While Grammar Puss is fighting a one-woman battle against the evolution of the word fulsome Dan Puckett and friends are creating a list of journalistic words and phrases with their “real” meanings. My favourites:
ACTIVIST: Vocal busybody whom the reporter likes.
DECLINED TO COMMENT: The other person was nice.
MASSIVE: A signal that the reporter doesn’t read enough to know any of those fancy-talk synonyms for “big” and doesn’t really care about writing, anyway.
While we are at it, can I add a plea to stop two very annoying journalistic speech-modes:
Adding “-gate” to any affair/big story/cover up. It doesn’t mean anything, and the Watergate affair had nothing to do with water, so what the hell does “Cheriegate” mean? Surely there was a shorthand way of referring to a big cover up story which was used before Nixon’s downfall, so why is it now that every new cover up has to use this particular construction?
Using a place name as a time, as in “since Soham” or “before Kyoto”. I know it’s a shorthand for “since the Soham murders” and “before the Kyoto agreement” but this limits each place to one sort of incident. I notice that it was never “since New York” always “since 9/11″ because plenty of other things happened in New York, just as plenty of other things happen in London so its not “since London” but “since 7/7″. What’s the rule here and can we please recind it? The only context I would find it acceptable is when you are travelling with a companion and you can refer to the “best cake since Paris” because the journey has tied together travelling through space with travelling through time. But the rest of the planet has no such common journey, so this construction is misused. It’s also likely to tie us in knots when they run out of cities for big meetings.
Those are fantastic observations. You should be a subeditor. With a large gun.
