Deflavorizer and Big Foot

The journalist and writer Dan Baum set parts of the blogosphere alight when he gave an unflinching account of his departure from The New Yorker in a series of Twitter postings.

Two curious journalism-related terms emerged from this Twitterlanche – “deflavorizer” and “big foot”:

Telling a story in strict chronological order turned out to be a fabulous discipline. It made the story easy to write, and may be why New Yorker stories are so easy to read. Of course, the magazine does run everything through the deflavorizer, following Samuel Johnson’s immortal advice: “Read what you have written, and when you come across a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

…

When Katrina happened, I petitioned successfully for the assignment. I got to New Orleans two days after the levees broke. Jon Lee Anderson was sent in as well. As I arrived, [David] Remnick [editor of The New Yorker] called my cellphone to say he was coming, too. Now, I was a little freaked out down there – hot, confused, mind-blown, and more than a little frightened. But still, I probably shouldn’t have said, “You’re going to bigfoot me?” (To bigfoot is to snatch a story away from a lower-ranking reporter.) “I would never do that,” Remnick said. “Well, what do you call this?” I asked.