The Language of Journalism

Volume 1, Newspaper Culture

Melvin J. Lasky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780765800015
• eBook ISBN: 9781351327183
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The newspaper is to the twentieth century what the novel was for the nineteenth century: the expression of popular sentiment. In the first of a three-volume study of journalism and what it has meant as a source of knowledge and as a mechanism for orchestrating mass ideology, Melvin J. Lasky provides a major overview. His research runs the gamut of material found in newspapers, from the trivial to the profound, from pseudo-science to habits of solid investigation.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first attacks deficiencies in grammar and syntax with examples from newspapers and magazines drawn from the German as well as English-language press. The second examines the key issues of journalism: accuracy and authenticity. Lasky provides an especially acute account of differences between active literacy and passive viewing, or the relationship of word and picture in defining authenticity.

The third part emphasizes the problem of bias in everything from racial reporting to cultural correctness. This is the first systematic attempt to study racial nomenclature, identity-labeling, and literary discrimination. Lasky follows closely the model set by George Orwell a half century earlier. The final section of the work covers the competition between popular media and the redefinition of pornography and its language. The volume closes with an examination of how the popular culture both influenced and was influential upon literary titans like Hemingway, Lawrence, and Tynan.

Part 1

A Question of Style

“For words of a feather tend to stick together, and if one strays behind, it is likely to incur danger in life.”

—Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921)

“It is not the word that I fear, but the emotion which produces the word....”

—Epictetus (50-138 AD), “Discourses”¹

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think...”

—Lord Byron, “Don Juan “ (1818)²

1

Words Win, Language Loses

The Infinity of a Split

The appalling casualness of the current use of language, remarked upon by so many literary critics today—deficiencies in grammar and vocabulary, ignorance of shades of meaning, indifference to traditional and/or reasonable rules of proper usage—could be a subject for a thousand-page lexicographical study. For the purposes of this work—which only occasionally, in a very few places also aspires to be a contribution to the “semantic sensitivity awareness” of aspiring journalists on some Utopian ideal paper—I will confine this opening section to a few representative notes illustrating the cultural zero-sum game in which the new words win and the old language loses.

First, a word of defeatism. Let me begin with the fiasco which amounts to the least of our troubles—the vain struggle to maintain that splendid old grammarian’s precept not to split infinitives. The last-ditch sticklers for that tiny rule of literary rectitude have been repulsed, rebuffed, routed. Here are the casualties strewn across the battlefield of just yesterday’s newspapers. My “body count” is taken from a week’s perusal of the Anglo-American press:

He emphasized the government’s failure to effectively enforce the immigration laws.... He decided to personally attack Columbia after six years of service there.... An industrial tribunal also criticized the TSB for failing to fully investigate the allegations.... Damon Hill even went so far as to playfully advise photographers to position themselves on the outside.... The protocol always called for him to confidently greet visitors.... She had problems when she began to voraciously eat everything in sight.... Hartford, Connecticut, is the first community to completely privatize its public school system.... Salem, the sheikh’s bodyguard, used a tape-recorder of his own to covertly monitor his conversations with FBI controllers...

How old this bad habit is can be surmised by a paragraph reprinted recently in the International Herald Tribune under its rubric “75 Years Ago.” It was a report of a London riot in Trafalgar Square (1919) against an American prohibitionist who vainly tried to convert an apparently pro-alcoholic “crowd of frenzied collegians”:

The students intended to publicly duck Mr. Johnson into a barrel of beer.³

Even Africans, who obviously learned proper English in the West, are doing it. A spokesman in Mobutu’s Zaire was quoted as saying in Kinshasa about the chances of gaining political power for a new reformer on the scene, named Kengo wa Dondo:

The trick for us is to incrementally extend legitimation to Kengo without letting Mobutu hijack it for himself.⁴

He must have felt free to split and splatter in this way because he was talking to the State Department’s deputy secretary of state, who is a former editor of Time magazine (now no longer a bastion of old fashioned values as in Henry Luce’s day).

The prize for the longest rupture of the year (at least among the splits that have come my way) was captured by the Daily Telegraph when it reported on a TV broadcaster’s expose of P.R. shenanigans:

During the programme, he used the names of 14 MPs to, according to another motion, “establish Ian Greer Associates’ credentials with its prospective clients.”

The most unkindest cut of all is when the split is elevated (from the unobtrusive 8-point text) to the blatant headline, and the 24-point Bodoni type screams out at you—

D.A. THREATENS TO PUBLICLY EXPOSE SECRET FILE

Sometimes it is a cozy matter of bunching up the phrase to keep you warm.

