Respect the Elder

I regret to report that, after years with no serious incidents, someone has stumbled on to the biggest booby trap in the Tribune’s stylebook and set it off. A member of the newsdesk, having seen a piece on a Flemish master go up on the website, innocently emailed to say: “Hi, please can we commit to either Bruegel or Brueghel in this? We’ve got a bit of both at the moment.”

Well, experienced arts subs will know what is coming next. The web production editor did the kindest thing he could, which was simply to email the style guide entry to him without comment. It reads as follows:

Yes, indeed. It’s not just that the spellings are intrinsically tricky. It’s not just that there are two Pieters, the Elder and the Younger (as well as Jan, who although a son of the Elder, is also an Elder himself). It’s that the older one changed the spelling of the family name halfway through his life, but the younger one didn’t.

What chance do you have of deducing that if you don’t happen to know it? To my mind, following the inconsistency that the rule demands results in a gnomic hypercorrectness that baffles readers (and the newsdesk) – except that this is unquestionably what happened, as Brueg(h)el’s signed canvases testify. What to do instead? Are we going to call a Bruegel a Brueghel, when we would never dream of attributing a Jefferson Starship album to Jefferson Airplane?

It’s the only spelling I know that needs to be checked against a calendar as well as a biography, and that’s what puts it slightly ahead of the second biggest booby trap in the Tribune’s stylebook – the Lloyd Webber Rule.

Andrew Lloyd Webber (thus, no hyphen) has a double-barrelled name. He was ennobled in 1997, and the rules of the House of Lords require that all compound names be hyphenated for the purposes of a title, whether they usually are or not. He is therefore, formally, Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton.

Also, strictly speaking, as all British sub-editors know, if you are using a lord or lady’s title you should not use their first name with it (so, eg, you say Lady Rendell or Ruth Rendell: not Lady Ruth Rendell).*

In that light, our style on peerages demands three things:

(i) That the peer in question be given their full name only at first mention, rather than their honorific, for absolute clarity of identification.

(ii) That the honorific then be given at second mention.

(iii) That, in the egalitarian spirit of the Tribune, all persons of voting age (with rare exceptions) be usually referred to by surname only, no matter how honoured they may be. This rule even applies to peers. So, for example, the correct style for Laurence Olivier would be Laurence Olivier, first mention; Lord Olivier, second mention; Olivier, third and subsequent mentions.

So if you put the House of Lords convention together with the Tribune’s style guide, you get the Lloyd Webber Rule:

Hyphenating an unhyphenated surname on second mention only? Now that’s what I call a rule.

*Unless they are the younger son of a duke or marquess, obviously! Ah, if only the Telegraph style guide were not now behind a paywall; what a guide that was to the minutiae of aristocratic convention.

ї before е

It began on a faintly sceptical note – “what is the BBC up to now?” – but the Daily Mail’s change of heart, and change of house style from Kiev to Kyiv, happened quickly.

Last Wednesday, this article appeared on its website: for the Mail, a rare discussion of the implications of language that came close to publicly acknowledging the existence of the Daily Mail style guide (and how one would love to get a sight of that). And although the headline and first paragraph are redolent of the usual suspicion of the national broadcaster,

the rest of the article is actually an informative and lucid discussion of the question:

“Ukraine’s capital is known as Київ in Ukrainian and Киев in Russian. Both terms do not have a direct translation into the Roman alphabet, with Kiev, Kyiv, Kyyiv or Kiyev all being possibilities. 

But the spelling ‘Kiev’ is intrinsically linked with the old USSR due to its widespread use by the British and Americans while the city was under Soviet rule. 

This continued after independence in 1991, until ‘Kyiv’ was legally approved by the Ukrainian government …

Young Ukrainians see ‘Kiev’ as a relic of the Soviet past, and this view is now shared by the government, which launched a ‘KyivNotKiev’ campaign in 2018. 

At this stage, the Mail is still keeping its journalistic distance – the last line of the article is a brisk “MailOnline has contacted the BBC for comment”, interrogating the corporation on the reader’s behalf. But by Friday morning, the following note had appeared in the print edition:

and by Friday lunchtime, the website was leaping on board a social media bandwagon to get others to follow suit:

A style guide change within two days of first raising a style issue in public, and an explicitly advertised one at that: that’s unusual behaviour for the Mail.

Of course, commentators were not slow to point out that acknowledging preferred terms in this way might set an awkward precedent for Britain’s leading scourge of wokeness. As Neil Fisher of the Times acutely put it: “I love the distinction here between ‘virtue signalling’ and ‘a symbolic show of support’.”

