Romps, Tots and Boffins

by Robert Hutton

  First published 2013 by

  Elliott and Thompson Limited

  27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

  www.eandtbooks.com

  EPUB: 978-1-90965-344-3

  MOBI: 978-1-90965-345-0

  Text © Robert Hutton 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover Design: Mark Swan / kid-ethic.com

  Typesetting: Louis Mackay / www.louismackaydesign.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  What is this book?

  What is journalese?

  THE JOURNALESE LIST

  General

  A question of attribution

  Anatomy of a scandal

  Banned

  Foreign correspondent

  Police story

  Everyone’s a critic

  The Devil reads Grazia

  How we used to live

  In the bedroom

  Journalese fear scale

  24-hour party people

  Journalese row scale

  Property ladder

  Lifestyles of the rich and famous

  This sporting life

  The numbers game

  Things newspaper readers should know

  Terms of the trade

  Journalistic slang

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.’

  – Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

  When my friend Tom worked on a weekly Glasgow paper, he had a recurring nightmare that his editor demanded he produce, from nothing and at short notice, the ultimate story to go underneath the ultimate local newspaper headline:

  BOSSES

  BLAST

  CHIEFS!

  Technically, this is an English sentence – subject-verb-object – but its meaning is obscure. That’s because it’s written in the language of newspapers. This is the world of booze-fuelled rampages and crunch talks; of troubled stars and caged sex beasts. This is the world of romps, tots and boffins. This is the world of ‘journalese’.

  WHAT IS THIS BOOK?

  In 2003, when I was a sub-editor on the Daily Mirror, and the paper was going through a particularly self-indulgent phase,* I suggested that we should start printing footnotes, to give our poor readers half a chance of understanding what we were on about. The idea was not taken up, which was a shame, if not a surprise.

  Nine years later, now a political correspondent for Bloomberg, I was sitting in an airport in Jordan, waiting for a 4am flight. This was the government’s fault. Downing Street had decided that the prime minister would take a small plane with him on a tour of Arab states, with room for only a couple of journalists. The rest of us had to use scheduled flights, and that meant flying in the middle of the night.

  The travelling press pack had been awake for 24 hours, in which time we’d visited a camp for Syrian refugees, filed our copy, done a mass interview with the prime minister, filed our copy, joined the ambassador for drinks, filed our copy, gone for dinner, answered questions about our copy, gone for more drinks, and found our way to the airport. Queen Alia International Airport doesn’t have much to divert the weary traveller, so we sat on our suitcases, told jokes, and waited for our stories to appear online so that we could put them on Twitter. As we finally queued up to board our plane, I sent the following tweet:

  Travelling Lobby* now compiling list of words only still in use in newspapers: boffin, tots, pal, frogman, lags... #journalese

  At Heathrow I turned on my phone to discover I’d hit a nerve. Fellow hacks were sending in their own additions. ‘Vow’, ‘set to’, ‘swingeing’ and ‘funnyman’ obviously deserved a place. In its 8am bulletin, the Today programme kindly offered ‘pledge’. By 10am I had 50 items. At 10pm the political commentator John Rentoul mused that he might be able to get a book out of the hashtag, and had to be warned off. The following evening, the list had reached 225, but we still didn’t have ‘skyrocket’.

  For me, maintaining the list became an obsession. I would notice a phrase, make a note of it and tweet it, and then six suggestions would be tweeted back. By the time I’d dealt with them, there would be 12 more. Entire evenings disappeared. I discovered that, to a man who tweets journalese, every news story is a reason to pull out his phone.

  My only comfort was the knowledge that others had caught the bug. In the coming weeks, most of the contributions came in by Twitter, but not all. I would return to my desk in Parliament to find anonymous notes stuck to my screen. Political aides would sidle up to me and mutter a phrase before disappearing, or send one-word emails and text messages. At summits, where the British press sit together at long trestle tables, hunched over their laptops, political editors would type in silence, stare at their screens, and then shout: ‘Have you got “thinly veiled threat”?’

  I applied strict rules for the list, varied only when I felt like it, or changed my mind, or forgot a previous decision: the collection is of words and phrases that either only appear in news reports or that have a special meaning in journalism.

  A couple of weeks into the Journalese Project, as it became known, a reporter from one of our leading tabloids took me aside. ‘We’re worried that if you keep this up, we won’t be able to write anything at all,’ he said. But I’m not trying to ban words.

  Others took the opposite view: more than one person suggested to me that the list could be a useful reference for hacks approaching deadline and short of a word. Help yourselves, but that’s not what it’s for.

  A third use was proposed by the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, Ed Miliband. On a tour of Scandinavia that I was covering, his aides explained the Journalese Project to him. He was sceptical at first, but as we gave him examples, he began to join in. When our plane landed with a disturbing thump, he turned to me and said: ‘Leader Of The Opposition In Mid-Air Drama.’ His team’s only comment on a piece I wrote about him was on the headline: ‘Surely “woo” is journalese?’ an aide commented drily. On the third morning, Miliband came over at breakfast: ‘Your journalese game is obsessive. I woke up at 2am thinking “gainsay”.’

