There's a fundamental difference between a journalist and any other wordsmith in the English language. The journalist must be right for now; if you write books, or even nonfiction magazine articles (other than for Time, Newsweek, or the like--or our beloved Weekly World News; they're fiction writers), you have to be right for a heck of a lot longer. It may look like sloppiness, but it's based on our voracious need to get all the information now.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"