https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/06/the-grasshopper-elite-and-its-enemy/
Many publications provide their writers with “style sheets,” a list of dos and don’ts with respect to things like diction, punctuation, grammar, and linguistic etiquette. My personal list of “dos” includes the Oxford comma (apples, oranges, and pears: that last comma is requisite) and, in most cases, using the singular masculine pronoun after collective nouns like “everyone” and “someone” (e.g., “Everyone likes to have his [not ‘their’] own way”).
Style sheet prescriptions (and proscriptions) can be more elaborate, and can affect substantive as well as stylistic matters. Over the last year or so, I have noticed an innovation, at once stylistic and substantive, that has taken root throughout the regime media. It is this: whenever referring to Donald Trump and the 2020 presidential election, be sure to insert editorial comments to the effect that any concerns about the fairness of that election are “baseless” or the result of “lies.”
I do not remember when I first noticed these little injections of partisan squid ink, but by now they are ubiquitous in the anti-Trump fraternity. Just one example: in a column Saturday about Donald Trump’s weekend rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the writer claimed Trump “spent much of his speech focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election” (emphasis added).
To the writing teachers out there, let me ask: Would that sentence have been better—less obviously partisan, hence more persuasive—had the word “baseless” been omitted?
Or how about this bit from later on in the piece: “Trump spent much of his speech touting the accomplishments of his term as president . . . and promoting the lie that the 2020 election was ‘rigged and stolen’” (again, emphasis added). What do you think?
Or how about this: Trump was in Wisconsin “ostensibly” to stump for Tim Michels, the person Trump backs for Tuesday’s GOP gubernatorial primary, but he devoted much of his speech “focusing on his baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.”
This last sentence offers connoisseurs of cant not one but two morsels to chew on.
