Ty wanted me to post something about the ascendance of "double down" as a buzzword in the presidential campaign. I don't really have anything to say about the phrase "double down," but here's stats guru Nate Silver with a useful analysis of McCain's am-I-going-to-the-debate-or-not strategy that revolves around a mathematically precise use of the phrase. You're welcome, Ty!

Copy-editing the world: Is it kind of funny that Gavin Newsom and PG&E, trying to appear down with "Generation Obama," can't even get the name of the headlining band right? Update: It's fixed now. When I originally posted this, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! was referred to as "Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah!"

Why the British newspaper industry, and indeed English culture as a whole, is so awesome: Guardian restaurant critic Giles Coren excoriates the paper's subeditors (British for copy-editors); the subs respond. Can you imagine any U.S. newspaper hosting an exchange like this one on its website?

Copy-editing the election: Jonathan Chait writes:

Republican campaigns to impugn the character of Democratic presidential nominees have two major themes. The primary one is slipperiness or flip-flopping.... The secondary theme is to portray the Democrat as effete, intellectual and un-manly. ("Effete" is a common epithet used against Democratic presidential hopefuls of the last two decades, along with "Harvard Boutique," "Blow-dried," "drag queen," and "Breck Girl.")

What's interesting is that effete doesn't have anything to do with gender. It originally meant "no longer fertile" (it's related to fetus); more broadly it means "tapped out, sapped of strength, past its prime, exhausted." But it sounds a bit like effeminate, so Republicans can use it to mean "unmanly" and everyone will get the point.

Copy-editing the primaries: In the wake of John Edwards's departure from the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both released sucking-up statements aimed at securing an endorsement from the cheery populist.

Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, and Politico all include this sentence in Obama's statement: "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this -- that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose." (Emphasis added.)

Of course, Obama meant to say that two Americas can become one -- an attempt to connect Edwards's "two Americas" theme with Obama's own message of unity. (Indeed, that's how Obama's website has it.) But someone -- a sleep-deprived Obama staffer, perhaps? -- added an extra n, and now it looks as though Obama was paying some kind of weird tribute to the Edwardses' marriage.

Copy-editing the election: First, the unwelcome return of a familiar error. Joe Klein, writing in Time:

With the terrorist threat diminished, is it worth spending $9 billion a month to referee the eternal Mesopotamian ethnic differences?

Klein is talking about the struggle between the Sunni and the Shi'a, and about the Kurds' fight for control of Kirkuk. Only one of these is an ethnic difference. (The incursions of Persian terrorists from Iran have an ethnic dimension, but Klein has already dismissed these as a contributor to the turmoil in Iraq.)

Second, from the NYT editorial page:

Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.

There is nothing technically wrong with this. The word denigrate simply means to criticize unfairly. But am I alone in thinking that its usage in this context leaves a bad taste? Washington mayoral aide David Howard got in trouble for using the word niggardly, which unlike denigrate is etymologically innocent of any connection to blackness.

Copy-editing the Iraq War, second in a series: Here's what occurred to me reading Gawker today: It's time to stop talking about 3,000 US troops dead and start talking about nearly 4,000.

Politico-linguistic intervention of the day: Listening to Terry Gross's meaty interview with WaPo's Thomas Ricks last week (web, iTunes), it struck me that serious, knowledgeable people have begun using the term ethnic cleansing to refer to what's going on in Iraqi cities and neighborhoods. Besides Ricks, the author of one of the most important books on the war so far, and Gross, who's usually pretty careful with her words, it's been all over the NYT in recent weeks, appearing in news stories and opinion pieces alike. David Brooks writes,

Second, the worst of the ethnic cleansing may be over. For years, Shiites and Sunnis have been purging each other from towns and neighborhoods.

But the problem, for once, is not Brooks's limited intelligence. Paul Krugman has this:

Oh, and by the way: Baghdad is undergoing ethnic cleansing, with Shiite militias driving Sunnis out of much of the city.

An early example is this Time piece headlined "Ethnic Cleansing in a Baghdad Neighborhood?"

The term ethnic cleansing originated, during the Balkan conflict, as a euphemism for genocide, often used by the English-speaking media with deliberate irony. It's a little strange to watch it turn into a legitimate, unironic term for mass displacement, especially since the word cleansing carries an ineradicable whiff of Nazi ideology.

But if we're going to use the term, can we at least use it accurately? Sunni and Shi'a are not ethnicities, they're religious denominations. For the most part, the people involved in homogenizing their neighborhoods, both Sunni and Shiite, are Arabs (although some are Turkmen, on both sides). The process is more properly called sectarian cleansing, or if you want to get really technical denominational cleansing, or if you want to lose the Nazi stuff sectarian homogenization. The best example of ethnic cleansing during the Iraq War is probably the expulsion of Arabs from Kirkuk, which seems to have calmed down a bit.

American ignorance about Iraq has done enough damage over the past five years; we shouldn't allow sloppy word choices to further cloud our understanding.