Journalese is news writers’ special lingo

Take “gubernatorial.” It’s a good example of journalese, words or phrases that hardly anyone uses except news writers. (That one always sounded to me like a peanut in a swimming pool.)

Newspaper reporters, and now radio and television news writers, employ a special lingo. Sometimes for a variety of reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. Often, as in gubernatorial, out of just plain pomposity. Another pompous case of journalese is “eponymous,” as they might call Ellsworth an eponymously named city, since it was named for Oliver Ellsworth. Most folks would never say such a thing.

News writers hate to use the same word twice. Whenever one of my copy editors caught me repeating a word in a later paragraph, she would circle it in red and write: “Echo!” But the contortions writers go through to avoid repetition are sometimes worse. I knew a sports writer who avoided writing “basketball” a second time by calling it “the casaba sport.” One time, to avoid journalese, I wrote several thousand words about a Chinese earthquake, using words like “quake” and “trembler” from time to time. But not once did I resort to “temblor” a rarity that is journalese at its worst.

Often the motivation is to make something sound bigger, stronger or more important than it is. “Many” sounds humdrum, so writers switch to “spate” or “rife,” neither one being part of normal spoken language. Instead of “colleagues” or “henchmen,” they misuse the word “cohorts,” which properly means legions, as in Lord Byron’s account of how the Assyrians’ “cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.” In news writing, stock prices and political careers don’t just drop; they “plummet.” And in news stories people rarely “persuade” anyone to do something; they must “convince” them to do it. A financial scheme doesn’t collapse; it “implodes.” Instead of being just “different,” something becomes “a far cry.”

Reporters can get tired of the plain verb “say,” so they use “state,” “aver,” “intone” (when they want to ridicule formal speech), and “insist” (meaning “but we know he’s lying”).

They don’t like starting too many paragraphs with “The,” so a whole lot of them begin, “Ironically ….,” whether any irony is involved or not. Another favorite lead-in is “Even as…,” which has a faintly biblical sound. “At week’s end” is right out of the old Time magazine style. And to go on in Timestyle, where “atop” came from, knows God.

Some of these crazy journalistic dodges have been creeping into spoken language, possibly because broadcasters favor them. Nowadays you may hear someone besides a movie reviewer or an art critic speak of the “venue” of a show, using a word normally reserved for use by lawyers, as in “a change of venue.” And you may hear someone say “provenance” (for origin or source).

But don’t expect a shrewd politician to use the word “gubernatorial.” He or she might be afraid folks would think they were putting on the dog.

Richard Dudman, of Ellsworth, has been a newspaperman for 64 years.