The article you linked to in the OP.
I can believe Bretos was not trying to be cute based on the question he asked Frazier, and that looks like ESPN going too far to be cautious. I have a great deal of trouble accepting that with regard to Federico. Nobody had asserted Lin was invincible in the first place. Even if you presume he didn’t think of the second meaning of the word - how? That’s poor judgment and a horrendous job of editing.
It strikes me as pretty much the opposite. It doesn’t scan at all as some metaphor for the team’s defense or anything like that. The way I took it, which I still think is the way Federico meant it, is that Lin himself had seemed invulnerable in his first X starts (however many he had before the game this headline referred to). After his first four games, Nate Silver of the NY Times 538 blog took a break from politics to show statistically how impressive a four-game streak that was. Everyone was watching, holding their breaths almost, wondering how long he could keep it up.
And so, inevitably (even if he turns out to be a future Hall of Famer), the answer was: “not indefinitely”. But since he had basically been the first NBA player ever to start his career with a streak of near perfection, it was only natural to dip into the bin of Hackneyed Sportswriter Phrases and use “chink in the armor” as shorthand for “he’s not perfectly invulnerable after all–he can lose”.
Note the definition here from The Free Dictionary:
if someone or something which seems to be strong has a chink in their armour, they have a small fault which may cause them problems
That’s always how I understood it: not “this group has a breach in their defence at such and such point” but “wow, this guy seemed perfect, unstoppable, but now he did something less than perfect and revealed he’s not completely without weakness after all”. Perfectly fits the context of what happened in this game.
Lin has not been nearly perfect. He’s been very good overall, the team had been winning while he’s playing, and he deserves a lot of praise in addition to having a great story. But he loses the ball about 6 times a game (and that’s after a good performance tonight). He’s setting records for that, and he gave the ball away 9 times during the Hornets game. This is not a secret that was just discovered during the Hornets game either- it’s something people have been seeing since his first few games.
Marley, did you read my edit in the post just above yours? It looks to me like you read into my original link more than was there.
I’ll just say straight up that this gets my dander up for two reasons: I feel for the guy who was fired, certainly; but I also take offense at everyone who says variations of “if he actually didn’t see the problem with the headline, he’s a moron”. Excuse me, but I consider myself very much *not *a moron. I read the headline before I knew it was controversial and did not detect the faintest hint of a racial connotation there (any more than, as someone mentioned, if it was said that a Latino player kept his locker “spic 'n span”). “Chink” is just not a very au courant slur, at least not one that I have encountered often at all.
And I am, I want to stress, a *very *careful reader. I have said for years that newspapers should hire me to work from home as a copy editor, because I am constantly catching little errors, even in esteemed publications like the Grey Lady herself, the New York Times.
So frankly, if–like 99 percent of people with an opinion about this–you didn’t see the headline before you heard about the controversy, you aren’t credible in saying “it should have been obvious”. “Chink in the armor” is a cliche. You know what else is? “Hindsight is 20/20”. But the fact is that many cliches (or truisms, if you like) are cliched precisely because they are tried and true. Hindsight *is *20/20, but foresight is not.
"devastated when he realized his mistake."
Mmmmm Hmmmmm. He’s either a liar or incredibly daft.
Still not sure whether he needs to lose his job over this, though. It’s wasteful to trash a career over something like this, but he needs to either wise up or get some contrition instead of proclaiming his innocence.
Okay, that’s a perfectly interesting argument for a sports discussion of Lin. But here what really matters is the media narrative. And when you have even stats geeks like Nate Silver demonstrating that his first four games were unprecedented (as I posted upthread), that builds an unprecedented level of buzz around his being seemingly “unstoppable”.
I haven’t watched him play at all, except for a highlight I looked up online of his hitting the game winning three pointer one night. I used to be a major basketball fan, but when I “cut the cord” (of cable TV), I had to drastically cut back my sports watching for the most part (with the exception of the NFL since I pay for NFL Rewind and watch almost all the games, but that’s “neither here nor there” to cite another cliche). But the media narrative broke through to me even though I wasn’t seeking out news about basketball. And that narrative did not convey “good but flawed”: it conveyed “unstoppable juggernaut, the likes of which the sport has never seen”. (Given that even the arduously factual Nate Silver signed on, I had little reason to question that narrative, but it’s true that Silver didn’t factor in turnovers so I don’t doubt you are correct about that.)
Great, another insulting characterisation for me to take offense at: “incredibly daft”. Thanks.
Did *you *see the headline before you knew about the controversy? Did **anyone **in this thread? Kinda doubt it!
“It was an honest mistake” would indeed be defending his choice of words, which you claim he didn’t do. He used the whole phrase, as a phrase, and may not have considered the individual words in it. Somebody pointed it out to him, he saw what they saw, and ‘oops’. Perfectly logical to explain an honest mistake as an honest mistake.
