The New York Times changed its stylebook earlier this year to discourage the use of the term “midget” after a public outcry was raised over its description of a 1930’s-era photograph of circus performer Lya Graf with financier J.P. Morgan, Jr. (left).

Apparently the Washington Post missed the memo. A Post story this week by Brady Dennis used the same word to describe the same photo.

Explaining the Times’ decision, public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that the paper had received a cascade of complaints over the word, which advocates described as an epithet. An excerpt from Hoyt’s column in April:

The new style entry says that people with a genetic condition resulting in unusually short stature should be referred to as dwarfs. “Midget, once used to describe dwarfs of otherwise normal proportions, is now widely considered offensive and should be avoided,” it says.

But the Post editors apparently weren’t the only ones to miss the memo. A month after Hoyt’s column, the word was back on the Times site describing the same photo, this time in a blog entry by Kate Phillips. She was quoting a description of the same photo from an op-ed by Ron Chernow that had run in the Times in January.

(Photo from Great News Photos and the Stories Behind Them, by John Faber)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 10:33 pm and is filed under dwarfism/little people, language, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.