I firmly sit in the camp that holds that the baggy-pants-mean-the-end-of-civilization meme ranks up there with the Ozzy-bites-off-bat’s-heads meme: It’s prima facie ridiculous. While Ozzy may have bitten the head off a bat, I’ve read it was a misunderstanding, or somesuch. While really baggy pants may lower the wearer’s IQ in my mind, I count it as free expression. After all, no laws bar people from dressing like clowns.

Given those views, a chuckle rumbled through my belly to see the issue (baggy pants, not Ozzy) on the front page of today’s Detroit Free Press, let alone as the centerpiece.

Then I read the lede:

Flint residents now have to watch their butts because Police Chief David Dicks is on the lookout.

Um, watch your butts ’cause Dicks is coming? Cute. Maybe a copy editor should have told them. Maybe it was intentional. If it’s the former, they’re fools for not realizing how awful and suggestive the lede is. If it’s the latter, I’d call it a lame attempt at trying to be hip with the lingo, as the kids might say. Either way, on reading that, I would have groaned and had the reporter change it.

And to think that yesterday I spurred a minor controversy in our Features department by flagging a variation of the phrase “get it up” in a story. The head of our department nixed it, replacing it with a parenthetical euphemism. Here’s the original, with apologies to Sue (I really liked the original quote).

(Author Jim) Harrison is predictably blunt. “I had a professor from U-M ask me why (Thomas) McGuane and Richard Ford and I all went to Michigan State,” he says. “I said it was easier, you had more time to read literature and write. And also, I told him, ‘You guys haven’t gotten it up since Arthur Miller in the ’40s, so just ease up, you know?’ ” He laughs.

Business Week has a feature up now on MIndworks Global Media, the company outside of New Delhi doing copy editing for the Orange County Register and Miami Herald. The headline: Company officials say they can do the job for 35-40 percent cheaper than I can.

Ouch.

(Thanks to Romenesko for the link.)

Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society, rebuts “In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors,” by Lawrence Downes, which I wrote about here. Downes’ piece appeared in The New York Times.

Late update: Maybe copy editors are dying after all — at least in Orange County.

I’m in the middle of Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston, and it’s as gripping and scary as a horror novel. Call it economic-horror nonfiction.

Johnston goes into a lot of detail about the commodification of labor, and how that trend works through a kind of outsourcing osmosis. To break it down to Duplos: Labor, including that done in front of a computer screen, will naturally move from high-cost countries (e.g., the U.S.) to low-cost countries like China and India. That process amounts to a third Industrial Revolution.

Here’s a scary passage:

“The first two jobs revolutions had in common one trait — people of average or even below-average intelligence could do many of the jobs with no more than a high school education. Will that be true in the digital, high tech third wave? And if it is not, what will be the consequences of living in a society where the brightest and hardest working are rewarded and almost everyone else is reduced to servant-level jobs and wages?”

Ponder that.

I generally consider myself a smart guy. I thought of copy editing as a safe career choice for a long while. Specialized knowledge of an area is critical to what I do. But then, a lot of what I do at work involves Googling this fact or that fact. As much as I hate to admit, that could be done from Bangalore. Is there value in a copy editor living and working where the copy originates? I’d like to think so.

But then, a friend caught up in the recent McClatchy layoffs tells me her job is going to India. She’s a page designer, but if a media company can outsource design positions, copy editing isn’t far behind.

I don’t want to be “reduced to servant-level jobs and wages,” but what happens when what I do evaporates?

Long live the copy editors!

In The New York Times, a elegy for my profession.

“… In that world of the perpetual present tense — post it now, fix it later, update constantly — old-time, persnickety editing may be a luxury in which only a few large news operations will indulge. It will be an artisanal product, like monastery honey and wooden yachts.”

On the Politico’s obit for Charlton Heston: Guns and Moses. I’m sure that stroke of genius felt like a revelation from Mount Sinai. As a copy editor, I wish a) I had come up with it, and b) I worked for an organization that would allow such snark to shine through.

David Simon, of “The Wire” fame, stands on the Huffington Post soap box and tells the media: You’re punked!

I forgot to post a link to this earlier. It’s a photo gallery I edited the words for that marks the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit riots. Click through. The pictures border on the surreal, knowing that this actually happened - here, in our beloved “D.”

“Mainstream media,” or the “MSM” for shorthand, falls into the retronym category. Once, we had only the media, which morphed into the “mass media” as niche mediums multiplied. Then, the niche mediums felt the need for a weighty counterbalance and the “MSM,” in all its apparent wickedness, was born.

I’m also guilty of using the term on occasion, but it gets worn out quickly. Let’s take a closer, albeit reasoned, look.

From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed.:

Mainstream, n., adj., a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence.

Media, n., a medium of cultivation, conveyance or expression.

Apply the former to the latter, and a combined definition sounds something like: a prevailing method of expression. By the book, it is the mode in which the largest percentage of the population experiences news and events. That’s a start, but that definition ranges far from what those using the term often mean. It disparages, and its beauty lies in the fact that it can disparage from right or left of the political spectrum.

On the left, it connotes rebelliousness. Liberal users of the word seem to link the MSM with the spectre of The Man. See? I’m just this little blogger poking a stick in the eye of the behemoth establishment machine.

On the right, it connotes strict contempt. Conservative users tend to link the MSM to elitist rhetoric as in, You won’t read this in the MSM. The MSM covers up good news from Iraq; The MSM treacherously exposes state secrets in the war on terrorism; et al.

Both sides employ MSM to their own reactionary ends. It’s a useful straw dog. While its utility makes it an appealing term, it paradoxically empties it of its original useful meaning. The term instead conveys a point its user desperately wants to make: I’m on your side. And, if I’m on your side, the corollary must be true: You’re on my side. It acts as a rhetorical in-joke.

Remember that whenever a speaker or writer lazily throws out the term or its too-cool-for-school acronym. Their true meaning likely goes something like this: I’ve picked my side, have you?

Remember also that dividing is a shortcut to conquering.

One the media, from the other side of the brightly beaming headlights. Could it be that pack journalism not only debases the subjects, but also the audience?

This just in, Mark Cuban doesn’t seem to use basic grammar and spelling. Let’s get the skinny from his grade-school teacher…