writinginthewild.com

The recent flap over errors in the APA Style manual has pushed me into pulling a Seinfeld and coining a new term: Cubicle Sourcing. You heard it here first, the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Cubicle Sourcing is the opposite of Crowd Sourcing, of course.

Crowd Sourcing, Wikipedia reminds us, is “a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Cubicle Sourcing, then, is my neologism for taking a task that ought be done by a community, and assigning it to a team of isolated copywriters and editors.

APA, in other words, did everything backwards; they used Cubicle Sourcing, and then when the text was released, incorporated the errors that were inevitably found in a series of errata and, in the end, another printing. They should have put the 5th edition up on the web and issued a call to their community of users for corrections, updates and clarifications.

In-house editors can watch for inconsistencies, moderate disputes, and so on. All of the major style manuals should be converted to Wikis edited by communities of users. Every two or three years– more often if times warrant– they could produce a by-demand print version. The old, private property/author model– Cubicle Sourcing– is inflexible, too slow to change, and prone to error.

The recent protests over fee increases in California’s higher education system are worth watching and worrying over for a lot of reasons, as a recent post on “Education is a Right” makes clear. “If California has taught us anything,” writers Greogory Candenna, “it is that the amount of fee hikes states and regents will impose on students to mitigate budget shortfalls is limitless.”

He’s not exaggerating. Fee increases have tripled the cost of college in California over the last decade. These are Reagan’s birds come home to roost in every sense. As Governor of California Reagan made his disdain of student protesters all too clear. The anti-war movement convinced Conservatives that too much education– like too much government– is a dangerous.

More important was the Conservative’s so-called New Federalism. which attempted to destroy the New Deal, and hamstring the federal government, by shifting power to the states. This meant, among other things, that there would no longer be a coherent national plan for higher education. Bush’s wildly irresponsible fiscal policies put the icing on the cake. It’ll take years to clean up the mess.

The New Oxford American dictionary has a knack for making astute choices for their word of the year, perhaps because, at some level, they are outsiders. This year they’ve picked “unfriend” as their top pick; their list includes several other technology words. I am not sure about ‘hashtag’ (I don’t tweet) but I think ‘sexting’ and ‘zombie bank’ are wonderfully evocative of our current zeitgeist.

I think the list of Obama words (Obamanoics, etc.) is banal; this started with Reagan and it no longer signifies. The list of political words is telling (including ‘zombie bank’) and more telling still is the wacky right-wing comments debate. Even here, in the most conservative and traditional of institutions, they found a liberal bias. Their beef lies in the choice of “teabagger” and “birther.”

What’s fascinating is that these writers have almost no sense of qualitative (much less quantitative) research. If these words are picked, the commenters imply, it has to be politics, and if they are picking only words that refer to the right wing, then it must be evidence of bias. The lexicographers must be ignoring left wing slang, perhaps because they would find it embarrassing.

These commenters are not embarrassed about their prejudices. “So much for scholarship,” Keith Smith, says, “Teabagger” is a slang sexual term perpetuated by openly gay correspondent Anderson Cooper of CNN.” Of course, as another writer noted, this term was first widely used by Fox News and other right wing writers, apparently unaware of the sexual connotation. That’s what was so funny.