Not being able to read his mind, I can’t form an opinion on whether it was actually an honest mistake. I doubt anybody can tell but him. But your argument that his comment indicates some kind of admission of guilt doesn’t really hold up.
Yes. In the last two weeks we’ve seen a deluge of Lin- and China- and Asia-related puns (and too many people treat headlines as pun contests anyway) in coverage of the Knicks and Lin, and while it’s not impossible the guy is telling the truth, it is very hard not to see “Chink in the Armor” as just another effort to top the previous day’s puns. From that standpoint it’s hard to take his denial at face value. Independent of everything else, it’s a bad headline because the Hornets didn’t discover any chinks in Jeremy Lin’s armor.
No, I stand by it: if he didn’t see it, it was a moronic failure in judgment. Someone who is making a career as a writer needs to be aware of the meaning of what he writes, which means he should know that this was a bad headline. He’s being paid to think of stuff like this because failing to do so harms his credibility and the credibility of whoever publishes what he writes.
You are free to assert that everyone who disagrees with you isn’t credible if you want, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a poor substitute for a real argument. I did not see the ESPN Mobile headline (I think it was only up from around 2:30 to 3 EST the morning after that game), but if you’d suggested it to me ahead of time I would have had no problem telling you it was a terrible idea because it suggests a racial slur even if none is intended. I wouldn’t use that as a headline in a story about China’s economy, the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors, or the failings of an Asian basketball player. It’s just stupid. Is being stupid a less grievous offense than using a racial slur because you think it makes a good pun in a headline? Maybe. But if you’re printing this guy’s work, saying “he’s not a racist, he’s just not observant” isn’t much of a defense.
The point here is that he was a writer for ESPN, so his headlines ought to be pretty well informed.
Nobody is talking about you. You didn’t write or publish this story.
No, that’s not what I said. I said he didn’t deny making a pun (which he did deny in the NY Post story), and that he said he didn’t intend offense, which I believe regardless of the reason he wrote the headline.
This is still a variant of the “he’s not a racist, he just did something really dumb” defense.
That doesn’t fly with me. I thought I had made it clear: I am constantly in “copy editor” mode in regard to everything I read, scanning for even small mistakes in grammar or spelling, the subtlest incongruity in tone, any lack of absolute airtightness in a logical argument or in the reliability of cited evidence, and yes: the faintest hint of prejudice, racial or otherwise. I’m the one who usually spots “heteronormative” constructions (even though I myself am straight), or subtly disparaging assumptions about race, class, or gender.
So, yes: if you are saying an editor working at this site would be “daft” or “dumb” or “stupid” to let this go through without noticing that it could be seen as a racial slur, that is necessarily ascribing those adjectives to me, because I completely missed it even with all my considerable faculties trained upon it.
You’re entitled to that opinion, but let’s call a spade a spade. (Another homonym with no racial connotation, by the way.)
ETA: Chinks in one’s armour do not have to be “discovered”. The phrase simply indicates that someone is not as powerful as they had previously appeared to be. Lin had a worse game than he had had in all previous starts; thus, the usage is apt.
If you had this much trouble spotting the trouble with that headline, I think you may be overestimating yourself. That’s a pretty glaring editorial blindspot you’ve just exhibited. Which, as a reader, isn’t a big deal. As a professional writer, though, that’s precisely the sort of lapse that means you need to start looking for a new job.
And before you ask, no, I didn’t see the headline before I heard the controversy. I don’t think that’s a useful (or reasonable, given how briefly the column was available before it was pulled) metric for this discussion.
If I were editing your comment, I’d advise not using “trouble” twice in four words in the first sentence. “Blindspot” is nonstandard–“blind spot” is preferred. In the second paragraph, a colon rather than a comma would be preferable after “before you ask”.
Yes, I know that’s annoying. But it’s what I do all the time; I just don’t usually describe it “out loud”.
It’s an interesting question as to why I didn’t see it as a slur. I think, first of all, it was (as someone noted upthread) part of a commonly used expression. Thus I wasn’t parsing the words individually so much as noting whether the phrase was used correctly in context (which it was).
Furthermore: while there have certainly been a great number of groan-inducing puns on Lin’s name over the past few weeks, along with some questionable ethnic allusions (like use of the word “fortune” along with a photo of a fortune cookie), using “chink” to refer to a person of Chinese ethnicity is in a whole other category. That slur (again, a homonym for a perfectly innocent word) is an extremely crude one, which doesn’t plausibly suggest itself for use as a lighthearted pun in a headline. That might in fact be the top reason that I find it implausible that Federico meant to use it this way; and disturbing that so many people do think it was more or less par for the course with the other “Linanity” that’s been swirling around.
