Combating a deadly disease
By Doug Fisher
Come closer for a minute. I want to tell you something,
but not the sort of thing you want to shout out in public.
Your stories might be infected
with bureaucratosis.
Don’t recoil. It happens to the best. Like a jungle
fungus, it slowly grows until the wispy threads show among
the words we write: Fled at a high rate of speed … Authorities
informed citizens that … The funds to purchase upgrades
for the facility …
And then, slowly, the rot
sets in for our readers. Two papers showed recently how
it can happen with phrases that
should be all but banned from our pages. We can learn and
understand the cure is an ever-vigilant copy desk willing
to challenge such writing.
In the first case, one newspaper
told us: Anyone else convicted in federal court of possessing
the synthetic male hormone
can receive up to one year in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.
It continued: Illegally selling steroids carries
a maximum penalty of five years and/or a $250,000 fine. And yet again,
showing that things were going downhill fast: Prescribing
steroids for that purpose is a felony punishable by up
to five years and/or fines of $5,000 for the first offense.
The patient must never use “and” and the slash
key together again. This bureaucratic dreck seems to creep
into our pages as we look for shorter ways of saying things.
It signals to readers, however, that we’ve become
one of “them” – the dreaded bureaucrats.
Here’s the reality: “Or” includes “and.”
Remember middle school math?
Your textbook probably had those intersecting-circle Venn
diagrams and talked about
logic. I grabbed mine the other day (it uses language I
can understand), and there it was. With A or B, both of
those intersecting circles were shaded in, including the
tiny part in the center that represents A and B. Logic
puts it this way: If p and q are true, then p or q must
always be true. In fact, the only time p or q can’t
be true is when p and q are both false.
Enough math. Let’s turn to an old FBI source of mine
who enjoyed picking at the bureaucratic stylings of the
agency’s all-points bulletins that often said a suspect
was armed with this “and/or” that. Roughly
put, he told me once: I don’t care if he’s
got a BB gun or a bazooka; I’m going to shoot him
if he points either one at me. I doubt that if the suspect
had both, it would have changed that agent’s mind.
Besides, we often misuse
and/or anyhow. The maximum penalty for selling steroids
is not “five years and/or a
$250,000 fine.” The maximum is both: five years and a $250,000 fine. If we can’t use it correctly, we
shouldn’t use it at all.
Bottom line: Avoid and/or.
If the distinction really is important, then write it to
make it stand out: The suspect
might be armed with a BB gun, a bazooka or both.
The next case comes from
the deadly courthouse shootings in Atlanta: Sheriff Myron
Freeman said he could not speak
about the standard procedures for escorting prisoners in
the courthouse and could not say what kind of holster had
been issued to the deputy, etc.
No reporter or editor should
let "could not" go
unchallenged.
“Could not” implies
some outside factor or force keeping him from doing it.
If so, readers have a right to know
what that is. There can be valid reasons: Perhaps a spokesman
has not seen a new court filing, the law limits what can
be said, etc. In each case, “cannot” or “could
not” should be followed by an explanation of why
the person could not comment.
Maybe the sheriff "did not” know
what holster the deputy had or what the procedures were,
but didn’t
want to say and so used the “could not” dodge.
That opens an entirely new and potentially more enlightening
line of questions.
Reporters should not let
politicians and corporate officials get away with a glib “I can’t comment” without
pressing for a reason, and editors should not let it through
the desk without querying the reporter.
More likely, the sheriff
would not comment. That gets to his own free-will decision
and doesn’t need an explanation,
though one is always nice to have.
If these sorts of things
can grow in large, generally well-edited papers, it shows
us that continued vigilance is needed
to keep the rot from spreading to the point where, in our
readers’ eyes, our writing might as well be dead.
