Um, I think you meant 'occupancy'

No, in case you were wondering about the odd title... the word in question isn't 'occupy' (we try not to use that word around here).

Confused?  Let me begin by saying I'm sorry... I clearly have too much time on my hands, but I just can't keep my mouth shut when someone uses the wrong word or makes a glaring grammatical error.  I do this to my kids all the time (and also to my wife when she isn't close enough to whack me with a skillet). 

You wouldn't expect that someone who runs roughshod over the rules of grammar and randomly employs ellipses (...) in place of commas and semicolons would be such a pedant about such things, but there it is.  Do as I say... not as I do!

I can understand if a person occasionally chooses a word that isn't exactly right, so long as it 'works'.  That kind of thing is a judgment call, and everyone listening/reading knows what you were trying to say. With a little thought, though, you could have come up with a better, more correct word, but it wasn't important enough to stop the flow of conversation and really think about.   

But there are other times when you reach hastily into your personal lexicon and pull out... the wrong word.  I'm talking about a word that isn't even close... one that leaves the listener/reader scratching his/her head and waiting for context to put the derailed sentence back on track.

I've done it... you've done it... we've all done it.  That's all fine and good because, hey!, I'm not a professional journalist with several layers of editors reviewing my work before it gets published.  If spelling, grammar or word choice errors slip through here on treppenwitz... no big deal.  The point I was trying to make usually gets across.

However, one expects more from a newspaper.

The Jerusalem post is good newspaper.  It's not the New York Times (who is?), but the editorial standards seem to be steadily improving under David Horovitz's editorial leadership.

However, yesterday while I ate lunch at my desk I was glancing over the headlines on the JPost web site and saw the following:

"J'lem hotel capacity seen to rise 30%"

Now this seemed exciting!  Anyone reading this headline would immediately understand that Jerusalem was undergoing a construction boom with an incredible 30% more hotel rooms being added to the already large inventory of tourist accommodations.  This was fantastic - the very signal the country had been waiting for to indicate that the Intifada was truly over!

So when I clicked on the link, you can understand that I was more than a little confused to find an article about the Hotel Association's predictions (wild guess) for a 30% increase in occupancy this year, not capacity!

My first clue was when the article stated, "Jerusalem hotels are expected to increase their capacity by 30% to 1.7 million lodgings in 2005...". 

Just for the sake of a reality check... Las Vegas, which has more hotel rooms than any other city in the US, at last count had a total of 17,205 hotel rooms.  Somehow I didn't think Jerusalem was going to have 1.7 million rooms to rent.

Capacity, when speaking about hotels, is used to describe how many people a hotel, or any number of hotels, can hold (e.g. "I'm sorry madam, we have no more rooms... the hotel is filled to capacity.")*.  Therefore, the only way a hotel (or in this case, a city) would be able to increase its capacity would be to add more rooms, right?

I was tempted to blame the error entirely on whoever wrote the headline since it's quite common for the journalist who writes an article to have little or no say in the headline that appears above his/her work.  But as you can see from the quote I provided above, the author (mis)uses the word 'capacity' in exactly the same way in the body of the piece.

C'mon JPost... I'm a loyal reader.  I really don't want to have to go get comfortable with Ynet.  I finally know where everything is on your oh-so-counter-intuitive site.  And I've even come to terms with your many idiosyncrasies (like the annoying fact that none of your pictures actually link to larger versions of the pictures!).

Otherwise, everything is just hunky dory.

[* Special thanks to my brother-in-law Jesse (the bigshot lexicographer) for confirming that I wasn't mistaken about the Post's incorrect word choice.  I promise not to 'go to the well' too often.]