But there seems no disagreement in the Mail, or among its critics, or in linguistic circles, about another aspect of the decision, which is the necessity and desirability of prescriptivism in these instances. Although linguists frequently condemn the imposition of editors’ arbitrary (sometimes very arbitrary) rules on published writing, few ever object when an oppressed group pleads for a deliberate change in language to be enforced. On Google Ngrams, which offers results for English up to 2019, the use of Kiev (blue line) always comfortably outstrips Kyiv (red line), which barely figures on the graph until the 1990s – one guesses as a result of independence – and then kicks up sharply from the early 2000s onwards, at around the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004. Kiev is, strictly speaking, the popular choice over time. But in circumstances like these, no one contends that corpus results should decide an argument on usage. Other considerations prevail.

These debates are not always easy ones: names and spellings matter to oppressors as well as the oppressed, as dictators’ renamings of cities and countries (and, in the case of President Nyazov of Turkmenistan, even days of the week) remind us. The Guardian thought hard before replacing “Burma” with “Myanmar” in copy, weighing the balance between an old name redolent of empire and a new one chosen by a brutal junta.

But the point is: these choices matter. They matter not just to editors in the newsroom, but to the people we are reporting on. Using a name, or shunning it, is, in the words of David Marsh, the Guardian’s former style guide editor, “a way of indicating, or at least of hinting at, approval or disapproval” – a way of signalling your support, and your values. Popularity and precedent, the principles on which descriptivism runs, are not equal to these circumstances. This is the other, not always acknowledged, side of prescriptivism – progressive, rather than regressive, and alive to the resonances embedded in a word, or even a spelling, that a purely descriptivist approach cannot hear.

Credible edibles

Regular reader Steve has spotted this in Charles County, Maryland, where a potentially alarming incident involving some schoolchildren seems to have lost something in translation on the website of WTOP-FM, Washington’s top news radio station.

If you’re as hardened and streetwise as, er, a sub-editor, you may know that “edibles” in this sense is starting to mean “way of consuming marijuana orally rather than by smoking”: it refers to the modern equivalent of cannabis brownies and so on. If not, you may be more than slightly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

That definition hasn’t made it into Collins, the Tribune’s house dictionary, yet, but it is now on Merriam-Webster Online. Even the dictionary, however, may not be able to help us with this paragraph:

You sense the first sentence may be missing some key words before “contained”. But I’m not sure what kind of garble has taken place in the second one. It’s positively alarmist: as Steve says, does this mean inedible candy is probably safer?

Thankfully, everyone seems to be all right:

(Hang, on I thought you said earlier they’d definitely eaten some?) But if the principal’s letter to parents went out with anything like that muddle over “edible candy” in it, who knows what the queues might now be like outside the county’s sweetshops.

The limits of SEO

Do you remember Mohammed Emwazi? Maybe it doesn’t ring a bell. Do you remember “Jihadi John”, though? Emwazi, it seems, was much better known by his Isis sobriquet than his real name: a basic analysis on Google reveals 103,000 hits for the latter versus 403,000 for the former.

But we didn’t call him that at the Tribune. The foreign desk asked us not to. Perhaps a mention somewhere in the copy to clarify that Emwazi was indeed known by that nickname, but never in the headline or at the top of the story. The desk didn’t want to “trivialise a serious situation”, or add tabloid pizzazz to the torture and beheading of hostages. So we didn’t. We’d have got more clicks if we had, but we stopped.

The same applies to the “QAnon Shaman”, the “Yorkshire Ripper” and several others. “It means we sometimes take a hit on search,” the web production editor writes, “but we do it so as not to make light of the individuals and their motives/actions”.

A few weeks ago on Horny Handed Subs of Toil, a member revealed that his publication asks subs to allow “mens”, no apostrophe, in certain circumstances for search engine optimisation, because Google fails to return as many results if you type it correctly as “men’s”. There was consternation, as you might expect, and some doubt as to whether it was in fact necessary, but it illustrated the kind of discussion that we normally have about SEO. Who’s top of the search results? How can we get more traffic? Are we doing the right thing? It’s much rarer, but perhaps more revealing about your organisation, to consider the things you won’t say even when Google wants you to.

With us, the reasons vary. Our coverage of the subpostmasters and subpostmistresses scandal is probably being hampered by our disinclination to say “subpostmasters” or “subpostmistresses”; we won’t use one without the other for reasons of inclusivity, but using both makes headlines unfeasibly long. We are going with “post office operators”, which is probably not what people are typing into their search engines. We insist on “register office” – the correct term – not “registry office”, even though Google Ngrams suggests that the latter has almost always been more popular than the former (and produces significantly more hits in search). And we say Brexiter, not Brexiteer – despite a two-to-one swing against it on Google – simply out of a determination, as strong today as ever, “not to make them sound like jolly pirates”.

Northern Star

Stopwatches at the ready: how long does it take you to “get” this Daily Star front page?

British readers will be at a considerable advantage here. But I’m British and write headlines for a living, and I had to stare at it for almost a minute in Sainsbury’s before I worked it out.

