Sonia Jaffe Robbins, Editing Workshop, G54.1123, WEEK IV
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Word use and abuse encompasses:
Word Choice
Neologisms
Making the Choice
Euphemisms
Clichés
Watching for word use and abuse can be one of the more enjoyable parts of copy editing. You get the chance to see good writers creating new metaphors and ways of expressing ideas. You also see poor writers fall flat on their faces. The copy editor's responsibility is to appreciate the former and save writers from the latter. But remember: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT. Don't change one word for another just because you would use that other word if you were writing the story. Let the writer's words stand, unless they are clearly wrong.
However, determining whether something is clearly wrong is not a simple matter. Our job as copy editors is to help writers communicate in the clearest and best way possible. But what "the clearest and best way possible" is varies from one publication to another, and from one kind of story to another. Time magazine edits all of its prose as though it came from one typewriter, written by one mind. At the other end of the spectrum are publications like Rolling Stone or The Village Voice, which encourage writers to use their own "voice." And even newspapers like the New York Times increasingly include personally written features in a personal "voice."
Dependence on dictionary meanings, or the frequency with which copy editors say "there's no such word" will depend on where you work. The extremes of either of the editorial viewpoints above leads either to bland and boring writing or to incomprehensibility. (For free-lance copy editors, fiction clearly awards the writer the greatest freedom in word choice and tests the copy editor's skill at enhancing the writer's voice without altering it.)
Word choice is one area where the writer's voice is evident, yet where the copy editor has to help with clarity. Some writers on words say that any way a native speaker of English uses a word is by definition correct, because usage means exactly that, how words are used. On the other hand, other word experts write about, and usually denounce, the way the language is "misused." The first can be called descriptivists, the latter prescriptivists. Descriptivists say word scholars can and should only describe how words are used; prescriptivists say we should prescribe the correct way for words to be used. (And they usually want words to be used the way they learned to use them.)
| What do you think about this question? Which group do you think you are in? |
Americans have no Academie Française to decree what words are acceptable, which aren't, and what are acceptable meanings. For example, the Academie Française in the 1980s decreed that "Americanisms" were forbidden in official publications, and French companies were fined for using such terms as "le weekend" or "le drugstore" in advertising copy. Copy editors may think of themselves as the unofficial Academie Française of the U.S., but we have no enforcement power, other than our persuasiveness in explaining to writers why our word choice is better than theirs. We rely on dictionaries, but even here, there is no authoritative voice copy editors can unfailingly appeal to.
American dictionaries began with Noah Webster, who published his first dictionary of American English in 1806. Webster's Tenth Collegiate Dictionary, published by Merriam-Webster, is the direct descendant of Noah Webster's, but many other publishers publish their own dictionaries, some with the word Webster in their title (like Webster's New World Dictionary, AP's official dictionary and published by IDG), others without it (like The American Heritage Dictionary and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language).
In the early days of dictionary making, dictionaries were thought of as performing a function like the Academie Française. They were authorities, prescribing the "right" spelling and the "right" meaning of words. Around the middle of the 20th century, however, highlighted by the publication of the unabridged Webster's Third International Dictionary in the early 1950s, prescription ceased being the primary reason for a dictionary. Rather than telling users of the language "right" from "wrong," dictionary editors "described" how the language was being used. Webster's Third was accused of abdicating its authority, in some cases of opening the gates to barbarism and perhaps leading to the fall of civilization, because it was no longer prescriptive; there are still people who treasure their dog-eared Second Edition, even if it has no words coined since the early 1930s. The same accusations of abdicating authority were made against the early 1990s edition of the Random House dictionary, because it lists such words as "chairperson," "herstory," and "waitron," as well as spellings like "womyn."
| Check the etymology of "history" in several dictionaries. Do you think a new word is needed to make the term gender neutral or gender inclusive? |
Dictionaries are compiled by editors and associated lexicographers who spend at least an hour a day reading newspapers, books, magazines of all kinds to see how words are used. Each time they find a word used unusually, or a word that currently isn't in the dictionary, they write a citation slip (noting the word, how it used, publication, date), which is then stored both on paper and on computer. The Merriam-Webster citation list has at least 14 million citations.
