Dayhoff Soundtrack: The TSA can't control how you talk

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The TSA can't control how you talk

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2010/11/the_tsa_cant_control_how_you_talk.html

Perhaps you have reflected while passing through airports, as I have many times over the past several years: Here are federal employees with wages and benefits whose job is to move a plastic dishpan from one end of a table to the other.

It is all part of the rich absurdity of contemporary air travel. First, you are fleeced by the airlines, which cannot apparently make a go of their business without nickel-and-diming the customers. Pay for a seat that has about as much space as you would have had in the hold of a ship on the Middle Passage, unless you pay more for some room. Pay for your bag. Pay more for an extra bag. Ryanair considered installing pay toilets on its planes, an idea whose time is surely coming... http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2010/11/the_tsa_cant_control_how_you_talk.html

John McIntyre, mild-mannered editor for a great metropolitan newspaper, has fussed over writers’ work, to sporadic expressions of gratitude, for thirty years. He is The Sun’s night content production manager and former head of its copy desk. He also teaches editing at Loyola University Maryland. A former president of the American Copy Editors Society, a native of Kentucky, a graduate of Michigan State and Syracuse, and a moderate prescriptivist, he writes about language, journalism, and arbitrarily chosen topics. If you are inspired by a spirit of contradiction, comment on the posts or write to him atjohn.mcintyre@baltsun.com.

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