This is the Star, of course – the national newspaper that puts stories about escaped hamsters on its front page – but it’s not a joke or “silly” article. It’s a perfectly legitimate piece of media news, albeit one that could sit comfortably on an inside page.

If you still need pointers: it’s a story about a decision to give British regional accents more prominence on the BBC, and the headline is written in Yorkshire dialect as a form of illustration. This much you might gather from the pun on “happen” (or ‘appen) in the strapline. In Yorkshire, “happen” can be used as a sentence adverb that functions in the same way as “perhaps” or “maybe”, and means essentially the same thing (so the sense is “perhaps it will happen”).

It’s a classic Yorkshire-ism that would set most British readers on the right path, but what comes after in the main head is still a challenge. What they’re trying for, you eventually realise, is a rhyming pun on “News at 10” using the Yorkshire phrase ’Ow do?, meaning “how [do you] do?”. I think what makes it particularly difficult is that, having started marking the dropped h’s with apostrophes in the strap, they then abruptly stop, so I was stuck on “OW” (cry of pain) and “DOS” (Microsoft operating system) for about 45 seconds before the light dawned. ’OW DO’S might need a lot of punctuation for a five-letter phrase, but it would have been clearer.

I mean, I say it’s difficult, but that may only be an indication of how painfully southern I am (born in London, raised in Sussex). Perhaps a lot of people got it straightaway. Still, given that the story is about unseen continuity announcers rather than well-known frontline newsreaders, it’s not 100% clear what Sophie Raworth (Surrey-born, crisp RP) is doing on the front page, or why she has acquired a northern accent and flat cap. News anchors being required to fake a dialect? I may be behind the curve slightly on this, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what it says in the text.

O Capt, my Capt

Captain Sir Tom Moore? Sir Captain Tom Moore? Not everybody got it the right way round when the Burma veteran and beloved fundraising champion died earlier this month, but on our subs’ desk we were wrestling with a different question. Should we be abbreviating his rank?

The style guide editor emails:

There’s been a divide on this in terms of whether to abbreviate the Captain to Capt, as per the military ranks section of the style guide. That section refers to how to describe serving officers, but in Moore’s case he was retired, and had actually been promoted to honorary colonel last year. Captain Tom was the nickname by which he was known so shortening to Capt Tom seems a bit jarring. 

I understand shortening to Capt might be useful for tight furniture, but doesn’t seem necessary generally. The case seems similar to other examples where a rank has become part of a nickname or refers to a fictional character – we wouldn’t write Capt Beefheart, Col Tom Parker or ground control to Maj Tom.

Accordingly, the style guide now reads:

That seems fairly comprehensive: I don’t think even the Telegraph’s style guide addresses that last issue.

But the good thing about working at a broadsheet is that you never have to stop making distinctions. The deputy production editor replies:

In fact, he had no right to be called Capt Moore [the abbreviated form] anyway. You have to be a Major or above to retain your title in retirement (in the army; a naval captain is a higher rank, so can be retained). https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/professions/the-armed-forces/

Even at a left-leaning, republican-curious publication such as the Tribune, an appeal to Debrett’s like this glows with prestige. (And it can also help with some of those baffling ranks. L/CoH? No, me neither, but it’s “Lance-Corporal of the Horse”, in the Household Division.) Now the only question is: what to do about Adm Ackbar?

First-paragraph blues

The column opens with a quotation:

Actually, some Googling reveals that the quote (from John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy) is actually a question and answer – two people speaking, not one – so there should be a closing quotation mark after “Keynesian”.

Actually, hang on. The whole thing is a quotation with dialogue inside it, so there ought to be a closing quotation mark at the end:

And of course an opening quotation mark at the start. The style at the Tribune is for quotation marks that form part of a drop-capital paragraph to be single when they open, and double when they close, in the body text. Thus:

But now that just looks like an opening double quote. Will readers understand that they are in fact two opening single quotes in a row? What if we go double-single?

Yikes. Three giant orange quotation marks. And look what happens to the line breaks.

It looks increasingly – and I hate contemplating this – that I’m going to have to compromise. In extreme circumstances like these, it is sometimes suggested that the opening paragraph can be rewritten. I always refuse to do it: the formatting should serve the writing, not the other way round. And in this case, I’m hardly about to start rewriting Le Carré’s bestselling dialogue to fit the column width.

So it turns out that if you quietly dispense with one of the opening quotes and tighten the gap between the two dropped characters, the paragraph suddenly fits neatly on six lines:

That looks nice. It’s wrong, but it looks nice. It’s good to have something to sweeten the pill of expediency. And it lets the reader get smoothly into the flow of the column without tripping over a picket of inverted commas. Or that’s what I’m telling myself.

