March 12, 2004

Amish day at the Times--Rumpspringa! (Apparently, I think it is my job to detect repetitions.) First, there's this description of Johnny Depp in a movie review by Elvis Mitchell headlined, "Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence":
Dressed ominously in a big-brimmed black hat and a work shirt buttoned to the neck — he looks like an Amish hitman — Shooter drawls menacingly, "You stole my book."

(The movie is just some thriller, not about the Amish at all--and Mitchell manages to refer to Popeye and Danger Mouse too, and I will be waiting for random recurrences of these characters.)

The second is the pathetic story "Man Charged After Snack Cakes Stolen" (why report it at all?):
Robert Lee McKiernan, 35, of Cedar Rapids, was arrested Tuesday after an incident in which authorities say he stole a box of Hostess Ho Hos and a box of Cinnamon Crumb Cakes from a barn at an Amish farm near Hazleton, in northeast Iowa.

The third is this correction, surely the Correction of the Day:
An article in The Arts on March 4 about a planned UPN reality show tentatively called "Amish in the City" misspelled the Pennsylvania Dutch term for a rite of passage in which some teenagers experiment with the outside world. Authorities on Amish tradition use various renditions of the dialect, but the most common version is rumspringa, not Rumpspringa.

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