Nicole seems to copy edit at home, as well as at work. She points, meanwhile, to this terrific little list of copy-editing gems:

1. There is no such thing as a miracle.
2. We do not refer to soldiers as “peacekeepers.�
3. We do not show stories to anyone outside the newspaper before publication.
4. Newspapers published in English use headlines written in English.
5. We do not allow people to render their names as logos.
6. The term “black box” serves no useful purpose. Use “flight data recorder” and “cockpit voice recorder.”
7. Dictionaries are the second-to-last refuge of scoundrels.

She highlights point 2 with a newletter (PDF) from the Testy Copy Editors:

International forces deploy soldiers. Avoiding this euphemism saves you one day from writing the headline “Peacekeeper fatally shoots mother, 2 children.”

The newsletter also provides “The past year’s most stunning example of making the relatively simple impossible to grasp”. The example has been analysed by one of their number who has summarised it as follows:

It’s simple. A bagel is an example of a cursor wrap-around on a screen on a screen that has been folded until all four sides are touching to make a dodecahedral object. Inexplicably, bagels don’t sound like cellos, nevertheless cosomologists explain that bagels can’t make waves the size of a cello.

So now you know.

Tags: words, soldiers, euphemisms