Jeff Gibson
I am excited to be writing this. I am so excited you’d think I had never written anything in my life. And I know you will be excited, too.
You’ve heard people talk that way. A city official calls a press conference to announce that some guy who just painted his house donated a couple of half-empty cans of paint to the dog pound.
“Now we can paint the pound!” the official says. “I am so excited!” Then she punches the air to show that she really is.
Baloney. Who could get excited over something like that?
The folks at my brokerage firm, that’s who. Awhile back, I got a letter from the firm’s headquarters informing me that my monthly statement would arrive in a new format. It would contain more information in greater detail. The letter told me, twice, that “We [at the firm] are excited by this,” and also, that “we know you will be excited, too.”
It seemed doubtful. What could be exciting about a more informative breakdown of a bunch of numbers? Granted, I had found my heart skipping beats during the Great Recession. There were some exciting things happening then; brokers jumping out of windows and stuff, and the times alone produced some big changes in my statement. But those were depressing, not exciting.
I decided to reserve judgment until I saw the new statement. Maybe it really would produce an adrenaline rush that would blow my head off.
It did not. It baffled me. I studied it right-side-up. I turned it sideways and upside down. I held a lighted candle under it, thinking maybe the heat would bring out an invisible ink message holding the key to all those numbers. No luck. I was thoroughly frustrated. I put the candle’s flame to the statement and went out to have a few and think about it. It took me months to figure out that statement: just look at the bottom line.
I never did get excited, but there is some lingering anxiety. What the hell am I doing, entrusting the management of my money to easily excited stockbrokers?
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Another term lodged in the popular vocabulary like an impacted wisdom tooth is “fiercely proud.” I’m not the only one puzzled by that term. Ed Kemmick, proprietor of this great news site (which carries only the finest content), has wondered how pride can be fierce. Or maybe it was Roger Clawson, whose strange, insightful columns once brightened the pages of the Billings Gazette and later the Billings Outpost.
I usually associate adjectives like “deep,” “quiet” and “dignified” with the word pride. “Fierce” doesn’t fit with that, although I’ll tell the world I’m real close to being fiercely proud of Ryan* O’Neill, the man who bagged bin Laden.
When I came to Butte I was young and innocent, and one of the first Butte guys I met was a rugged miner type who informed me that Butte not only was the most beautiful city in the world, with its steep streets, its picturesque old buildings and Lake Berkeley, where old snow geese go to die, but that it actually resembled San Francisco.
Like I said, I was an innocent, having come directly from Billings, and I decided to impress the guy with my wit. “Well, maybe,” I said, “but not since the earthquake.”
“Har, har!” he said, just before he let me know you don’t joke about Butte with a Buttian.
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I’m writing this because I used to work for newspapers and sometimes I was a copy editor. Copy editors don’t get any respect (everybody else in the newsroom calls them “effing old cranks”), but they have power. They use it to strip the hide off thin-skinned young prima donnas and replace it with the scar tissue that makes a reporter insensitive, snoopy, pushy and aware of the need for careful, accurate use of the written word. Ideally, the facts, too. They get cynical without any help.
There aren’t many copy editors, as such, left on some newspapers today. The job now tends to be a combination copy editor-page designer position. The folks who hold these jobs do good work, but they’re spread too thin.
Perhaps partly as a result of that, fad words and fashion phrases have crept into many newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal. Journal reporters used to contact a source or call a source on the phone. Now, more and more, they say they “reached out” to a source. Soon they’ll be reporting that a couple of corporate rivals “reached out and came together so the healing process could lead them to closure.” They buried the hatchet, in other words.
And I swear the Journal has a policy that if the word “iconic” doesn’t appear in the paper every day, somebody gets fired. The paper has called General Motors, “the iconic automaker.” It has called that place in Algiers “the iconic Casbah.” Another publication wrote of “the iconic rings of Saturn.” If something is iconic enough to be called iconic, it needn’t be called iconic, Everybody knows it. Any day now, I expect to see an article refer to “the iconic savior, Jesus.” Jesus, it’s irritating.
At the paper where I last worked, I attended editorial board meetings. One day another staffer asked what we did at those meetings, especially the ones that went on and on.
I told her. “We do a lot of stepping up to the plate and thinking out of the box so we can bring something to the table at the end of the day.” Every so often, someone really would talk like that and you could almost believe he was saying something.
Then there’s “opt.” Newspapers love the word. They can’t use it often enough. They use it even when it’s completely unneeded, like this: “On Hal Brown’s first day of work he opted to take I-90 East to the 27th Street exit. Upon reaching First Avenue North, he opted to turn left. At five o’clock, he opted to drive home.” Where is the fascination in this word?
And “passionate,” a once useful, even impressive word, is now worn out from overuse.
Newspapers occasionally atrocitize the language. They verbize nouns and nounize verbs. They intransitive the transitive. It saddens.
Even the ad department gets into it. It used to be that when businesses sold goods at reduced prices, it was called a sale. Now the ads call it a “major sales event.” Something used to sell at a low price. Now it sells at “an attractive price point.”
The ad department, by the way, is sometimes called “The Dark Side” by reporters. That’s because reporters are paranoid, and suspect the ad people will try to interfere with news coverage. For their part, the ad people refer to news personnel as “those ignorant twits who don’t understand who butters their bread.”
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You think all this is nothing to be concerned about? You think I’m persnickety and fastidious and making mountains from molehills? Didn’t I already tell you I’m an effing old crank? I can even tell you how nit-picker is spelled. That way. With a hyphen. So there.
But there’s reason for concern. People who use the language professionally should be the last to lower the bar. Somebody has to man the ramparts or sooner or later nobody will understand what anybody else is talking about. The King’s English is the best path to clear meaning and accurate description.
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I’ll end with a concession, or at least an acknowledgment.
Nothing is set in concrete, even for old cranks. There are exceptions to my quibbles. They’re rare, but important, and it’s useful to remember them.
For example, one evening long ago I was sitting close to a popular girl at a drive-in movie.
The movie was one of those iconic John Wayne major motion picture events, for which I had a passion. I had almost forgotten the girl when she put a hand on my shoulder and whispered into my ear.
“Jim, honey,” she said. “Let us…”
“Not Jim. I’m Jeff.”
“Oh, whatever,” she said. “Let us reach out and come together.”
Right away, I forgave her that Jim business and her choice of words and got to work. Sometimes context is everything.
Jeff Gibson was born in Livingston and worked at the Billings Gazette as a young man. He retired from the Montana Standard in Butte, where he now lives. Gibson is the author of two novels: “Last Rites of Passage,” which he calls a coming of old-age story, and “Outlaws,” a story of love and money in the New West. Digital versions of both are available on Kindle and other readers, and hard copies through Amazon.
*Editor’s note: Sharp-eyed reader Paul Vang pointed out that Mr. O’Neill’s name is Rob, not Ryan, proving that everybody, even copy editors, needs a copy editor, and one better than your Last Best News editor-in-chief.
