Beware of Absolutes

WORLD SERIOUS -- Philadelphia baseball fans were thrilled when Ray Halladay pitched a post-season no-hitter. And rightly so. And the local TV people carried on and on that it was only the second such in baseball history. They repeatedly told viewers that it was the first post-season no-hitter in more than 50 years, a wonderful achievement. Indeed so. But if true, who was the other guy who threw the post-season no-hitter?

NEVER ASSUME --- Not all viewers and readers are avid sports fans, who would remember that the other guy was Don Larsen, who pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. This is not to take anything away from Halladay's triumph, but a no-hitter (one man got on base by a walk) in a division playoff game is not the same as pitching a perfect game (no runs, no hits, no errors, no one on base) during  a World Series championship game.

MORAL -- If you write about something that is "only the second" or write "for the first time in  fifty years," you owe it to readers to tell them who or what was first.

SAIL ON -- The New York Times got caught in a similar trap when it reported that Sir Francis Chichester was the first to sail around the world alone. He wasn't; Sir Francis was the first to circumnavigate the globe following the same route as the early clipper ships. The Times correction noted that Joshua Slocum was credited with being the first to sail around the world singlehandedly.

SOUP SONG -- A Campbell's commercial proclaimed that the company's soups have "farm-grown ingredients." True enough. Who would buy food from  a test tube?

GLEANINGS of an Itinerant Speller -- A flier from candidate Rand Paul protests that the U.S. "has lost control of it's borders and it's national security." Sorry, Dr. Paul. The possessive form is "its," as in "his" or "hers." Sticking in an apostrophe indicates something is missing; in this case, the letter i.  The contracted form is from the set "it is."

BORDER ISSUES -- Candidate Paul wants the U.S. to seal its borders to keep out illegal immigrants. Is the country really overrun with Canadians? The Samurai Rim Man warns that they are so much harder to detect, since they look like us, they talk like us, and they even have similar names. They blend. As examples, consider the following names, all of Canadians who have taken jobs away from Amurkins: Michael J. Fox, Robert McNeil, Lorne Greene (star of "Gunsmoke"), John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Anka, Pamela Anderson, Dan Ackroyd, Mort Sahl, Art Linkletter, Mike Myers, Justin Bieber and -- perhaps the most insidious of all -- William Shatner, captain of the starship Enterprise. And all those hockey players ...

QUOTATIONS FROM THE RIM -- "Rudeness should be a strategy, not a way of life."