Neil Arun didn’t want to miss a rare but risky opportunity to embed with an Iraqi police unit, hunting members of al Qaeda. But his employers -- responsible for Neil’s security -- weren’t happy. This film by Richard Pendry nvestigates how a frontline journalist balances risk and reward.
My first news editor didn't like to see his reporters consulting the newsroom dictionary. "If you're having to look a word up," he'd growl, "then it's too complicated for the readers. Use a simpler one."
I always felt uneasy about the reductive nature of his argument. If everybody followed his logic, wouldn't the English language contract and ultimately disappear? And didn't we owe it to our readers to make sure we were being precise in our usage? Not that I ever managed to pluck up the courage to take him on; he was far too scary. But I wonder what he'd have made of the New York Times's online system that allows readers to click on any word they're not sure of to obtain a dictionary definition.
Nieman Journalism Lab published a memo earlier this month from the NYT's deputy news editor Philip Corbett highlighting the top 50 words that sent readers to the dictionary in the first five months of the year. It has added its own analysis of the data (with a nice use of Google Docs, incidentally) to show which word had most look-ups per use on the site.
So although the most commonly looked-up term was 'sui generis', a Latin term used commonly in legal stories, the most looked-up word per use is 'saturnine'. Which, come to think of it, isn't a bad description of my old news editor.
There are some surprising inclusions in the top 50 too, including 'swine' and 'glut'.
Importantly, Corbett isn't imposing a ban on any of these words - even though he admits that two of them sent even him to the dictionary. (In my own case, I'll admit to being at the very least fuzzy on a good eight or so).
He writes: "I’m not suggesting that we should ban these or any challenging words. Some uses may be perfectly justified. But let’s keep in mind why we’re writing and who’s reading, and under what circumstances. And let’s avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense."
I think there are two distinct problems. The first, to which your old news editor seemed determined to contribute, is the notion that journalists should abandon the aspiration to educate their readers and be content merely to entertain them. We should not give up fourth esate ideals so easily. . The second is a depressing and pompous tendency to confuse verbosity with sophistication. I had a colleague who once condemend this habit, discernible in the work of several columnists but fewer reporters, by declaring "our political columnist is prolix because he is a f***wit. " It was a little ungenerous, but essentially accurate. I felt the same way recently when reading a column in which the writer described a moment of mild inspiration as an "all too rapidly curtailed passage of triumphant epiphany." Dear, dear....George Orwell was right about the value of plain English, but plain need not mean colourless.