Warning: This column uses words that might be offensive to some and amusing to others.
Last week, a reader took exception to the choice of words in a story about the deaths of four bison at a county park.
It really chaps my buns.
No, that wasn’t what the reader said. That was the quote he took issue with. The reader said that using this quote was descending to a lower standard.
This reader’s buns were chapped, however, because the colloquialism means to anger. Clearly, he was vexed with The Star for allowing those words in the story.
It’s a question of language and common word usage.
Many readers believe American word usage gets more common everyday, to use the secondary definition of the word common to lack refinement. Sometimes readers see words they view as coarse in the pages of this newspaper.
The 2003 Associated Press Stylebook (the bible of journalistic style note the lowercase b) points out that certain colloquialisms are perfectly fine by even Webster’s New World Dictionary standards. Just because they’re common, the dictionary says, it doesn’t mean they are substandard or illiterate. So does that make them fair game?
An average issue of The Star is filled with thousands of inches of statements, descriptions and quotes. To accurately reflect events, journalists often use everyday language. If the story warrants it, a journalist may even write the way some of us speak. You know?
In its own stylebook, The Star sets guidelines for what editors should print and what they should avoid. Much of it deals with profanity:
Because we are a general-interest, family newspaper, words or expressions that may be considered vulgar, profane or obscene generally should NOT appear in copy. This restriction includes, but is not limited to, what many would consider mild expressions, such as hell,’ damn’ or God.’ Case-by-case exceptions must be cleared by a managing editor or his or her representative.
Don Munday, copy chief of The Star’s Universal Desk, takes this view: We should guard against flippant use (of coarse language) creeping into the paper. Munday’s job is often to be the last set of eyes on a story before it is published. He frequently makes the call of what gets in and what doesn’t.
For example, he said that the copy desk recently deleted the word crap in a quote in a story. Some thought that the word was OK to use, following the argument that this word is crucial to the lively tone of the story and shows how emphatic the guy is about his point. Others thought the story held up fine without the quote.
My coarseness meter is less sensitive than Munday’s. I would have left crap in a direct quote.
Let’s take a second look at the bison story. It contained another common phrase, again a quote:
The people who do this are usually drunker than a hoot owl.
Paraphrasing this expression into the more innocuous the people who do this are usually inebriated surely wouldn’t have had as much punch. But more important, newspapers mustn’t care only about tone and clever writing. Truth and accuracy must prevail. That is why The Star advises its writers not to clean up quotes. And that’s why, even in this family newspaper, profanity, barnyard ephithets and even sexually explicit language sometimes find a way into print.
According to Munday, The Star only has used the S-word a couple of times in recent memory once in the title of a book. And several readers were shocked when we published, unedited, independent council Kenneth Starr’s report on President Clinton, which contained graphic sexual content.
John McIntyre, president of the copy editing association ACES, says newspapers must write for their audiences in language that they recognize and are comfortable with if they don’t want to be hopelessly antique.
McIntyre is also assistant managing editor for the Baltimore Sun. He points out that dictionaries are already out of date by the time they are printed. He believes editors exist to make judgments on language.
You’ve got to be able to make judgments based on your own ear and your own sense of the language, he said.
So did it chap his buns to hear that The Star used that phrase? Despite his call for moving with the times, McIntyre says he would have resisted.
It sounds vulgar.
