Style, usage and confusion
By Doug Fisher
Forgive your copy editors if any of them went to the American Copy Editors
Society meeting in Miami last month and came away a little confused about
language. There was a lot of confusing advice floating around those hotel
halls.
The three days opened with a major editor at a major newspaper
leading a session about what can safely be called "the rules." The
headline come-on is a promise to untangle that pesky placement of "only." (Only
the problem is that some "experts," don't see a lot of difference,
for instance, between phrases such as "he only had one" and "he
had only one.")
In the middle was a session on "Rules that Aren't" – way
too many to go into here, but safely assume that insisting on "more
than" for "over" is one of them.
And on the final day came a presenter whose standard is
whether something is "useful to the reader." Under that, he'd
throw out "awhile" as an adverb and let "a while" stand
for both. ("While," of course, is a noun, which is why it takes
an article and is used with prepositions such as "for" and "in.")
He's not very fond of the compared to/compared with distinction either
(let "compared to" handle it all) or the each other/one another
split.
Interestingly, he'd push to keep "enormous" (dealing with size)
distinct from "enormity" (great evil), even though with the
amount of misuse all around, this would hardly seem to be very useful
to many of our readers.
Leaving that session, one apparently puzzled woman remarked
how she'd just been to another where the speaker was pushing "shambles" as
correct only where the result was a bloody mess (yes, that's its derivation,
but hardly its widespread use anymore). Or maybe she just misheard a rule
that wasn't.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, at a session for
college students, one woman exclaimed how she'd drop so
much teaching of AP style. After all, she said, "At the paper I went to, they spelled
'underway' as one word."
It's just more of a reminder that those shibboleths many
newsrooms hold dear are in, well, a shambles. Instant digital
communication is quickly scrambling many of the usage and
style conventions that are there "just because" or that have been in place so long we've
forgotten why they were put in the stylebook.
Make it a point every year – heck, tie it to the ACES conference – to
review the style and usage opinions out there and give your newsroom's
stylebook a tune-up. If nothing else, it will give you an excuse to drink.
As for the woman's plaintive cry about AP style, one is
tempted to ask, "So what should we teach?" Most U.S. newsrooms
still use AP as their primary style, even if it's just as the basis for
their own stylebooks. And, like it or not, we need some standards to build
around in j-school (one does not live by teaching common sense alone,
trust me).
But her point is well-taken if seen as a plea to teach
style not as some inviolable absolute. Understand it is
arbitrary but not capricious, that many styles exist and
that, god forbid, some might use "none" with the plural verb or cast "underway" and "workforce" as
single words. In other words, teach our future editors how to deal with
it, not how to hate it.
AP could help by vastly simplifying some of its style points,
such as its maze-like guidance on numbers. This is the
time of year the new stylebooks are about to hit the streets,
and judging from the list of changes and new entries so
far, major changes on some of the more contested entries
are not in the works.
The wire service, having officially entered the hyphen
minimalist movement last year, has dropped the hyphen from daylight
saving time. It's also declared day care to be without a hyphen,
a welcome clarification given its previous similar guidance
on child
care.
Many entries reflect the hot spots of the world and in
cyberspace. AP ratifies MySpace and YouTube as one word
with the middle letters capped, while ring tone shall be two. GPS is
now OK for all references to "global positioning system."
A new Mexico entry explains that country's political structure,
acknowledgment, perhaps, that as immigration issues spread,
the average reporter is likely to need some quick reference.
AP now includes a list of hard-to-spell towns in northern
Israel, as well as an entry for Hezbollah, reminding us how to
spell one of Israel's top foes. It also has adopted India's
spelling of Mumbai (for Bombay) and Chennai (for Madras).
Now that such mortgages are all over the news, AP directs subprime as
one word, and it has included an excellent section on how
to determine when the combination of businesses really
is a merger.
These days you've got to keep up, so get your 2007 stylebook
ASAP (all caps, no periods – the new stylebook says so).