I absolutely disagree with you that my rarity in having seen the headline before the uproar (the probability of which was increased by the fact that I am a “night owl”) means that it’s not a “useful (or reasonable)” criterion as to one’s credibiity.
Take as an analogy people who find their small children are trapped in a burning house. We have all read about cases where they ran in and saved the children, at great risk to their own lives. There are of course other cases in which people do not muster the courage to brave the flames. I personally know one guy who has never gotten over the guilt he feels for not having saved his younger brother from a fire that he himself escaped. And there was even a man put on Death Row at least in part (according to one juror) because he did not run back into his burning house to save his small children.
Only a tiny minority of the population actually faces this choice, of course. Yet many people seem very comfortable in stating “Oh, I’d definitely run back inside the house” (you can substitute various other "I’d definitely"s here, whether it is to engage in some other heroic or brave action, or not to become corrupted by power or succumb to temptation…etc.). Am I not justified in looking askance at such unequivocal declarations? Is it not only those who have faced the decision who are truly justified in declaring what they would have done?
By the same token, if you didn’t read the headline before having your mind corrupted by knowledge of the controversy (like those illusions you can’t “unsee” once you’ve seen them), all you can really say is “I don’t know, and can not know, whether or not I would have spotted it”.
It is NOT always a slur - even in this day and age
I eat faggots
I love the taste of faggots
I had a couple of faggots last night (ok thats a lie - the last time was about a month ago)
Now if the US posters have picked themselves up from the floor - try and Google Faggots to see what This UK poster is talking about
BTW, Marley, in going back over the thread I notice a delicious irony in one of your posts. You had taken the strong position that the article I posted in the OP indicated that Federico was tacitly admitting he used “chink” as a pun. You also wrote, after a few people questioned you on that: “There is really only one way to read the headline- as a play on the two meaning(sic) of chink.” (I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you didn’t write “two meaning” without the plural-indicating trailing “-s” as a stereotypical imitation of the way Asian immigrants talk.)
“Only one way to read the headline”. Well, obviously I saw another way to read it: the way I did originally read it. But you also seemed to feel there was only one way to read the story I posted; yet I took a different meaning from it (that Federico’s “honest mistake” referred to his not having considered that the headline would be taken as a racial slur).
The article I subsequently posted, from the NY Daily News, proved conclusively that my interpretation of the original article had been right all along. (I definitely will not, however, say the alternate interpretation was “dumb”, “stupid”, or “daft”, don’t worry!) So does that make you wonder whether you are after all on solid ground to declare there is “only one way to read the headline”? Or does it impart the lesson that two different people, both intelligent, can read something in different ways?
I’ll admit I had to think twice before realizing what the problem was. Probably because I haven’t heard the word “chink” in its derogatory sense (that I can remember) since I was a kid.
Also, probably, because the headline isn’t calling Lin a “chink” of any kind–it’s saying there is a chink in his armor. If it’s meant in the derogatory sense, it’s saying there’s an asian person inside Lin’s armor. Seems like a very strange thing to say. Hard to make sense of it as derogatorily intended, because it’s hard to make sense of it at all if “chink” means “asian.”
For these reasons, and because “chink in the armor” is a cliche which this person has apparently used many times before, I’m inclined to think it was an honest mistake.
sure enough
to the op: ESPN has a business to run, and there is a large revenue source this guy might lose for them.
this reminds me of this story: Chrysler’s Twitter Account Accidentally Drops the F-Bomb [UPDATED] | Mashable
For everyone who is focused on the writer’s vagueness regarding his intentions…do you SERIOUSLY think the guy is going to explicitly own up to punning on a racial slur?
“Yeah, I know what ‘chink’ means when used in reference to an Asian guy, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Gimme a break here! I’m a good guy!”
News Flash: Stupid people aren’t going to admit their stupidity. Not if they want another job.
Another News Flash: Beloved celebrities aren’t going to risk tarnishing their status by complaining about something like this.
Doe-eyed innocence is rampant around here.
QFT. In a much more concise way than I did, you really lay out the exact way I feel as well. Each of your paragraphs nails a distinct element of a three-pronged case. I read this and suddenly don’t feel so much like I’m on another planet, finding the natives’ cognitive orientation difficult to relate to.
But then again, maybe you and I are just fellow members of the slow-witted club. 
Well I’m pretty certain that, given the circumstances, Anthony Federico is lying through his teeth. However if he, or anyone else for that matter, can turn up any of the “hundreds” of headlines he has written that contain the phrase, I will amend my view.
Lin, and his Chinese heritage, has been the buzz not only in sports news but in news in general for weeks. Anyone in the news business who doesn’t know that “chink” can be a racial slur doesn’t belong in that business. It’s that simple. Doesn’t matter if it was intentional or not It was stupid wordsmithing. If wordswmithing is your job, you should not be stupid at it.