Matthew Arnold was a British poet and frequent newspaper contributor in the 1870s. He once observed, “Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
That’s something for language purists to keep in mind when they see grammatical or logical errors in news reports.
News reporters and editors rarely have the luxury of putting a work aside for a few days, then taking a fresh look at it.
Even here at The Topeka Capital-Journal, you might find an occasional lapse.
Pat Kelly, our news editor, is doing his bit to keep those to a minimum. He occasionally sends out an internal email to everyone in the newsroom with a list of errors he has seen in copy crossing his virtual desktop. One item in particular caught my attention recently.
“Don’t write ‘sub-freezing’ temperatures. If the temperature is freezing, it doesn’t need ‘sub.’ ”
That makes a lot of sense. I hope I’m not the one who committed the error.
■ A headline on a story in The Capital-Journal recently read: “No funds found missing.”
At first it seemed another oxymoron had been found. Is it possible for something to be simultaneously found and missing?
Of course, any reader knows what the headline meant. It meant an investigation had been conducted to determine if any money was missing, but it was all accounted for.
Further, I couldn’t think of any way to write a headline that would fit the space allotted that was more straightforward.
One might write, “No missing funds found,” but that just makes it worse.
“Money accounted for” would nearly fit the space, but would amount to ending a sentence with a preposition — something TCJ readers won’t stand for. (Or rather, “something for which TCJ readers wouldn’t stand.”)
Headline writing isn’t as easy as it appears. Early in my career I worked a stint on the copy desk, editing reporters’ copy and writing the headlines.
In those pre-computer days we had to estimate the length of a headline based on a modified counting system.
A headline of a certain size that had to fit into a certain space might challenge the copy editor to describe the gist of the story in 19 characters.
But not all characters take up the same amount of space. A capital “W” counted for two characters, while a lowercase “i” counted as half.
So lighten up on the copy editors, folks. They are doing the best they can.
■ By the way, if you find no errors in this column, it’s as likely a tribute to Pat Kelly and the other copy desk people as to me.