What determines whether a new word or a new meaning is added to the dictionary? It's not only a question of how many times it appears in print, but also where it appears. The word "ayatollah," for example, was accepted pretty quickly, but "humongous" took about 18 years. A dictionary editor says "humongous" first appeared in its citation file in the late 1960s from college newspapers, but not until the word started appearing in political cartoons, then advertisements, and finally in "reputable" papers did dictionary editors accept it. Once a new meaning is accepted by dictionary editors, it is added after older, more common meanings.
New words ("neologism" means "newly created words" or "new meanings for established words") are introduced into the English language all the time and standard English words change their meanings. These processes have occurred in the English language for centuries -- which is why Shakespeare is sometimes hard to understand and Chaucer reads like a foreign language. As words change, or new words are introduced, controversy arises: the prescriptivists argue that the change is unnecessary, and probably bad for the language, while the descriptivists often welcome the change as reinvigorating the language.
| Can you think of examples of new words in your lifetime? Which of these words have you accepted, and which rejected? Which words of the American Dialect Society's Words of the Year do you think will survive, and which won't? |
Copy editors must negotiate a very fine line regarding word choice. On the most mundane level, we watch out for homonyms (words that sound the same but are spelled differently), those words that spell checkers can't pick up -- prescriptivists and descriptivists don't disagree here. On a slightly higher level, we watch for words that are spelled similarly (e.g., "effect" and "affect"), orhave different shades of meaning (e.g., "ensure" [to guarantee...], insure [to take out insurance against loss]).
Here is where prescriptivists and descriptivists begin to diverge. If these different shades of meaning begin to fade in usage, when does a copy editor's correction of "misuse" become a hopeless attempt to stop the rising tide? When does the copy editor "preserve," when "give in"? With "ensure" and "insure," Webster's English Usage now reports that usage is indistinguishable, and the New World Dictionary notes that "ensure" is an obsolete variant of insure.
Prescriptivists think that writers giving new meanings to words indicates an imprecise use of words, which is considered a sign of imprecise thinking. "Fuzzing" the meaning of words can lead us to "lose" a word that was useful because it sounds like another word that means something different (see "fortuitous," below). Others think this "fuzzing" of meaning is a sign of imaginative use of the language and leads to new ways of thinking about issues, and especially new ways of describing new things in the world.
As the language changes, there is a period of perhaps 30 to 50 years in which editors and copy editors (only prescriptivists?) hold the line for word distinctions. If the need for change is strong enough, it will eventually show up in the descriptivist dictionaries and usage manuals, and a new generation of editors and copy editors will wonder what the fuss was all about.
| Do you think that copy editors are inherently conservative? |
Here are a few language controversies of the past 30 years, which may also crop up on copy-editing tests.
Copy editors learn to look closely at what words mean and whether writers are using words accurately. But we also learn to be flexible and to evaluate new words and new meanings by asking: is there a useful, necessary need for this change? (For example, the word "survivor" is increasingly replacing the word "victim," as in "a cancer survivor." Are you a prescriptivist or a descriptivist on this change? What is gained or lost in this word change?
The job of the copy editor is to recognize neologisms, and then ask: Is this word necessary? The publication you work for will determine how readily you will accept neologisms or how strict a scrutiny new words will face. A trade publication may readily accept new words as part of a specialized vocabulary, while a general interest publication would reject the same words as jargon until they are accepted by a mainstream dictionary.
Some questions you might ask to evaluate neologisms:
How would you apply these questions to the following words?
Here are some words that officially entered English, i.e., were included in dictionaries
| What words from the 2000s do you think might make it into dictionaries in the new millennium? |
Last revision: January 16, 2005
