There are times when I read a newspaper or magazine article and I think that the author -- regardless of what the byline says -- is Hyman Kaplan.
Kaplan is author Leo Rosten’s hilariously inept immigrant continually undoing the tangled and perplex usages of the English language.
Kaplanisms appear to be particularly common on the airwaves. I recall a newscast on a local radio station which triumphantly announced that a new space rocket had just been “jettisoned into the sky.” Broadcasters don’t care what the words mean as long as they make the right sounds.

This audio malady causes such pain that I involuntarily switch off the radio in mid newscast when its effects strikes me. As a result, I’m never sure if the accused was convicted or found innocent.
My pique at the imprecise and mistaken use of written language subsides when I think of the Kaplanisms I have committed in a large chunk of a lifetime writing for newspapers.
Reporting on the results of a city council session in the Adirondacks, I meant to write that, “The city council voted to require all able bodied persons now on welfare to work a minimum of 20 hours a week on public works projects.”
Unfortunately, in writing that sentence I typed a “t” instead of a “w” in the word “now.” I was surprised when the story appeared in the paper and no working citizens wrote objections about being forced to spend a good part of their week laboring for the local government.
That seems to conform a recent survey which found that a large percentage of the population is more willing to believe what it reads than what it has experienced first hand.
That may be because the media usually portrays journalists as crime solvers, dogged, incorruptible seekers of truth and heroic exposers of malfeasance by high government officials. Never have I seen one portrayed as a comic, a role they sometimes inadvertently play. Never, for instance, have I seen a film showing a reporter accidentally plunging his hand into three-foot high, uncut 100th anniversary cake at a formal dinner as one Buffalo reporter did.
Nor in the movies have I ever encountered the following conversation I overheard in which a reporter took an engagement announcement from the mother of the young woman involved:
“The wedding will be in Denver,” the would-be bride’s mother solemnly announced.
The reporter began typing, then stopped and looked up impatiently at the woman. “Yes, but what city in Denver?”
Sometimes reporters and their editors are embarrassed by what appears in print. I remember a brief story written by a woman reporter I worked with in New Haven. It was the type of piece a leading actress would never write in the movies or on television.
The reporter was asked to correct an error in a story about a local man who had become ill after being bitten by an insect while on an African safari.
Thousands of readers the next morning read the following complete story:
“Yesterday’s edition incorrectly stated that John Mitchell has returned to his home on Orange Avenue. Mitchell, who was bitten by a dragon, is recovering in New Haven Hospital.”
####

Joseph P. Ritz is an author, playwright and retired reporter who worked for a total of 30 years on the Buffalo Courier-Express and Buffalo News. His play, Trappists, will open April 6 in Manhattan.