Bruce Apar’s Blog

Solving our Failure to Communicate

Inference (Infer) and Implication (Imply) are not interchangeable.

They are the inverse of each other.

A speaker implies, or delivers, a secondary, unspoken meaning. A listener, on the other hand, infers, or receives, a secondary, unspoken meaning from what the speaker says or writes.

A writer for the Associated Press, David Bauder, got it wrong in an article published Feb. 24 about Fox creating a business channel to compete with CNBC. Harking (it’s not harkening) back to when Fox took on CNN with a round-the-clock news channel, he wrote, “a Fox slogan like ‘fair and balanced,’ with the inference that CNN wasn’t … ” He meant implication. The writer might contend he was referring to the public, or viewing audience, but in the context of his article, his subject is Fox, which delivers the slogan, not the viewer, who receives it.

It’s becoming more common elsewhere that journalists and other professional writers struggle with diction, or word choice. In some cases, it is so bad, it amounts to malapropism, an almost comic misuse of a word.

A recent blog I scanned contained a post from someone who said he had been a reporter for a quarter-century, then proceeded to tell us he was about to make some “observances,” which would make sense if he was due to celebrate a religious holiday. He of course meant observations.

In the same vein, on the Contents page of the February issue of Westchester Commerce, the house organ of The Business Council of Westchester, we learn that in the issue, new Council chairman, Stephen J. Jones, “discusses his goals and objections for 2007.” That is supposed to be objectives (we presume), because we did not spot any objections in his very articulate commentary.

Typically, a typographical error is a mechanical mistake (e.g., when a word is repeated or missing, or a letter is out of place), while use of the wrong word — like observances for observations — is a mental lapse, which afflicts us all from time to time.