When people think about Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving Thursday, the relevant images are usually retail carnage of some kind — barbarians at the gates of big-box retailers, fights over discounted merchandise, scuffles in the parking lots, trampled store employees, and (a new one this year) pepper spray being used to keep other people away from stuff that you want to buy. (What to do with all that leftover pepper spray when there aren’t any protesters around to disperse?)

That’s the mainland. In Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the southern coast of Massachusetts, retail works at a more genteel pace. There is no Walmart; there is no Target.

With a winter population of 15,007, compared with summer’s population of 105,624, according to the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, you would imagine correctly that most of the shops shut down by this time of year. Not anymore. Now they stay open later, and even here among the white-walled Cape Cods, quaint old fishing captain houses and the massive mansions of the moneyed (Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, “You’re So Vain” singer Carly Simon and many more), Black Friday is here. But it’s smaller, and violence in the service of consumer satisfaction is something that people leave behind with their darker impulses “off island.”

This year, the temperature reached nearly 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was brilliant sun, so when I walked down there on Friday, I saw about 100 people over an hour or so taking their early afternoon constitutionals along Main Street where many of Edgartown’s shops were open for business and doing big discounts.

I talked to some people, including  Rachel Romanowsky, a marketing manager for Jack Wills, a clothing store that specializes in items that “reflect British heritage and style.”

“There are more people out shopping, definitely,” she said, comparing it with last year, when more people — even among the wealthy — were fretting about their financial futures as the effects of the financial crisis and recession of the past few years played out. “Last year we hit our target, but it was nothing overwhelming. This year, we exceeded our targets early.”

She said the company was expecting $5,000 in sales at the Edgartown store on Friday, but at 2pm said that the store might exceed its target by 15 percent. She also said that the store was crowded at times on Friday. I asked what “crowded” meant. “About 10 people,” she said.

The Gainsbourg song is called “Je suis venu te dire que je m’en vais” — “I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving.” It also serves as notice to you that I’ll move my remarks over to my Tumblr site. Why?

1. It seems easier to maintain one blog with all my thoughts on journalism, music or whatever I want to write about.

2. It’s personal rather than work, even if I’m discussing writing, reporting and journalism all around — in other words, the way I make my living.

Nobody has accused me of trying to demolish any temples or turning any sacred cows into steaks, but it seems to me that an adult would use a personal forum to talk publicly about his passionate feelings regarding the great profession of journalism. Those feelings can be positive, negative, praising, hectoring and many more. Letting them loose here might seem to some people that I’m attacking the feeding hand rather than… uh… chewing on it thoughtfully to encourage better journalism all around.

My comments about journalism and the quality of the work that goes into it concern all media, not just one organization. So why not take the struggle somewhere else? See you there, all two of my readers.

You often can’t get through a day of reading business news without coming across the convenient, but repulsive phrases, “a growing chorus,” and “all eyes are on,” or some variation. Usually, there is a growing chorus of support or opposition to something, and all the investors’ eyes are trained on one thing or another.

The Moron Tabernacle Choir performs Oedipus Rex, wide-eyed and in mid-crescendo.

If you find these words in your news article, delete them and find a better way to tell your reader that more people feel a certain way about something, and that some event or trend is garnering a lot of attention.

Sometimes editors ask me if I can think of a better way to say the stock phrases that pass for writing in today’s journalism. In the case of choruses and eyes, no. Why should I? If that’s all you can come up with, take a break from this rapidly shrinking journalism job market and enroll in a writing course. The world will thank you and forgive you.

I’m already trying to edit myself. That headline is off. It should say, “You should not write like a businessperson just because you cover business.”

You often might think to yourself, upon reading my blog posts, “yes, of course, Robert. Tell us something that we don’t know.” But remember this: when you read our stories, you often see a swamp of business jargon. Some reporters where we work have told me that they read our stories and then visit the New York Times website to find out what’s really going on because they can’t penetrate the business talk. Some endorsement.

One response I hear from the reporters I work with is that our clients are businesspeople. They know what a shale play is. They know what go-shop windows are. They know what a blockbuster drug is.

Indeed some of them do. But here is a list of reasons why that is no excuse to write in their language:

- Businesspeople don’t want to be bored by reading the same words that they speak. They know they are bad writers. We are not businesspeople. We are paid to write and communicate well.

- We write for a wide base of financial clients. Perhaps one of them has not invested money in shale gas and oil fields before. Maybe he or she doesn’t know the jargon common to that business.

- Beyond our business clients, maybe someone’s mother or father invests in a company involved in this business. It’s not a stretch to think that they like information delivered to them with clarity when their money is at stake. We write for them too.

What is a supply chain? I read about it every day when I edit stories. It appears to be a global network of companies that build things that go inside the things of other companies, and so on. I can imagine a hypothetical supply chain: someone makes rubber somewhere in Asia, and delivers it wholesale to a company that cuts it up into little pieces. Those little pieces become little pieces in the cog of some other product made by another company that goes inside an engine (or something) of yet another company. That company then sells the vehicle (as it were) to some other company that uses it for yet another reason.

My question: can we stop calling it the supply chain? Is there a better word or more descriptive phrase? I don’t know. I do know, however, that “supply chain” and “global supply chain” sound like literary crutches for people whose ability to produce well written articles is suffering from a chronic disability.

I spy the term “oil major” in our stories more often than I should. In fact, spying it once is spying it too often. Oil majors, judging my searching on the Internet, appear to be the world’s biggest oil companies. Wikipedia says they are BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total SA. Well, Wikipedia says they are “supermajors.” Does that mean that there is a lower tier of plain old majors?

Why bother to have the argument? Let’s refer to them as “the world’s biggest oil companies” when we write about them. Maybe we can say, “Chevron, one of the world’s biggest oil companies…” and not, “Oil major Chevron…”

Writing “oil major” in our stories is the equivalent to an arrogant sign to our wider readership that we are talking at the cozy, highest levels with other people who talk that way. If our mission is to explain things simply and clearly to people, we should abandon the language of our beats and our sources, and write in the language of the people. That starts with killing “oil major.”