Sunday column: Poached columns, skunked phrases edition

Today’s column is online here, and both questions are a little more dramatic than usual — a daughter who wants permission to cut herself out of her mother’s life, at least temporarily, and a young man whose girlfriend doesn’t want him to stay the night while her ex is in town because it would be “flaunting their relationship.”

Two things:

1. There’s only one advice columnist whose name is synonymous with dramatic letters, and that’s Slate’s Dear Prudie. But has the tabloid Globe (not my Globe, obviously!) been stealing her questions for their own advice column, written by Debbie Reynolds? According to Emily Yoffe, questions similar in theme to ones that she has answered, but with certain details changed (a person’s gender, a housepet’s species), have regularly been running in Dear Debbie’s column a few weeks after they’ve appeared in her own.

People often send letters to more than one columnist–I once answered a question that also got sent to Ask Amy. As I wrote at the time,

Lots of people send in letters to multiple advice columns at the same time. There’s a strict rule in academia about multiple submissions to scholarly journals, but there’s not much we advice columnists can do about it–it’s not as though we have some sort of central clearinghouse of questions, nor does every single advice columnist read every other advice columnist every day to ensure that there are no repeats. (Given different publication schedules and lead times, even if we did, that wouldn’t prevent the occasional duplication.) As a result, it’s not uncommon for two advice columnists to run the same question within days of each other–or on the very same day, such as this “Dear Cary” question that also appeared in “Dear Prudence” (second one down). A quick Google search on “advice column” and “same question” also revealed this gem from Gawker: it appears that the same question ran in both “Dear Prudence” and “Ask Amy,” within months of each other–but the male half of the disagreeing couple wrote to Prudie, and the woman to Amy!

(It’s possible on that one, of course, that the letter-writer was the same in both cases, and was playing a gag. There isn’t much we can do about that, either. Advice columnists don’t make up the questions, but the people who send the questions in might. My editor will confirm before a question is published that the writer is indeed M.S. from Mansfield and the author of the question, but she isn’t going to send a team of fact-checkers to M.S.’s house to verify that her mother-in-law is, in fact, as annoying as M.S. says she is.)

People send letters to multiple columnists, and people may exaggerate for effect or even send letters about problems they don’t have, out of curiosity. What I’m quite sure readers of advice columns do not do is send a letter to one columnist, wait a few weeks, change “daughter” to “son” and send it in to another columnist. Ms. Yoffe took action:

Since Reynolds did not appear to be involved in the sourcing of the letters, I hoped the Globe would be able to provide an answer. I spoke to the Globe’s editor on the phone and sent over documentation of some of the concurrences. On Wednesday I got an email back from a lawyer for American Media, Lo-Mae Lai. She stated that “similarities between readers’ letters is just one of the many challenges that all authors of advice columns must face”—even me, she made sure to point out. But Lai went on to say that having reviewed the letters I brought to their attention, they “agree that there are some editorial similarities in the subject matter contained in these letters.” And in fact, Lai wrote, the person who managed the Dear Debbie column left the company on June 20, 2014. The new overseer “has assured us that all content in the Dear Debbie letters is original.”

That’s what Miss Conduct would have advised her to do.

2. Flaunting their relationship? As I said in the column, “Whether you’re arguing about exes or gay rights, the first person to refer to the normal functioning of a romantic relationship as ‘flaunting’ loses.” It’s such a skunked phrase! It carries with it a whole miasma of shame and propriety and the kind of excessive concern for the (perceived) sensibilities of others that makes you unable to stick to principle.

Are there other phrases–keeping away from the blatantly political–that cue you that a person is somehow not arguing in good faith, or that they’re arguing from a completely different set of standards? One that always tips me off is referring to any group as “the Xes” rather than simply “Xes.” “The Jews” rather than “Jews” or “Jewish people.” “The feminists” rather than “feminists.” Calling a group “the Xes” implies that you think of them as monolithic, subsumed to some group identity. (And once one X figures out that’s how you see them, they’re all gonna know soon. So watch it.)