An old geezer reminisces about situation

It’s fun when two of my favourite feeds come together in a single item, to whit “Shooting down ‘amateur grammar nazis’” over at Language Log, which riffs on a recent xkcd cartoon.

I remember, as a young cub reporter, being infected with the news editor’s aversion to the sloppy use of “situation” to mean “circumstances” and all that guff (as it happens, the very use that xkcd’s freedom-fighter espouses). And I remember being asked to write a story about the work of a professor of acoustics who had come up with new techniques to determine where loudspeakers should be placed in a room for optimal sound quality. And I remember (although not perfectly accurately) being pleased as punch with my headline: Research on loudspeaker situation.