  It hadn’t struck me that it could be a game, but Miliband had a point. The easiest way to play it is to give each player a different newspaper. They go through it, scoring a point for each item on the list that they can find. The player with the FT scores double.

  But while this book may serve as a campaign for fresher writing, or a handy thesaurus for unfresh writers, or a game for two or more players aged eight and up, I don’t see it as any of those.

  To me, it’s footnotes for newspapers. Finally, readers will be able to understand what reporters are really trying to tell them. Why not ask your newsagent to deliver a copy of the book every day, along with your paper? Then you can cut out the relevant notes, and paste them at the bottom of each page. Or, if you’ve embraced the modern world, to the screen of your tablet.

  * Piers Morgan was editor and, seeing that he had fallen 10 places in the Guardian’s Media Power List, commissioned a three-page list of ‘The 100 Least Influential People in Britain’, where he wrote rude things about people he didn’t like. The surprise on days like this
was not that circulation fell, but that anyone bought the paper at all.

  * The collective noun for political correspondents is the Lobby, from our historic right to stand in Members’ Lobby outside the chamber of the House of Commons and try to speak to MPs.

  WHAT IS JOURNALESE?

  ‘Tecs Quiz Tug-of-Love Gymslip Mum On Murder Bid.’ All right, I made that one up. But headlines only a touch less ridiculous appear in British papers every day. They’re written in journalese, a language spoken, generally unconsciously, by tens of thousands of journalists, and apparently understood by their millions of readers.

  In newspapers, no one ever disagrees with someone else: they ‘clash’. If they explain their reasons, they ‘launch into a rant’. If they say a rude word, it’s an ‘astonishing foul-mouthed tirade’.

  But this is about more than hyperbole. Keith Waterhouse, whose brilliant On Newspaper Style remains an essential guide for writers more than 30 years after he first wrote it, described journalese as writing that evoked the image of a reporter filing copy.* He identified ‘tabloidese’ as a distinct sub-genre. These days that distinction is disappearing. The words he picked out as distinctive of The Sun and the Mirror are found in The Times and The Telegraph as well.

  The language of journalism is driven partly by space. People in other industries probably haven’t given much thought to the letter ‘m’, but we have. It’s really wide, at least one and a half times the width of most letters. An ‘i’, on the other hand, is a little thing of beauty. This matters when you’re trying to fit words into a small space, such as a headline. Short words that convey meaning become very valuable. Like ‘bid’, or ‘rise’. So much better than ‘attempt’ or ‘growth’.

  That’s not the whole story. Some words sound more exciting. ‘Slammed’ is really vivid. So is ‘rant’. Trying to catch people’s attention and hold their interest, exciting words are definitely better than boring words.

  But exciting words lose their shine with overuse. When we read of ‘growing fears’ these days, do we have any sense of excitement, or only a weary feeling that everyone’s going through the motions, like the cast of a movie franchise that’s had one too many sequels?

  Then there are the clichés. There’s a lot to be said for clichés. They’ve survived because they work. Journalism isn’t meant to be difficult literature, it’s meant to communicate information quickly and engagingly, often to people who’re not giving you their full attention. Familiar words, phrases and structures can be effective in that. They can also serve a purpose. Writing about British politics for a global audience, I periodically have to find a way to explain briefly some unfamiliar concept or archaic rule. If I find a good phrase that does the job, I squirrel it away for next time.*

  Clichés can even be enjoyable for the reader, just as a favourite song or a predictable ‘twist’ in a soap opera can be. A glance through the output of the most popular newspaper columnists suggests many readers must want a level of predictability.

  Often, though, clichés are a symptom of lazy journalism, writing that no longer wants to grab the reader by the throat and astonish them, but simply wants to file and move on. We should excuse some of that: most media organisations are cutting staff and expecting fewer people to produce more copy. Sometimes, ‘file and move on’ is a journalist’s job description.

  We’ll excuse some of it, but not all of it. And we’ll start by not excusing ‘tragic tot’. If you’re going to write about a dead three-year-old, you should do it well, and with thought. ‘Tragic tot’ was glib and appalling even the first time, many years ago, that someone put it in print. If you find you’ve typed it, slam your fingers in your desk drawer and, when the pain subsides, start again.

  Not all journalese is bad. The inventors of some phrases deserve acknowledgement: ‘mad cow disease’ and ‘test-tube baby’ are lovely examples. They take obscure scientific terms, and replace them with vivid expressions that immediately convey meaning. I would give their creators medals if I could.

