the crap, Richard (and Judith). In a business that requires 162 or more main pieces, many of which are deadline-driven submissions no more than 2 hours after an 8th or 9th inning reversal of the entire story line, she captures the salient facts and the mood of nearly every game. Great leads and closes, writing during an age in which most of the audience not only knows what happened, but had watched or listened to the same event.
Sometimes she appears to try too hard to make each piece stand out. But she is clearly superior to most of the other hacks writing daily baseball stories.
Listen Richard, not all us can be perfect like you, as the New Yorker stated about your latest book:
“Bradley’s prosaic style and his penchant for statistics sometimes test the reader’s patience….”
Maybe those in glass houses need to throw fewer stones….