Category Archives: Wrongful usage

Approximately annoying

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Sonia Jaffe Robbins, professor of journalism, responded to my desperate plea that she inflict the Banned for Life list on her impressionable young newsies. Sonia’s reply:

I love your “banned” page. Yes, it goes to my students, immediately.
And here are my contributions, just off the top of my head (there are
many more deep in my memory bank, and I hope they stay there):

  • “Approximately 375…” or any exact number. Yes,
    I know the harried copy editor doesn’t want to write out that number
    at the beginning of a sentence, but surely there are other ways to
    recast.
  • Anyone on trial who is “found innocent.” No jury
    finds the accused innocent; the verdict is “not guilty.”
    Yes, I know the fear of dropping the word “not” and publishing
    “guilty” instead of “not guilty,” but in these
    days of computerized type and layout, that isn’t likely to happen
    anymore, is it?
  • Investigators are always sifting through the rubble after
    airplane crashes. Please have them do something else.
  • “It’s a no-brainer.” It certainly is a no-brainer
    to come up with this phrase. Maybe writers and editors could try using
    their brains to say something else?
  • And the person in the hospital who “fights for life.”

    • News flash: murders are brutal

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    Canadian David Isaac sends these along:

  • A brutal murder (rape, assault); isn’t all murder brutal?
  • Rushed to hospital; as in the “the victim was rushed
    to hospital.” Do tell. What do you think the paramedics did,
    took a slow drive to hospital?
  • Thrown his/her hat into the ring; where’s the ring? Who wears hats?

    • Evacuate this

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    From D. Reed Watson:

  • Stop modifying the word “unique“! The word means
    one of a kind. How, then, could something be more or most unique?
    STOP IT!
  • And I almost evacuate myself everytime I hear a reporter tell me
    how many people were evacuated. Evacuate means to make vacant.
    (or to empty). If a person is evacuated, it is generally done with
    an enema. Please, let’s evacuate the buildings and leave the poor
    people alone!
  • And of course, the ever popular “back to you” at
    the end of a live shot.

    • Impact this

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    Mark Samuels sent along these complaints that made me wonder if perhaps
    he had an impacted molar at the time:

    The older I become, the more the daily diet of shallow and ill-educated talking heads that the broadcast media provides me tends to grind upon me, particularly when certain buzzwords are picked up, used over and over, and then bleed into print journalism. And we all agree, of course, that print journalism is the last bastion of literacy in the civilized
    world.

    Some examples:

  • “CLEARLY, blah blah blah. . .” CLEARLY, this is
    being overused and I want to throw up every time I hear some pretentious, egocentric politician/commentator/tv reporter use it.
  • Or tune in to the overuse of AS WELL, when a simple ALSO
    or TOO would do.Then there is the grating conversion of a noun or adjective to a verb:
  • An IMPACT may impinge or strike (noun). And we may have IMPACTED teeth, an IMPACTED area where the state provides services but derives little tax revenue because of tax-exempt federal property, and we may even be IMPACTED by being wedged in or packed (all adjectives)
    But Johnny’s inability to speak or write the Queen’s English was not IMPACTED by his refusal to do his lessons, although that refusal may have had an IMPACT upon his situation. IMPACT is never a verb, much less a past-tense transitive verb in the form of IMPACTED. Clearly, there are many other examples that have impacted our speech and reporting as well.

    • Facilitating a hike

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    Lee Anthony sent the following:

    These two really piss me off:

  • “Hike” as in “tax hike” or “price hike”: I really wish taxes and prices would take a hike, but they just keep increasing.
  • “Facilitate“: A ridiculous bit of public servantspeak
    that’s increasingly finding its way into news reports.

    • Not exactly a day at the beach

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    Karl Witter sent this voluminous list of suggestions along:

    Banned images:

  • The intrepid reporter standing at a beach’s high-water mark in the onslaught of a hurricane or other coastal storm. I’m waiting to see a wave crashing over the reporter, and, after subsiding, the
    camera op reeling in a snapped cable with no mic or reporter attached.
  • The transitional bantering in which news anchors, meteorologists and sports anchors appear on screen together for several seconds.

    • Banned words (not including spillover from the corporate lexicon):

  • “And you’re not going to believe this…”, “Get
    ready for this…”, or similar, prefacing a TV news story which
    will shock us with needlessly tragic human suffering or bureaucratic
    nincompoopery.
  • “Grow” as a verb done by the subject to the object. One grows neither the economy nor a dog. One can feed a puppy, house-train it, and take it to the vet. Then it grows.
  • “Random violence” isn’t; lightning is. The phrase
    seems to have been invented for contemporary street and blue-collar
    crimes, and gangs. Old-fashioned American shootouts, from the Old
    West to the Roaring Twenties, needed no such distinction for the accidental
    shooting of non-involved bystanders.
  • “The mother of all…” is this decade’s mother
    of all cliches.
  • “Abortion clinic,” “abortion doctor“. Hmm…nobody’s called John Salvi’s victims “abortion receptionists” yet. Hey, I’m just glad the press hasn’t adapted the right-to-lifers’ terminology and started calling women’s health clinics “fetus
    farms”! (Half-kidding but barely.)
  • “xxx-ly correct” when one really means “just
    plain accurate and right.” Included uses of note are geographically
    correct, historically correct, and, the winning stretch-of-phrase,
    orinthologically correct.
  • “Politically correct” applied ex-post-facto to
    anything. Someday a journalist will describe the Underground Railroad,
    the Pure Food and Drug Act, or the Taylor Act as “P.C.”
    Actually, “politically correct” is a “feely” word
    with no definition anymore. Restrain its use to the original higher-education
    meaning and trash it in other arenas.

    • Lost at sea

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    Max Hughey respectfully submits the following (and cites Willy the
    Shake to prove that he really means it):

    Ban “sea change” until people learn its meaning.
    It does NOT mean a watershed event but, rather, indicates a miraculous
    change into something finer, such as from a grain of sand into a pearl.
    (See Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Act I, Scene II; Ariel
    sings, “Nothing of him doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into
    something rich and strange.”) For example, the 1994 Republican
    takeover of Congress was NOT a sea change — unless one is a Republican
    — although I’ve heard it used dozens of times on radio and television.
    One might almost believe that this usage has been orchestrated by
    Newt Gingrich et al.

    Dig those coffers, man

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    From Gene McCarthy:

    One very overworked pet peeve-word I’ve always had was “coffers” and people, usually municipal/government officials, “digging deep” into them to pay somebody or something. In a day when cash is becoming obsolete and funds are whizzed around the world in
    a millisecond, isn’t it a bit ridiculous to continue to use a term
    which Webster’s New World dictionary says was a “chest for holding
    money or valuables?” Maybe just plain old “accounts”
    would more than suffice.

    Oh, those evil geniuses

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    From Bill Case:

    I’ve noticed a tad bit of grade-inflation in the use of the word
    “mastermind” in describing criminals. One local broadcast
    this week used the term to describe a teenage lout who convinced two
    of his peers to rob a drugstore (actually THE drugstore) in a small
    town in rural West Virginia. Since everybody knows everybody else
    in this particular town — and the trio of louts left a clear trail
    of footprints in the snow — all were apprehended shortly after the
    fact. I think we need some kind of minimum level of competence for
    criminal masterminds.