Stick that carrot!

Idiots rule. No I’m not talking about the Republicans or the idiots who vote for them, but the idiots who write for the media. There are few more malicious manglers of the English tongue than the pompous prattlers of the press. These are the people whose pretentious malapropisms drive real words into oblivion in the way bad money drives good money off the market.

I’ve wasted enough time complaining about people who insist that “negatively impacted” sounds better than “hurt” and who can’t tell the difference between affect and effect. Genital herpes is more treatable than newspeak addiction and I give up. The carrot and stick metaphor however is so widely misused that I have to say something before I’m forced to raid CNN headquarters with a basket full of lubricated carrots.

Years ago, a popular subject in political and other cartoons was the donkey cart driver who held a carrot from a string at the end of a stick so that the donkey, in trying to get at it, would move steadily forward. As a metaphor for a reward that cannot be reached or a ploy to dupe the ignorant, it served many a cartoonist well. That was back when impacts were collisions and people knew the difference between cars and trucks.

A CNN headline today shouts “Carrot-stick' deal agreed on Iran.” Ignoring the superiority of with or for to on, I’ll get straight to the point of the stick: The stick is not to punish the donkey. It’s not an alternative to the reward; it’s a method to deny the reward even if the donkey tries to take the carrot by moving forward. Thus the headline describes exactly the opposite of what the CNN morons are trying to say.

It’s bad enough that we’ve sold the American dream by following a tax-cut carrot on a stick, but I would rather learn Spanish than endure much more of CNN’s journalistic gibberish.