The Post Wherein I Steal From Rich Hall . . .

. . . The world needs more Rich Hall.

The reason this thought came to mind was cause I was thinking of a possible situation that requires the invention of a sniglet.

The initial thought came while reading this Slate article, and was later reinforced by this recent Cathy Seipp post.

What relates these two articles?

Both have a moment where you are reading along and the writer makes an assumption or assertion of fact that you know is blatantly, horrendously, unequivocally false, and yet the "journalist" writing for some major outlet doesn't realize how wrong they are.

Is it the cocoon? Poor editing? Laziness? There Are few journalists left, only hacks?

Back to that Slate article, there's this sentence that brought my reading of the article to a complete halt, "And the outdated-but-fun NES was displaced not by the slightly improved Super NES but by the original PlayStation and the Nintendo 64. Unless you're a hard-core gamer, not every generation has a must-buy console. Sometimes, they're all losers.".

Problem with that sentence, is it's simply not true. And it's magnificently not true. the SNES was a far bigger hit than the N64, the N64 was a relative flop as far as Nintendo systems go. The 2nd golden era of gaming was the SNES/Sega Genesis 16-bit era. Great games, large market shares, and a reawakening of gaming after the debacle at the end of the Atari 2600 era. Chris Suellentrop no doubt went from NES to PS or N64, but that doesn't mean everyone followed his trajectory. The problem with much journalism, across all sections of papers and across the MSM backed section of the blogosphere is that these "journalist" confuse their personal experiences with universal truths.

The fact that everyone they know is just like them, doesn't mean that everyone in the rest of the world is anything like everyone they know.

So what does all this have to do with Rich Hall and sniglets?

That feeling comes up often enough (at least with me) that I think it deserves a sniglet.

I suggest the word,

HACKOPAUSE = the sentence or phrase within an article that stops you dead in your tracks, gives you pause, and forces you to question the validity of all other arguments within.