Her keyboard is cleansed and slate cleared for 2002

  • Ellen Goodman / Boston Globe columnist
  • Thursday, December 27, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

BOSTON — As a certified member of the clean slate club, I traditionally end the year by purging my conscience of the error of my column ways. I offer my annual, apoplectic and apologetic media culpas.

Mind you I am not as culpable as the ink-stained wretch at Fortune magazine who named Enron one of the 10 stocks to buy for the long haul. For that matter, I didn’t say Rudy Giuliani would go down in history as a loser, or that George Bush would never look presidential or that we were through forever with nation-building. You get the idea.

However, with the world in chaos, it is no time to give up on tradition. I want to greet the new year as a stand-up gal. So I stand corrected.

Let me begin in a patriotic frame of mind. In a column, I promoted "America the Beautiful" over the "Star-Spangled Unsingable" as a national anthem because the spangles were too hard on the esophagus. Well, as many an anatomically correct reader informed me, you don’t use the esophagus when you sing. A Boulder, Colo., reader put it gently, "When you sing, the air comes through the trachea. The only time air comes through the esophagus is when you burp. I’d hate to think what the national anthem would sound like that way."

If that error was hard to, um, stomach, this one was a tiny pox on my keyboard. In a column on bioterrorism, I said smallpox had "the dubious honor of being the first biological weapon," when the Brits used it on Indians in the 18th century. Well, not so fast or not so first. My favorite contender for "first": In 1346, the Tatars catapulted plague-infested bodies into the walled city of Kaffa. Ah, yes, the march of progress.

While we are war-footing, I also said that Eleanor Roosevelt had gone to England during the Blitz. Well, I wasn’t blitzed with complaints, but a few elders wanted to set the record straight. The Blitz was the name for the nighttime air raids that lasted from 1940 to 1941. The redoubtable ER visited wartime London in 1942.

I’d apologize for that SNAFU except that snafu also got snafued. I described that World War II acronym as "situation normal, all fouled up." I was accused of being far too genteel — a first for this column — by dozens of GIs who remembered using another "F" word. Well, my dictionary — a family friendly book, gives both F words, but I’ll go with the guys.

You think being called genteel was a shock, I was also taken to task this year for being politically incorrect. A woman wrote that I dissed her religion when I didn’t use a capital letter. From now on, it’s Pagan.

That was nothing compared to the complaint that I wasn’t fair to pit bulls. An owner fumed: "It angers me to see that stereotype perpetuated by a lazy know-nothing writer who would invoke these poor mistreated creatures as avatars of evil." I apologize, honestly. Some of my best friends are pit bulls and I will never do it again as long as you keep that "poor mistreated creature" away from me.

Speaking of poor misguided creatures, in writing about polygamist Tom Green and his crop of young wives, I criticized Utah, admonishing the state to raise the age of marriage from a teeny-bopper 14. Oops, the Legislature was one step of ahead of me. They’d already ruled that a minor had to be 15 and that a judge or court commissioner had to rule that marriage was voluntary and in her best interest. Of course Utah, site of the upcoming winter Olympics, can only give me a silver medal in raising hackles. The gold goes to the Salt Lake City man who named a new beer Polygamy Porter and wanted billboards to read: "Take some home for the wives."

More from the religious sidelines? I wrote that women were banned from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Banned, no; segregated, yes. I tried to retrieve that error but not in time for many readers. So, I stand corrected … but on the side.

That was just a dustup compared to the storm when I wrote that the separation of church and state is engraved in the Constitution. I got enough copies of the Bill of Rights to paper my office. The words? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The meaning? That will keep the courts and my correspondents busy for the next millennium.

Two quick guilty verdicts. Yes dear readers, a vaccine is not a cure; it’s a preventative. Yes, gulp, I did write "mother load" when I meant "mother lode" and bless the correspondent who thought it was a pun rather than a lapse in punditry.

Now for mis-nomers. Or Ms. Nomers. In a column on Dean Kamen’s invention nicknamed "Ginger," I attributed the praise of Ginger Rogers — she did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels — to Ann Richards. Well, the former Texas governor popularized the line but our ardent archeologists traced its origins to a 1982 "Frank and Ernest" cartoon.

But what’s in a name anyway? In writing about creeping commercialism, I lamented families who name their kids after corporations: i.e. Tiffany. It turns out that Tiffany Jones is different from Home Depot Brown. The old English name for a girl predates the store and my comments by at least 500 years.

I also went on assorted misadventures with the first lady. I chided Laura Bush for not going beyond her comforting role and comfort zone. I came up short and she came on strong.

Finally, when Mrs. Bush was asked if she saw her first lady role more as Eleanor and Hillary or Bess and Mamie, she answered, "I view my role as first lady as Laura Bush." At that comment, feeling penitent, I raised my cup and offered a hearty "here, here."

"Here, here?" Where, oh, where was I? I should have written, "hear, hear." And so, ears open, keyboard cleansed, I leave 2001, humble, refreshed and determined to be vigilant — here, hear and everywear.

Ellen Goodman can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or send e-mail to EllenGoodman@Globe.com.

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