The Boston Glob
By adamg - Mon, 06/30/2008 - 12:29pm.
Mike Ball doubts he's the only person to call the Globe the Glob from time to time. Now it looks like even some Globe editors are in on the joke.
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Mike Ball doubts he's the only person to call the Globe the Glob from time to time. Now it looks like even some Globe editors are in on the joke.
The joke works better...
A typo joke works better when you don't actually fix the typo you are making fun of.
Great Gadsby
Indeed, it does. As penance, I should try reading this past the first page or so.
Nearly 20 Years
An artsy friend was crashing in my apartment while my husband and I went to work. We arrived home and he had not only reassembled the newspaper in his famously retentive way, but adorned it as well.
The "e" in "Globe" was obscured by a giant inksplash design, as if it were hit with a black paint ball.
In my household, we have called it the "Glob" (splorch!) ever since.
And as for the competition
Boston Harried
Boston Horrid
(both worked better when the paper still had -American suffixed to its name)
My favorite
Is still what we used to call the paper in Milford:
The Pilfered Daily News
because they were forever ripping off stories from competing papers; in the old days, sometimes by pasting up columns from the other paper into their pages (back when this literally meant cutting, with a knife, and pasting, with glue or wax). Allegedly, they once ran a front-page story about a huge factory fire in Franklin, after which the editor of the Woonsocket Call called his counterpart at the News and had a call that went something like this.
"Great story. How'd you get it up so fast."
"We have sources."
"Too bad you didn't keep reading our version, because you would have noticed it was a story about the 100th anniversary of that fire."
It's been the "Glob" to me
It's been the "Glob" to me since 1987, before I even lived here (but did work here).
It helps to understand this if you happen to be a Unix programmer, as I was at that time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)
You young whippersnappers
We were calling it the Glob when I was in college, and I graduated in 1973.
Globule
I've heard it called "the Glob" since '91 or so, when I was living on the West Coast.
In recent years, I occasionally think "Globule".
But I make a point to call it properly sometimes, even while doing catty media crit in private email, to reduce the likelihood of someday inadvertently saying "Glob" to a Globe staffer.
I think of "the Glob" as a term of endearment, and sometimes as a method of chiding.
Globbers don't weep
I bet you'll not find a single Globe staffer offended by the term "Glob." I recall when I worked during college at the Columbia, S.C., The State. There, many staffers called it "The Snake." They had the extra drive of knowing the owner and publisher's labor policies as well.
There's a long tradition of that.
I suspect you could find some 90+ year old former Globe staffer who grew up calling the paper the Glob or the Glib. There's affection, sure, but with a sense of truth in stereotyping.