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.”
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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.

It’s impossible to play the violin without supernatural assistance.
I learned the truth of that a long time ago when I was seven.
I don’t know what evil Mr. Dix, my violin instructor, had done to earn the task of teaching me the instrument. I like to think he had played first violin with a great orchestra and lost his job for putting too much rosin on his bow strings at a time the management was cutting expenses and that he had fallen in love with a young woman while hitch-hiking on his way to find a job in Cincinnati and so remained in our city.
Whatever wrong he had done, he looked like he needed a meal and his frayed collar and sleeve ends showed that he needed a new shirt. Unfortunately, he was also a serious lover of music.
Pianists only have to hit the correct a key to get the right note. No one can play the violin without signing a pact with the devil.
It defies the laws of physics for a human to press his finger on a taut string in exactly the right place two times in a row while holding a hollow wooden box with his chin and, with his other hand, drawing part of a horse’s tail across the string. Not only that, but the string on which the tail is being rubbed must be the right one out of four possible choices. If that isn’t difficult enough, consider this: the bow must not touch the other strings. It cannot be done by a human. It requires the aid of supernatural power, whether from the devil, or from God.
Catholic school kids were compelled to ask a lot of God, mostly through the Virgin Mother and enough saints to triple the population density of California, a place which is not their natural habitat. The nuns told us of angels who came down from heaven and helped boys and girls who prayed for help with their homework -- some even did some of the work for them. I prayed for help a lot. Why study or practice when you can get an angel to do it for you?
I was too scared of authority to pray to God directly to help me find E flat, or to send down one of His angels who could do it. You didn’t want to upset someone who could send you directly to hell with trivial matters. I prayed to the fourteen saints or so who had the reputation of being the top agents, the ones who could bypass all the secretaries and personal assistants and get though to God at his private, unlisted number.
Not even St. Jude, the patron of the impossible, could help. What came out of my violin sounded like a cat with its tail caught under a rocker. It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Dix had so many pupils he could afford to lose one. After six weeks of lessons, he still wore frayed shirts and looked like he was on a two week fast. But starvation was preferable to listening to me make the scraping sounds of a rusty hinge. A cow rubbing against a barbed wire fence made more melody.
He told my parents the task was hopeless and was never seen again.
But my mother didn’t give up. When I was in sixth grade she bought a small marimba with her Avon money and brought it in the house saying I was to learn to play it.
“We let you choose the violin. Now I’m going to choose what you’re going to play.”
It was useless to protest that I hadn’t chosen the violin.
I had never seen a marimba, which is like a xylophone with long tubes hanging down from it. The ones they use mostly in orchestras which play Latin American music have tubes of polished metal. Mine had cardboard tubes like the ones inside a roll of paper towels, except they were painted silver and had a metal cap on one end.
She choose the marimba for me because the man in the apartment next to her when she was young had played the instrument and she had been fascinated watching him hold several mallets in each hand and pound out music.
I never got to the several mallets in each hand phase. But at least when I hit a wooden bar that had “E-” engraved on it, I got “E-.”

As I hear daily reports of more killings in Iraq, either of American troops or civilians, something I’ve often heard and once accepted as wise and true runs in my head like a clip from an old movie which defies erasing.
The statement is: “Those who don’t know history are likely to repeat it.”
It’s something that history teachers and writers are apt to say to get people to pay attention to the past. Paying attention to the past is well and good. The past is full of exciting, bloody, heroic and and fascinating events, many of which affect our lives today. I have always found history interesting and useful and in a grim way way entertaining and griping.
But when one looks at Northern Ireland, or Iraq or any place, including the U.S., where the past is used as a reason for killing and violence, one could just as easily say those who dwell on history are apt to repeat it.
History can easily become a matter of mutual accusation and recrimination, an infinite regress of cruelty and oppression, unless forgetfulness or forgiveness intervenes Vengeance so often portrayed as wholesome and admirable in our literature, our movies and television shows, leds to more vengeance and so the killing goes on and one and there is no stopping.
That is one of the meanings of history.

THE details of my adoption are sketchy and come from a very unreliable source — my foster mother.
She herself was unable to have children. But her husband was determined to override God’s better judgment. I think also each was looking for an ally in their many violent quarrels.
We lived in a world of make believe. They pretended I was their natural child. I pretended to be unaware I wasn’t their son.
I was given away by my mother only a few days after my birth, but my awareness that the unhappy, quarreling couple I knew as “father” and “mother” weren’t my real parents, though unspoken, lingered in a corner of my mind as long as I can remember. And then there were hints about my status in the small family throughout my early life.
If my foster mother is to be believed, her husband, Joseph E. Ritz, had gone alone to St. Francis Hospital in search of a son. On learning he was Catholic, married and had a job, hospital authorities gave me to him and his wife. They apparently believed that was sufficient to assure my future well being physically and spiritually.
“They said at the hospital that if we didn’t take you then, it would be harder for us to adopt once an agency got involved,” my foster mother told me when I at last confronted her with my unwavering belief I was not her natural son. I was 18 and had finished high school six months earlier.
“A banker and his wife, very wealthy people, wanted you very bad, but they wouldn’t let them adopt you because they weren’t Catholic.”
Being raised by a wealthy Protestant couple wouldn’t have been that bad, I thought.
My natural mother was said to be Irish-American, blue-eyed, dark-haired, pretty and 26 at the time I was born. She was the sister of not one, but two priests, “one so high up in the church it would kill him if he knew of your existence.” At the time of my birth, she was said to be working as a housekeeper at the rectory where her brother was pastor. It was not a place where an illegitimate child could be raised. I would have been living evidence that a significant mortal sin had been committed by the sister of priests who preached chastity before marriage.
I was told my mother sometimes came to a park to see me when I was being wheeled in carriage. It fits the image I have of her. I do not remember her.
You can read more at my web site: jritz.net