Copyright 1999 Joe Shea. All Rights Reserved.

EDITORS WERE MEANT TO HANG AROUND WORDS
by Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

Several classified ads in the jobs sections of professional media journals insist that editors desperately want "a 'word' person" -- or someone fitting the now often disdained label of "wordsmith" -- to join their copy desks. At least in journalism's preaching and teaching, if not in its practice, words remain important.

But ads for copy editors also increasingly carry some requirement that the candidate have a familiarity with QuarkXPress or some other pagination software. The technology that was supposed to make the copy desk's job easier has in the past decade turned copy editors more and more into paginators who have mastered an electronic code for designing and laying out pages rather than spending time examining and analyzing words, phrases and sentences.

Don't hastily pin the Luddite label on me. I'm all for the technological revolution that has come to news rooms, but as we've enjoyed the new toys in our box we've let the basic matter of our concern, words, languish in the murk, overwhelmed by the jargon of typography and page design.

A harried colleague recently complained that "we're getting the pages out with nice type and great pictures, and they look excellent, but they're full of errors because nobody's paying any attention to the words."

At an American Press Institute seminar early this year, I heard a well-known newspaper designer chastise his own profession for forgetting that "newspapers are made up primarily of words" and that the most important element on any page remains the copy, the written words.

Attention to words is not a popular demand put upon budding editors these days. I've known far too many young editors who don't understand the technical distinction between masthead and flag or caption and cutline in their own publications.

More seriously, few understand the distinction between being "anxious" over something and being "eager" for something, and the grammarian's battles over the case distinctions of "who" versus "whom" or the restrictive modifying use of "that" versus "which" have been all but lost. Not many grasp the proper distinction between "fewer" and "less than."

Editors serious about beefing up copy desks should test such knowledge. Instead, the copy editor's test often is little more than a spelling test or a test of familiarity with trendy trivia or of facts that can be readily found in reference books.

Despite such discouraging signs, I know these nuances of grammar and usage can be taught. What I find missing among many journalists can best be called an attitude toward words. Within the past two years I've heard one senior editor complain, "Young editors don't read off the job," and another say with resignation, "Today's young people are picture people; they're more visually oriented than word oriented."

But as an entire profession we've become sloppy and lazy with our words, and in saying so I point the finger at myself.

Recently I sat in a committee meeting at which I made the off-handed remark, "Even if these meetings go nowhere, it will be good that we had the discussions."

"Wait a minute," a friend interrupted. "What do you mean by 'nowhere'?"

He insisted our discussions were going to carry us somewhere even if we didn't know where that was at this time in our series of meetings. I had been nailed in my lazy use of the language.

I had been told earlier by another person when the committee was being formed that this friend is "a good word man." The characterization was borne out for me in our first session.

Along similar lines, comedian George Carlin has made a career of reminding us how sloppy and careless we've become with words.

During a recent appearance at the National Press Club, Carlin told listeners, "During my life toilet paper became bathroom tissue and dump turned into landfill." Carlin attacked our penchant for euphemisms. "Some of this can make you want to throw up - or perform an involuntary protein spill," he mocked.

Newspapers continue to have similar problems. We've never covered a speech worth writing about that wasn't characterized as "major." And just as disabled ships perennially have been described as "limping" back to port, so today's powerful baseball players don't simply hit the ball well, they "crush" it.

Listening to one of my children's recordings last week, I was struck by the phrase "smashed to smithereens."

What, I asked myself, is a smithereen? (Fragments or small bits, the dictionary informs, noting the word is most likely an English variant of the Irish word smidirin.)

Editors stop at such words with wonder. Good editors won't allow a barely understood word to go by without pondering its meaning, origin and connotation as well as its denotation.

If the page designers and graphic artists have encroached on editors' traditional turf, in part it's because we've let the point of editing slide out from under us.

Good editors take their lead from the great poet W. H. Auden, who answered, when asked what had attracted him to becoming a poet and writer, "I like to hang around words."

Contact The American Reporter

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net