  How is the internet changing this? When copy appears on-screen, the columns are generally wider, meaning that headlines of short words running across four or five lines are no longer necessary. Twitter treats both an ‘i’ and an ‘m’ as a single character, and allows 140 of them, space that we would have regarded as impossibly generous even on the FT, where I once wrote a 52-character headline.

  The ability to publish instantly has also changed the character of journalism. Those of us who work on what used to be called newswires have always been under pressure to beat rivals by seconds. In recent years, we have smiled as newspaper colleagues, who used to see such anxieties as beneath them, have boasted of being the first to tweet some incremental development. These tweets generally begin with a piece of journalese imported from television: ‘BREAKING’. It should only be used ironically.

  Still, the internet may be putting journalism’s business models under threat, but it hasn’t stopped the spread of journalese. If anything, it has increased now that readers can effortlessly flick between news platforms. With hordes of young, underpaid and under-edited journalists employed to sit on each paper’s website, cutting and pasting (sorry, ‘following up’) rivals’ stories, it’s no surprise that it’s increasingly difficult to tell tabloid language from broadsheet.*

  In looking at why journalese is so prevalent, though, it’s hard to get away from the idea that newspapers are written that way simply because that’s how young journalists think a journalist ought to write. Not only young journalists – I’ve known senior executives on newspapers who saw it as their job to insert cliché and tired hyperbole into every story.

  The problem may get worse, rather than better. As a sub-editor at the Mirror, it was my job to cut and rewrite copy so that it fitted into the space allotted, was free from errors, and read well. Newspaper subs are an odd bunch. They work at night, but in an office. They never meet the public, or management, and dress and grow beards appropriately. If you want to picture one, imagine an academic recently released from prison. In the days when their work was treasured by their employers, you would never have picked out the subs as some of the best-paid people in journalism. It always amazed me that some of the Mirror’s were allowed past security at Canary Wharf.

  There are certainly bad subs out there, but our crew spent far more time taking journalese out of stories than we spent inserting it. When I took the job, in 2000, I was assured it would be a job for life if I wanted it. I left, three years later, to become a sub at the FT, and then to go back into reporting, but I told myself that a good sub will never starve. These days that feels less true. Like many poorly understood ‘back office’ functions, subs’ benches are being closed down. I cannot imagine that this will improve either the accuracy or the quality of newspapers.

  Journalese: The Case for the Defence

  1. It’s short, and space is at a premium (which is a terrible word: seven letters, two of them big, wide ‘m’s; try ‘pricey’, ‘costly’ or ‘costs’; better yet, recast the sentence: ‘It’s short, and there’s no space’). There just isn’t that much room in headlines, especially on tabloids. So we have ‘raps’ for ‘attacks’, and ‘in’ as an all-purpose linking word. Such as ‘CRITICS IN SICK RAPS’, which fits over two lines across two columns of a tabloid, but also requires translation (‘People who didn’t like something have made some unpleasant attacks on it.’)

  2. It’s lively. Journalism is writing for people who’re eating their breakfast, or commuting, or trying to understand what’s just happened so they can make a decision. It shouldn’t be hard work. It should carry the reader along, and punchy words help.

  3. It’s familiar. Busy readers know what ‘crisis talks’ are without having to be told. Journalese helps them get the idea quickly.

  Journalese: The Case for the Prosecution

  1. It’s clichéd. Some of it uses images that have been out of date for decades. Readers pay for our writing. They at least deserve fresh clichés.
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  2. Lazy writing encourages lazy thought. A colleague once observed to me that there was a temptation for political journalists to cast every story as a question of which minister should have to resign. The world is a subtle and interesting place, but you and your readers will miss that if you write in journalese.

  3. It’s unnecessary. The better the actual news story, the less journalese there’ll be in the reports. Good stories, told right, in plain English, sell themselves. Journalese is like a poker player’s ‘tell’: it’s a sign the writer is trying to make a weak tale look better than it is. Try finding better stories instead.

  4. It’s code. I know what ‘Chef lag is on run’ means, roughly: someone who has something to do with cooking has escaped prison. But I’ve been reading newspapers most of my life. If we want to win new readers, we can’t expect them to learn a new language first.

  AMERICA’S JOURNALESE

  Three months after I began this project, I discovered that two Americans, Paul Dickson and Robert Skole, had been conducting a similar one, and had just published Journalese – a dictionary for deciphering the news. I wondered briefly whether my work had been done for me, but it was quickly clear that America’s journalese is a different dialect from Britain’s. A comparison of their list and this one could inform a dissertation on the differences between British and US journalism. They have no ‘lethal cocktails’ or ‘snubs’, but they do have ‘brouhaha’ and ‘irksome’. They have no ‘boffins’. There are only five references to sex, a subject that gets its own section here. They do have ‘romp’, but to an American, it means something amusing or comic. This perhaps explains why USA Today felt safe to headline a soft-news piece: ‘Easter Egg Roll: Celebs, tots romp on White House lawn’. In Britain, that would have been a much bigger story.