Love in the news

Yeah, let’s take a swipe at one of the much-reviled mainstream media, but this time for good, solid reason.

Christmas Eve dinner and complex card game with friends, then Boxing Day party with a complex game of Catchphrase plus a 45-minute drive home late last night left me crawling into work this morning feeling a bit like Bob Cratchit telling Scrooge, “I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.”

So I was trawling Washington Post this morning, trying to ease myself back into work, and lookee what I found: a frisnic (well, I don’t think it really qualifies as a “story”) in their Style section about (and by) someone who used Tinder to find what appears to be more than a one-off hookup. 

Well, yippee.

However, what piqued my real interest was the headline in the left-hand rail teaser:

Fiancé, as you well know, is the male half of the betrothed couple. I looked at the writer’s name and thought, “Well, isn’t that very post-Obergefell v. Hodges?”

Okay, no, that’s not what I thought. I thought, “Oh, WaPo, WaPo—do you have no editors of any stripe who understand the whole fiancé-fiancée thing? Is your copy-editing algorithm so pig-ignorant that it doesn’t even flag this for a human?”

So I clicked on the link, because I wanted to see how many corrections appeared in the comments. As it happened, there were no comments, but here’s how someone or something “fixed” the head:

Well, what do I know—maybe “wifé” is a whole thing, and I’m just behind the times.

Thank you, WaPo. For I can now continue to make rather merry.

UPDATE: as of 1400 today, this is what has been showing for at least three hours (they changed the head, but didn't reload the article, because "wife" still shows in the URL): 

I may be making rather merry, but inside I'm weeping for civilization.