No. 11 for December 2002
No sooner had last month’s column hit the “newsstands” than I received a well-deserved e-mail from Stephen Guilfoyle of The People-Sentinel in Barnwell, S.C., taking issue with one of my examples.
The example was “the bulk of the funding.” His complaint was not with my advice to avoid the jargonish “the bulk of,” but with my use of “funding” in the example.
“Fund in any use is an awful word,” he wrote. “Editors and copy editing teachers need to break journalists of this bad habit.”
I meekly wrote back that I try to use examples found in real newspapers, and I figure it’s best to tackle only one problem at a time, so I left “fund” alone.
Guilfoyle is correct, however; we often use the word – and too many like it – when simpler language is available. Often it’s because the words have become ingrained into our jargon.
Sometimes students complain that we always seem to be “writing down” to people, and isn’t it the responsibility of journalism to elevate the language? Those complaints usually come after a sometimes forceful suggestion that they work harder to find a common way of saying a complicated thing.
Those students, I think, are confused. What makes the best journalism is not elevating the language, but elevating the exploration of increasingly complex subjects and ideas, then finding language to make that exploration accessible to the widest possible public.
But “fund,” you might argue, is hardly a complicated word that requires reaching for your dictionary. True. But it falls short of my basic test: Would I say this to my wife, children or friends? I can’t think of the last time I said I would fund dinner, fund my car repairs, or fund my children’s education. I plan to pay for all of those – or, more likely with the latter, go broke trying. One word is not always clearer than two.
Fund might be a break-the-glass-in-case-of-emergency word on a tight headline. It will always be part of “mutual fund,” and it probably is a losing cause to fight “fund-raiser” and its ilk in political stories.
But why do we say a government agency will fund a program? Why not just say pay for it? And “funding for the program” becomes “money for the program.”
We use “structure” when we can write “building.” “Facility” creeps in when we mean industrial plant or sewage plant, or nursing home, or any of a dozen other things. It’s synonymania – the fear of repeating something, and so we have to call it something else that ultimately ends up muddling things.
We have people “purchasing,” though if you asked them, they’d probably tell you they “buy” things.
And then there’s my favorite – exacerbate – that pops up in news stories when “intensify” or “aggravate” or “further aggravate” would do nicely.
I’m not willing to accept the argument yet that exacerbate has become part of the common language.
But language does change and evolve, and sometimes it’s best to abandon the battle. We seem close to that point with using “host” and “premiere” as verbs, rail as we might. The AP tiptoed away from the controversy about host this year when it took the proscription out of its stylebook. Who knows, maybe in some future time, “fund” will gain the same respectability.
Until then, we should keep asking: Are we elevating the dialog, or just using big words?
There is some help out there, and some of the best I’ve seen recently comes from Robert Harwell Fiske via Marion Street Press. Fiske’s The Dictionary of Concise Writing and The Dimwit’s Dictionary: 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them, deserve a prominent position in the newsroom where everyone can use them.
I’ve bought my share of Webster’s wannabes and regretted it, but would easily shell out $19.95 apiece for each of these. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I received review copies, one of the few perks of being an instructor. I receive many review copies; I endorse few.)
Fiske is editor of The Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com), a subscription site devoted to contemporary language.
A few minutes with the Dictionary of Concise Writing will brighten and tighten any work. The litany of “grammatical gimmicks,” “infantile phrases,” “moribund metaphors,” “torpid terms” and “wretched redundancies” from The Dimwit’s Dictionary should make even the most jaded writer think twice about the language.
Joseph Epstein, former editor of The American Scholar, puts it well in his foreword to The Dimwit’s Dictionary: “You are what you eat, the old food faddists used to say. As I read him, Robert Harwell Fiske is saying that we are, or soon become, what we say and write. Use language slovenly, dully, dopily and we soon ourselves become sloppy, dull, dopey.”
Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, teaches journalism at the University of South Carolina and can be reached at dfisher@sc.edu or 803-777-3315.