I guess it was when I heard NBC News reporter Dennis Murphy
say “one-year anniversary” on a report Saturday night. This man – nearly my age – went to an
exclusive prep school (Georgetown Prep
in Maryland) and is a graduate of Williams College. So he is at least
partially educated. I think it was
hearing an experienced network reporter like Murphy say something as stupid as
“one-year anniversary” that set me off on this, my latest rant about the decline
of appropriate grammar, usage, and structure of the English spoken (and
written) by news broadcasters.
Please have mercy for my wife, who must listen to me rant
about this stuff just about every day.
And don’t get me wrong –I know the difference between conversational and
formal English and am a huge advocate of the conversational form, even in news
reports.
Let’s face it: nobody says “fled on foot”. Everybody says “ran off” or “ran away”. Yet you hear that usage just about every day
on broadcast news, where the writer simply transposed the phrase from the
police report. Somewhere in my dusty old
consultant report files, I have a piece of broadcast news copy which contains
the phrase “fled on foot in an unknown direction with an undetermined amount of
United States Currency”. In English,
that’s usually said “ran off with a bunch of money”, yet the young person who
wrote the story (or, more appropriately, plagiarized the police report) was capable of speaking perfectly acceptable conversational
English – while NOT on the air or writing news copy.
That’s an example of what I used to call the
“process-product” fault – getting so wrapped up in the process of writing news
copy that you forget the goal is to produce copy which will be easily
understood by the “end-user”.
A report on a Green Bay TV station a few days ago told of “a
child who was injured by a firework”.
I’m not sure how that tortured usage came to be.
Here’s something that comes up several times every summer in
Madison. It’s a constant source of
belly-laughs to hear the local newsies deal with “Concerts on the Square”. There are six of them, every Wednesday night
from mid-June to the end of July. It’s
as though the plural noun can never be changed or altered: “The Concerts on the
Square are postponed tonight due to (and, of course, it should be “because of”)
bad weather”. Wouldn’t it be simpler to
say “Tonight’s Concert on the Square is postponed because of bad weather”?
These are the kind of folks who would never say “physics are
the hardest subject I ever took in High School” but can’t deal with
deconstructing a simple plural noun. And
let’s not even open the can of worms about those who say things like “I’m going
to the Brewer game tonight”.
If Journalism were truly a profession, rather than an
occupation, you’d have to pass some sort of test before being allowed to
inflict news on the general public. I’ve
often said if someone were serious about Journalism, they’d take a lot of
courses in English composition to learn the craft of properly using our
language.
Imagine what general medicine would be like if doctors
didn’t have to take and pass many courses in anatomy. Or what general aviation would be like if
pilots didn’t have to understand the physics of powered flight. Or if you went to a service garage where the
mechanics knew a lot about engines, but nothing about transmissions. Or a public school band director who knew a
great deal about playing brass instruments, but nothing about reeds or strings.
What I’m getting at is that so many people who are presumed
to be professional communicators seem to know so little about the fundamentals
of English. They couldn’t diagram a
sentence if you asked. They have no
understanding about subtleties like active versus (or, as the young folks say,
“verse”) passive voice. They’ve never
heard of terms like misplaced modifier or dangling participle. They wouldn’t
know a relative pronoun from a reflexive pronoun.
I realize this battle was lost a long time ago, and the
pushback I would get during my consulting days usually consisted of some form
of “you don’t need to be an auto mechanic to be a good driver; I don’t need to
know what makes it tick, I just need to know how to operate it”; or “ya, well,
the Beatles couldn’t read music, but they sure created a lot of damn good
songs”. Depending on my level of
frustration I would occasionally reply with something like “if you could write
news as well as John Lenon and Paul McCartney could write songs, your boss
wouldn’t have paid me to come here and try to teach you this stuff”.
People who say things like “it’s my parents’ 35-year
anniversary tomorrow” would never say “my mom is celebrating her 56-year
birthday tomorrow”. But a veteran
professional communicator like Dennis Murphy who says something as stupid as
“one-year anniversary” needs retraining.
That kind of crap is for the young folks.
