As a journalism student, reading this sort of thing annoys me.
Okay, so you were trying to be funny with the lead graf. I can see that. But no one’s dropping a dime (or anything else) on a TOLL-FREE call. I’m two years into college and even I wouldn’t have written that. And I see this sort of writing all the time - stories with clichés, poor grammar and generally poor writing. Is anyone copyediting these stories? Is anyone making sure the reporters can actually write?
A constant inundation of errors and sheer stupidities such as that is what compels me to be a copy editor someday. It makes my teeth ache when people write stupid things in public.
Perhaps they meant a dime bag? ::gasp!!:: Nefarious bastards! They’ve clearly inserted their fascist anti-drug propaganda into our poor, sweet, innocent news blurbs! What kind of Nazi world do we live in?!?!?
I don’t get it. WTF does “drop a dime” mean?
Back when I was a teenager, a pay phone call cost ten cents. One dropped the dime into the coin slot. Some phone boxes gave back change, others would merrily take your quarter and not provide change. But “dropping a dime” means “make a (pay) phone call”, the implication being that one calls from a pay phone to prevent the call being traced.
In some areas, too, even local phone calls from a home phone were metered. This wasn’t the case where I grew up, so I don’t know the rate.
Rat out, or to put it more politely “help the police with their enquiries.”
Interesting - I didn’t know the term related to “squealing,” so to speak. I understood it as making a pay phone call, period. (And I was born in 1983, so I never made a phone call from a phone booth for only a dime.)
You were born way too late to get this one, then. Back in the sixties, a “dime dropper” was one who anonymously called the police - yes, a ten cent call - to tip off the “man”. Usually it was to get someone busted for drugs.
Of course, catching this sort of thing is only a rare treat in a copyeditor’s day. You will also have to spend days trudging through messy/incomplete reference lists, checking seemingly endless URLs to be sure they are correct, and sometimes just trying to figure out what the heck the author is talking about just so you can write an intelligent query that has a chance of being addressed rather than ignored.
Good copyediting is transparent. Sometimes an occasional error slips through, but what you don’t see is all the stuff the editor DID fix.
And it’s usually the WORST writing for which you are instructed to leave the nonsense alone and fix only egregious mechanical errors.
</slight hijack>
Tell 'em Scarlett. Man, how many times have you heard this conversation:
PublisherDude: “Geez, have you read this copy?? It sucks!!!”
CopyEditor: “Yes. And you should have seen it before the editing!”
If you start out with shit, you might be able to tidy it up a bit, but ultimately, it will still be shit.
And sometimes you have to choose between letting less-than-stellar material get to print or missing a deadline.
Yep, the quote is bad. BUT ‘drop a dime’ is also a metaphor, for make a phone call and play Mr Tattletale.
The individual who wrote that obviously knows that, and used it without much thought to the rest of the verbage. I’m not that horrified by it. Perhaps I’m becoming numb to the use of language, or misuse of it.
Logic.
It is a metaphor, and now that I understand its definition in full, it makes more sense. But I hope this writer never whines about the lack of younger readers in his/her paper when he/she uses metaphors no one under 30 will understand.
Ah, I am guessing this was a quote from the tabloid press?
They pander to so many different people in terms of their readers, that I guess it’s a forgiveable thing. More and more each day the english language evolves with the use of metaphor, and slang that they are simply evolving with it.
You could look upon it as the watering down of language, or the evolution of language as used by society. Or that might just be semantics.
Logic.
Er, no, this was an AP wire story printed in Buffalo, N.Y.'s newspaper, The Buffalo News. I’m not getting the impression, from reading their website, that they are a tabloid, though perhaps a Buffalo Doper could correct me.