Sexist Terminology Back in Vogue
…or maybe it never left.
WFSB recently referred to a brawl between six women as a cat fight. The title of the piece: ”
Police: Karaoke Argument Lead To Cat Fight.”
Of course, the weakening of standards for newspapers and television news is simply not news. Just today on the front page of the Courant site, the “newspaper” posted an advertisement posing as a news article.
Without diminishing your point about sexist usage, I lament that the WFSB headline contains one of my language-abuse pet peeves — the use of “lead” as the past-tense form of the verb “to lead”. “Lead” the metal sounds like it, but the past-tense form of the verb is “led” (as in Zeppelin).
This error has been popping up continually of late.
As a former copy editor/layout guy, I can’t help wondering if this isn’t due in part to the Web’s liberation of headlines from the constraints of newspaper column widths. When struggling to copyfit a single column headine (especially), choosing any word with extra letters, even if its usage was correct, was an extravagance we could ill afford.
I don’t think it diminishes the point at all. There’s all around sloppy work being done in the industry these days.