Some one asked William T. Stead, the English journalist, whether he would have an astronomer or a newspaper writer prepare an article on sun spots, and Stead’s instant reply was that the astronomer would write it for astronomers in language that no one else would understand, but the reporter would tap the brain of the specialist and so serve out his knowledge that the ordinary reader would understand.
All the tendency of present-day writing is to translate technical language, scientific terms, professional formula, and medical terms into plain common sense English. Let the good work go on!
And let not the young man contemplating a journalistic career be persuaded that newspaper English is not good English. The men who wrote for the newspapers of the Spanish-American War, of the great political movements of Europe of later years, of our great industrial developments, and of the World War in particular, are the very men who have rewritten these things into history for magazines and for book publishers. When they wrote this information for the newspapers, distinguished college professors and learned critics called it “journalese”; when it appears in the reviews and in books they speak of it as “literature.”
In praise of newspaper writing as good training for writers, Anatole France has this to say:
It is an inveterate prejudice to believe that one spoils his pen in writing for the newspapers. On the contrary one gains in that way suppleness as also ease and that readiness without which the phrase does not move gracefully and never smiles. It is a good school say what one will.
Some of the modern English seems very practical and easy to understand. The use of the words “scrapped” and “junked” as verbs seems to have been put permanently into the language by the Washington Disarmament Conference. A well known journal says, “The newspapers were kidding him,” and very likely we will have to accept “kid” as a verb. The entire Navy now says of a man who goes from one place to another that he “shoves off.” It is proper to say of a dissatisfied man that he is “peeved,” according to the dictionaries, but its use is new. Food is now known as “eats” and the pleasures of the pipe or cigar are called “smokes.” A recent head-line said, “Flivvers furnish booze to soldiers.” Another newspaper transforms “hokus” into a verb: “Complained that she hokused him,” while the scholarly New Republic says of some occupation of youngsters that “it gives them no time to go on the loose.”
A new invention brings out a new crop of words. We have “automobile,” “garage,” “speedometer,” “limousine,” “taxi,” “taximeter,” “motorboat,” “motorcycle,” “chauffeur,” all useful and necessary additions to our elastic language. The airplane has brought as many more. Our slang goes on apace.
Make your sheet easy to read, as well as easy to understand. The other day a morning paper in a London cable said, “Wheat sold at 60 shillings a quarter in the corn market to-day.” That sentence gave the mind of the reader a jolt and a pause, in the attempt to translate shillings and quarters into cents and bushels. Few American readers are familiar with foreign languages, hence all words, as well as quotations, in the French, German, or other tongues, should be made into English. Pounds, marks, and francs should be computed into dollars and cents, kilometers into miles. And who knows where in New York State the Thirty-fifth Congress District is? Why not call it the Syracuse district? Or who can tell where in New York City the Sixteenth Precinct police station may be? Why not identify it as the Mercer Street station?
On the first Sunday of President Wilson’s stay in Paris he went to church and the Associated Press report said the clergyman preached from Isaiah ix. 9. Naturally the words of the text were not transmitted at full cable rates; and naturally, too, a certain curiosity was felt as to what they were. Yet of six New York daily newspapers examined, one only had taken the pains to dig out the text and print it. That sheet certainly served its readers better than did the others.