Update: David Simon responds!

One of the otherwise-engaging newsroom scenes in last night’s Wire premiere stuck in our craw: David Simon's grammar lesson. Remember? The go-getting young reporter played by Michelle Paress gets chastised for writing that (paraphrasing) “the Fire Department evacuated 120 people” during a fire. “You evacuate a building. You don’t evacuate people,” Old Curmudgeon Editor grunts. Cut to Paress’s character looking in some sort of reference book, then admiringly muttering, “He’s right, you know,” to a fellow reporter. But is he really right?

Like eight of the eleven other journalists that make up the show’s core audience, we’re slightly worried that Simon’s take on a world we sort of understand (or at least understand better than the world of narcotics sales and policing) will ring false, thus undercutting our awe at the realism of the show’s first four seasons. And we took the admiring “he’s right” to indicate that the Old Curmudgeon is supposed to be one of the wise, principled characters the viewer supports against the forces of institutional dipshittery. But we're pretty sure you can evacuate a person or a group of people, and so Curmudgeon seemed like an ill-informed, bullying blowhard.

Still agitated this morning, we consulted the New York Magazine copy department and the Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary (tenth edition). And lo, definition 4a: “to remove, esp. from a military zone or dangerous area.” That tenth edition came out in 1981, which would seem to indicate that any controversy over the proper use of “evacuate” was long over even when Simon was chafing under the Sun’s clownish management back in the eighties. So what’s the deal? Was it an anomalous moment of non-verisimilitude? Does it augur a somewhat-inaccurate portrayal of the press? Or will the point be debated further in one of those classic Wire confrontations between two characters who are nominally both working for the cause? We’ve asked the show’s writers for comment and will update if and when we convince them that we are actually serious about this. —Ben Mathis-Lilley

Update: David Simon responds!