One ‘k’ in TikToker

More confirmation that that small cloud of dust on the horizon is actually the BuzzFeed style guide, racing away from the rest of us towards previously uncharted parts of the language. Some other style guides have a Twitter account, but not a Twitter account like this:

In case you, like me, are wondering what at least half of this means, let’s take it item by item. (I’ve looked things up in Urban Dictionary so that you don’t have to.)

 

Social video app originating in China in which (young) people lip-sync to short bursts of music or perform in other ways and share the results. Hugely popular; worries parents

The number of times you and a correspondent on the video-messaging app Snapchat have exchanged messages in quick succession (yes, they count such things)

Needs no explanation for Gen X-ers raised on The Dukes of Hazzard. Not quite sure why this is new – perhaps just to indicate that it’s closed up, not hyphenated

No, I had no idea either, but it’s short for Fake Instagram (account); a pseudonymous Instagram account that runs in parallel with one’s real Instagram (rinsta) but is made visible only to select friends (and not, one takes it, parents). Used to document unsayable thoughts, disastrous selfies and other unpolished content

Form of pop music sung in Cantonese and strongly associated with Hong Kong; also popular in many other parts of south-east Asia

We don’t have an entry for this in the Tribune style guide, which goes straight from “straitened circumstances” to “Strategic Rail Authority”

Quite surprised this was new for 2019 as well, as even we older types know what it means. To accidentally call somebody by sitting on your mobile phone and activating the screen (or in the old days, by pressing down on the keys)

Becoming widely embraced by baby boomers themselves, a phrase indicating weariness on a young person’s part with constant self-righteous nagging from their elders

An image, phrase, or piece of content likely or suitable to become an internet meme (the frog emoji, I am assuming, refers to the Pepe the Frog meme, in which a non-political cartoon character from an online comic was co-opted by white nationalists on social media and became a coded symbol indicating far-right sympathies)

A character in the latest Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian. Although of the same species as Yoda, the wise green sage from the original Star Wars films, it should be noted that the baby creature is not actually Yoda himself, and that the character’s official name is simply The Child

The people for whom this style guide will make the most sense. (To this day, I’m still unclear precisely what the sunglasses emoji is intended to signify)

‘Either is acceptable’

The style guide used to say this about “all right”:

Now it says this:

The Who, noted. Kingley Amis, noted. There are many voices. But what’s the style now? Is it all right? Is it alright? Is it both? (Also, doesn’t the difference between “she got the answers all right” and “she got the answers, alright!” depend on the presence of the comma, not the style of the word?)

Elsewhere in the guide, the entry for “swath” says:

Well, yes, they’re acceptable. They’re just variant spellings – they’re all acceptable. But that’s not the point.

Sometimes, a style choice signifies a particular way of thinking about a topic, a considered taking of sides on an important issue. But even when it’s just choosing between two versions of words that mean the same thing, the choice is still important. Successfully adhering to one style adds to the subliminal impression of an organisation as competent, alert and professional. The Guardian’s catastrophic history with misprints haunts it, in its nickname, to this day, even though there was nothing substantively inaccurate about the stories it published in those typo-strewn days. The accusation was an easy one to make – that imprecise spellers are also imprecise thinkers – and the mud stuck.

The most distinctive style choices can even act as canaries in the verbal coalmine: if the New Yorker ever starts getting inconsistent about the use of the diaeresis in “coöperate”, we will know something’s seriously wrong. Failing to specify a style in such instances may not change the meaning of a sentence, but it might start to change the way that your staff thinks about its job. “Either” should never be acceptable.

Fortunately, however, the style guide remains resonant and clear on the things that really matter:

 

 

Hands across the water

No matter how far a British warship sails, she’s always under the watchful eye of the Daily Mail. More so than ever these days, now that the Mail has fully functioning newsrooms on three continents, all operating  entirely transparently to its global readership. Well, almost.

Observe as 65,000-tonne HMS Queen Elizabeth sets off for the US on Saturday, a £3bn aircraft carrier on her maiden voyage, picking up two “US F-35B” fighters on the way. Weeks later, she “sails into the blue skies of New York City Friday” (the skies?): safely arrived, but now a “70,000 ton” ship costing “$4bn”, “multimillion-dollar” fighters embarked and accompanied by a quote from the “UK defence secretary”.

As we have discussed before, it’s not the big things that confound the emerging anglophone news agenda: everyone’s interested in Trump, Instagram models, celebrity affairs and viral video, no matter where they originate in the world. It’s the small things, the detail points that betray who you really think you’re writing for: the weights and measures, the indications (or not) of nationality, the brief explanations of localisms considered necessary or unnecessary. It may be a British-built ship flying American-made fighters, but all the available dialects for this story are local: there is no global English for the global newsrooms to speak.

Do readers notice? They don’t seem to complain. Well, not often.

And it’s just as well: it would be very hard to eliminate parochialisms at the micro level like this. Thank goodness that football pitches in Britain and America are both approximately the same size: