On Fox News and Down the Toilet
January 12, 2010
The Washington Post’s lead story in Style today quotes Republican strategist Todd Harris as noting that Sarah Palin’s new gig on Fox will give her “a platform she can use to stay relevant, to stay in the public eye and to flush out some of her policy positions.”
When I read that I thought for a moment this was another instance where the Post’s recent lack of attention to copy editing was coming into play. But the quote is repeated twice in the hard copy of the paper — both in the body of the piece and as a takeout quote – and so my next thought was the quote was accurate and that perhaps it was a case of the speaker misspeaking. Or miss-thinking. Didn’t Harris mean to say “flesh” rather than “flush”?
To “flesh out” would mean to articulate more fully, to detail or delineate. To “flush out” is a hunting term meaning to force an animal to stop hiding (visions here of that poor turkey being slaughtered in the background as Palin was being interviewed in the foreground). Or maybe Harris didn’t misspeak. Maybe he did mean exactly what he said — to flush out as in to clean out a system with a flow of water. Was Harris implying that Palin’s policy positions needed an enema?
This misstatement supports what I already feared about the dismal state of literacy. People don’t read, so instead they repeat what they think they heard. This is the reason people write “I should of” when they mean “I should’ve,” and worry about a friend’s prostrate cancer when in fact, the gland contains no “r.” And surely if the former President had ever read the word “nu-cle-ar,” he would have been able to pronounce it correctly.
~Michelle