Prescriptivnik

For a moment, I wasn’t entirely clear what was being corrected here:

Was this going to be a discussion about “refusenik”? In fact, it soon becomes clear that it isn’t: the quote is merely provided as context to explain why the non-standard noun “copyrighters” has become confused with “copywriters”. But perhaps we do need to talk about “refusenik”; because current usage is moving it rapidly away from what it used to mean.

“-nik”, (“-ник”), as imported from Russian and added to the end of English words, has become a gloriously compact morpheme for creating agent nouns (as well as a way of adding an implied hint or criticism about the subject’s politics): beatnik, peacenik, no-goodnik. But it’s so compact that it actually leaves the precise relationship between the noun and the agent unclear. A beatnik is someone enraptured by the Beat movement; a peacenik is a proud pacifist. Similarly, a “refusenik” is now someone who chooses to boycott something as a protest. But historically, the word meant something very different.

The original term, “отказник” (“otkaznik”), was applied to minorities in Cold War Russia – often Soviet Jews – who were being denied permission to leave the USSR and emigrate (in the Soviet Jews’ case, to Israel; in the case of other minorities, to join diasporas or seek asylum on religious grounds). The policy, which prompted an international human rights dispute, came to a head for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s before bans were lifted for a period. So the original refuseniks were not people who had refused to do something; they were people to whom something had been refused; would-be refugees who were being prevented from travelling to any other country. They were victims of refusal, not proponents of it.

In these post-Soviet days, that usage is rarely heard. Many of the major dictionaries still record it, for example, Oxford, American Heritage and Merriam-Webster –

– but Collins already describes the original, political meaning  as the “former” definition:

and it’s clear that a word that could once have been a synonym for “detainee” is now well on the way to being a synonym for “dissident”.

Usage has radically changed the word’s meaning and laundered it, willy-nilly, of its political gravity and history. One might feel that this has not been language-change’s finest hour, although the compressed ambivalence of “-nik” as a suffix probably made some confusion inevitable. Now, as is the case with “enormity”, the new meaning of  “refusenik” has overwritten the old to such an extent that it’s no longer safe to assume the original usage will be understood.

But it can still be jarring to see the new meaning employed in text. And of course, one doesn’t have to use it; one can probably be a refusenik – I mean a dissident – about that for a while longer.

Crud distinctions

So this is what you don’t do. In the light of last time’s discussion about when you might, in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, be tempted to clean up a quote, here’s a clear example of the vast majority of cases when you wouldn’t and shouldn’t.

I could listen to showrunners talk all day, and this splendid roundtable with five of television’s most in-demand producers is a good example of the flair with which the LA Times covers its hometown industry – even in the face of competition from Variety, the film mags and any number of specialist websites. But in the transcription of the interviews beneath the video, that most genteel of vulgar terms, “crud”, has appeared next to the name of Fargo creator Noah Hawley.

Did he really say “crud”? Does anyone ever say that? Well, because we have the video at the top of the page, we can check. And, as you might have suspected, Hawley doesn’t say “crud” (at about the 31.45 mark on the tape); of course, he says “crap”. The word has been censored in print. It’s a classic example, presumably, of the misplaced sense of editorial propriety that Bill Walsh describes in Lapsing Into A Comma:

It’s pretty likely that somewhere someone is watching on CNN as somebody says, “I ain’t saying nothing to you [bleep]er [bleep]ers,” while reading a printed account of the same statement that says, “I respectfully decline to comment, my good man.”

The rest of the roundtable is transcribed punctiliously. And I don’t have a problem with occasional square-bracketed clarifications when they’re inserted into long-form quotes in which interviewees can clearly be heard speaking in their own voice. But it does seem odd, when happily publishing a video of someone saying “crap” on your own website, that you would bother to expurgate the word in the text beneath.

Not that swearing doesn’t present a tricky problem for editors; it does, especially in quotes. The rule here at the Tribune is that obscenities should be printed in full and uncensored within direct quotes, but may not appear anywhere else in the paper. The Associated Press disagrees, and recommends to “replace letters of an offensive word with a hyphen” when there is no compelling need to reproduce the term in full. But it too advises against censorship:

In reporting profanity that normally would use the words “damn” or “god”, lowercase “god” and use the following forms: damn, damn it, goddamn it. Do not, however, change the offending words to euphemisms. Do not, for example, change “damn it” to “darn it”.

All of which doesn’t help much in dealing with the knotty problem that started this whole discussion off a fortnight ago: outfielder Carlos Gomez’s anger at the all-too-accurate transcription of his words as they appeared in the Houston Chronicle.

When a player gives you this as a quote:

For the last year and this year, I not really do much for this team. The fans be angry. They be disappointed.

What’s the correct way to proceed?

1. Run the quote verbatim, as the Chronicle did? That’s the impeccable journalistic thing to do – except that the player might feel slighted about his halting English, as Gomez now does, other non-native anglophones may detect a whiff of native-speaker condescension, and a difficult debate about social disadvantage could develop over what was meant to be a simple baseball story.
2. “Clean up” the quote? Definitely not: the amount of work needed to turn it into standard English goes far beyond what even the most lax judge would consider acceptable. Huge amounts of it would have to be changed: “Last year and this year, I haven’t really done much for this team. The fans are angry. They are disappointed”.
3. Take some the words out of direct speech? You could do – except, again, because every single phrase is in non-standard English, you would have to report the whole thing indirectly, leading to the peculiar situation of a player “speaking to the fans” without giving a single actual quote.
4. Just not run the story at all? That wouldn’t satisfy anyone – not the reporter who brought the story in, the readers who like to hear from their beloved Astros, or the player who wanted to get a message through to the bleachers. (And how would you explain it to Gomez? “Sorry, Carlos, but we really can’t run this until your English improves”?)

After two weeks of thinking about it, I’m still not sure what I would do.