Unfazed in the chilly air, Maria Maples in a slinky dress marched to the ladies room and buddied-up to the hot-air dryers to better heat up her ample torso.⁵

With so many colleagues who share my mild horror and chronic dismay at this kind of thing—indifference to grammar is, I suspect, linked ultimately to indifference to meaning and truth—I have long since admitted defeat. But I still, like the hapless Charlie away from his assembly line, twist and twinge, and go on to register irritation at each day’s specimen (naturally excepting those dozen classic cases where there’s no sensible alternative to splitting). Still, there is mounting evidence that reporters or their sub-editors go out of their way to show how liberated they are: to really and truly write well is to consistently and blatantly split infinitives. The mood on the other side is, alas, triumphalist. The poet (T.S. Eliot, somewhere) had it right: words split, language breaks up, the wasteland cometh...

We didn’t think we have the creativity to dramatically distinguish our products on our own.

Mr. Barry announced sweeping changes in the Defense Department to better cope with the danger.

Indeed General Mladic traveled from one execution site to another to personally oversee the extermination.⁶

The usual sub-standard delinquencies have almost made a normal rhythm of the bifurcated infinitive, for this is the way that ill-clad sentences can appear in public these days. The gait is pedestrian but no longer seems conspicuous.

The new European Commission will find it difficult to quickly resuscitate a piece of [TV-Quota] legislation.

A computer hack who blocked radio-station phone-lines so that he could be the winning contest-caller admitted using his computer to fraudulently win two Porsches and at least two trips to Hawaii.

NATO commanders can deter attacks to an extent, but it’s very difficult to actually prevent the place being occupied.⁷

See a verb coming and you reach out to fill the open space. I sense a note of aggressiveness in the practice, and also a bit of an effort to be somewhat unusual and even original. The Herald-Tribune headline writer contrived this head across three front-page columns for a Washington Post story about how to (almost) get away with political corruption:

HOW TO (LEGALLY) GET FOREIGN GIFTS

Foreign languages have their own native problems with verbs, not necessarily akin to the splitting of the Anglo-Saxon infinitives, but in English everybody is doing it, if one believes Alessandra Stanley (reporting from Russia for the New York Times) who is quoting one of her Moscow sources, a Mr. Umar Dzhabraiov, about his quarrel with a high ex-Soviet bureaucrat: “He has the ability to initially convince people he is right.” Does Russian have splittable verbs? or was he prompted or interpreted, and otherwise helped along by the up-to-the-minute Ms. Stanley?⁸

Chaucer, as academics have reported, split a handful of infinitives, but the modern practice may have begun by giving wide latitude to the raw, untutored talents who were permitted to write as they pleased. Now it is on the verge of becoming a grammatical imperative. Sub-editors, and indeed headline writers, move the adverb crisply into the once-forbidden space, splitting the infinitive with the pioneer spirit of an Abe Lincoln splitting rails. No, our district attorneys will not be exposing the secret files publicly; nor will our ministers be confessing their failures publicly (or even publicly confessing those selfsame failures). The four-column headline in the International Herald Tribune presumably following the style books of its sponsors, the New York Times and the Washington Post (with an assist from the Los Angeles Times), read:

E.U. MINISTERS TO PUBLICLY CONFESS FAILURES.⁹

I am afraid it’s time for the rest of us to publicly confess: We just can’t stop them. The split is infinite, and permanent.

One would have to risk being totally humorless to go on about it (as I am, half-heartedly, trying to do), when the whole matter of grammatical proprieties has become a subject for jokes and a peg for fun columnists. One wag (Dave Barry of the Miami Herald) has been posing as a “Language Person” who was named “the Official Grammarian for the 1996 Summer Olympic.” In that capacity he would be “testing the athletes’ urine at random for split infinitives and traces of illegal gerunds.” As for the “diphthong,” there was nothing suspicious about that and, in fact, he was persuaded by one dictionary or another that it was “a word that is used to form a good name for a rock band (e.g., Earl Piedmont & the Diphthongs).”¹⁰ This may well be, as I say, the least of our troubles in a raging sea of adversities. We probably won’t be, as a direct consequence of barbarian practices in our language, approaching the End of Civilization as we have known it. Yet the admirable Karl Kraus spent a lifetime in tragic Vienna arguing just this—if a shade too melodramatically, but then the apocalyptic wasteland did come in the form of two great world wars.

