media Washington Post — NOT A CROSSWORD

Posted November 4, 2005 • Comments Off on Washington Post — NOT A CROSSWORD

I was just reading Gene Weingarten’s critique of Wednesday’s Washington Post. The backstory of this is that every day certain Post staffers are assigned to read the whole paper and write up their opinions of what was done wrong and right and mostly wrong. Wednesday was Gene’s turn. He got on his weekly online chat and allowed readers to suggest whatever THEY wanted to critique about Wednesday’s paper, promising to pass their concerns onto the giants of the paper (the Bradlees and such), who actually do read these critiques.

The reader portion of the critique is really pretty great. There’s a thoughtful piece about the Post’s eagerness to explain why each anonymous source is anonymous, regardless of whether said anonymity is newsworthy or increases the source’s credibility. There’s a correct but hopelessly naïve piece about how horoscopes are a waste of space (though it does have a good feature idea). There’s a complaint about how washingtonpost.com messes up words with diacriticals, like résumé. There’s a bemoaning of crappy hockey coverage, which lapse honestly really is inexcusable, especially when DC’s basketball team, covered to the gills, sucks so consistently. And, lastly, there’s a piece that makes me VERY, VERY GLAD I use the Adblock extension: eleven people complained about those disgusting Lamisil ads on the website.

Gene’s portion of Gene’s critique contains this paragraph:

3. The (unintentionally) funniest story today was on B2, about a
graffito found in Charles County that “included a word sometimes used pejoratively about black people.” The story then added that it was possible this word referred only to Halloween. Out of delicacy,
presumably, we declined to specify the middlin’ epithet in question. This resulted in what was, in my opinion, a totally ridiculous but highly entertaining story. After a full hour debate, my wife finally figured out what the word must be, which made us laugh even more. This story was a silly mistake. Simply not a story. In my opinion.

I immediately thought: I must know what this word is.

The paragraph refers to this story: Graffiti Near Arson Target Probed as a Possible Slur

Now that I’ve read the story, I think I know what the word is. What I do NOT understand is what the hell that has to do with Halloween. Am I guessing wrong? Someone help me.