Grammar Moses: Is 'media' plural or not?
As a news medium today, we often write about the news media.
Carl Ball wrote me a question about that: "In the Daily Herald's editorial entitled "A foreboding report," published on Easter Sunday, the penultimate paragraph is a single sentence: 'The news media is under an assault that is dangerous to our liberty.' If 'media' is the plural of 'medium,' shouldn't the verb be 'are' instead of 'is?' I wouldn't say, 'The dogs is barking' or 'The people is talking.'"
What it boils down to, Carl, is whether "media" should take a singular or plural verb. As I often say, it depends.
If you're running down the types of "news" media - newspapers, magazines, television, bloggers, Facebook pundits, your aunt when she tattles on a neighbor from the rooftop of your apartment building - in describing a variety of disparate voices or conveyances of news, then you'd treat "media" as a plural of "medium" and hook it up with a plural verb form.
For example: "Mom! The media are at the door. They want to know why Dad embezzled all that money from work to feed your American Girl habit."
The entire news industry isn't at your door. You can count the number of folks on the front stoop. The print journalists are easy to spot in our frumpy "Spotlight" costumes, and you can spot a TV person a mile away.
In the case of "The news media is under an assault that is dangerous to our liberty," we treated "media" as a mass noun. The "media" in this case is a collective.
A few examples of mass nouns are "knowledge," "furniture" and "weather."
These are all nouns that can't be counted. In addition to not taking a plural verb, they don't take an indefinite article (a or an.)
Such uncountable or mass nouns are used in the singular, so you'd apply a singular verb.
Illicit captioning
David Harding of Warrenville forwarded a web summary of a story in a competing publication on the impending retirement of Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer.
It read, in part: "The news of Urban Meyer's pending retirement will illicit strong reactions around college football."
My reaction is: "Good, OSU has won enough. Give my Illini a fighting chance."
But that's not David's point.
"Elicit" is a verb meaning to draw out. "Illicit" is an adjective describing something that is forbidden by rules, law or custom: Think illicit drugs, illicit photos, illicit Big Ten championships.
A spell-checker won't catch that homophone problem, so you need to be on the ball.
Pareidolia redux
A few columns ago I wrote about pareidolia, the tendency to see meaningful images in random things, such as a barking dog in a cloud or the visage of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.
I enjoy a little pareidolia as much as the next guy and was tickled when Hannah Anderson, a manager at Martel's Pizza in downstate Murphysboro, sent her mom a photo of something she encountered while doing prep work for the day. Her mom, Stefanie Anderson, manages our central and southern Illinois newspapers.
Take a look at the photo and tell me what you see. Just a delicious, juicy green pepper?
Where's your imagination?
I immediately saw a smiley face, as did most people with whom I shared the photo on Facebook.
Extra credit goes to my astute childhood pal Scott Schuster, who saw something else.
Take another look.
"Is that the Batman logo above the smiley face?" he asked.
Write - and look - carefully!
• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.