As Kraus insisted in his philology of nit-picking, they who violate the essence of language will in turn be violated. They are the condemned victims of a society plagued by dark and pernicious ambiguities, and increasingly alienated from proper standards of order, truth and meaning. And for Kraus—as for H.L. Mencken, our greatest philological critic—grammar and rhetoric were the clues to catastrophes. Kraus seized upon every little item in the press or erratic phrase in parliament as pieces of evidence for the dire future, what he called in his formidable play of that name, Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit {The Last Days of Mankind).*

I will not withhold my sneaking admiration for an old-fashioned and recalcitrant school of thought which is attempting, against all odds, to hold fast to traditional rules of grammar and syntax. In his weekly department on “Usage andAbusage,” one newspaper columnist has been arguing for years against splitting the infinitive and was especially upset when the Chambers Dictionary people, in the summer of 1996, finally gave up the ghost and conceded that the once-taboo practice was now “perfectly in order.” The Daily Telegraph’s authority on the subject (whose brief, alas, does not extend to any other column or page in his own paper) was “insulted.” As he wrote,

Free speech includes the freedom to mangle it, as we all do at one time or another, in informal circumstances. But, as I wrote here only a year ago when Oxford kindly sanctioned the dreaded split, anyone with an ounce of feeling for speech rhythm knows that it is ugly and angular, and will avoid it.

Some of the thousand bits of favorable evidence, beginning with the Bard, were again trotted out in support of the case for the prosecution. How odd and indeed absurd it would have been had Shakespeare written “To be or to not be” or “A consummation to devoutly be wished”! The split puts a limp into the natural flow of words, although no one will deny that Shakespeare ignored grammar when it suited him; but not euphony (and he knew enough Greek to know it meant “good sound”).

Insulted traditionalists keep on cringing and groaning. A BBC reporter said the other day, “They are intending to now study it closely.” And what is wrong, pray, with “now to study it closely” or “to study it closely now”? Yet how long will we want to expend our ingenuity by rephrasing all the split infinitives that come our way in the course of a day? If we maintain our beleaguered and almost lost positions, then it must surely be not a mere matter of literary style but more than that, one of essential life-style. As one English lexicographer (Fritz Spiegl) writes, pulling himself up to his full cultural height—

Our freedom also allows us to decide whether we wash, shave, or scrub our fingernails. When out camping or mountaineering we let niceties go by the board and offend no one. Equally it is good manners in the drawing room to observe conventions when not to do so might make others uncomfortable, or think less of one. Nobody complains about good manners—or good grammar.

That is why I faintly resent being told by Chambers that a four-day stubble and dirty nails are now acceptable.

Acceptable to whom? Or should we write, “Who to?”¹¹

I share little or none of the emotional involvement of my grammarian friends who in their pedantic loyalties cheer on all who dare to employ the traditional rules and chastise or otherwise condemn to obloquy those who carelessly or deliberately herd themselves among the splitters. But I do aver that when I unexpectedly find, rare as this is becoming, an unsplit infinitive a special rhythm and even an extra shot of persuasive power seems to hover over the construction. Here is an English columnist discussing pregnancy and the state of the abortion debate; and she is arguing for more candor about the little-mentioned after-effects of terminal foetal surgery, suggesting only that “Violently to interrupt this delicate and powerful process is likely to cause trouble.” This sentence as constructed is, I submit, a touch stronger, or more expressive and elegant, than if violence had also been done to the infinitives.¹²

Railing in their very own self-interest against the imaginary rules that petty linguistic tyrants have sought to lay upon the English language, novelists, poets, and other serious craftsmen in modern literature have often insisted that there is simply no grammatical reason whatsoever against splitting an infinitive. Often the avoidance of one lands the writer in trouble; Fowler and other texts are full of examples, and the general liberal conclusion is that “We will split infinitives rather than be barbarous or artificial.” Among the literary men who lined themselves up in opposition to the “anti-split infinitive fanatics” was Kingsley Amis, but despairing that the old “rule” would ever yield to reason, he made in the end his own reasonable, if gloomy, compromise in his guide to modern usage, The King’s English (1997):

whatever anybody may say, split infinitives are still to be avoided in most circumstances.... I personally think that to split an infinitive is perfectly legitimate, but I do my best never to split one in public and I would certainly not advise anybody else to do so, even today.

He was not quite aware that it was no longer a matter of ungainly departures from natural word orders by a careful writer eager to get on with his felicitous phrasing. Good prose in our time is being overwhelmed by forces much larger than quibbles about solecisms. Fowler’s successor, Robert Burchfield, is still trying to keep his finger in the hole of the dam:

Avoid splitting infinitives whenever possible, but do not suffer undue remorse if a split infinitive is unavoidable for the natural and unambiguous completion of a sentence already begun.¹³

This guidance makes a sensible arrangement with the faits accomplis in serious prose wherein a Philip Roth shows “a willingness to not always, in every circumstance think the very besf of being natural—when a John Updike “shares a curious dry ability to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1 A Question of Style
• Part 2 The Art of Quotation
• Part 3 The Quest for Meaning
• Part 4 The F-word and Other Obscenities
• Notes
• Index