Thursday, March 11, 2010
Chicagoland / Media The Several Dozen Words You Can't Say on WGN
Posted by Whet Moser on 03.11.10 at 12:00 PM
This list of words and phrases banned from WGN Radio by CEO Randy Michaels is making the rounds. Perhaps it's wrong for me to be supporting Randy Michaels in anything, but I'm entirely behind getting rid of "literally," "white stuff," and especially "giving 110%."
I have beef with a few - "bare naked" is unfortunately verboten, but as long as "buck naked" and "naked as a jaybird" are overlooked, I can deal. I could go either way on "untimely death," but fortunately he doesn't seem to have explicitly forbidden "timely death."
Comments (6)
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I would like to see an addendum to this list to include proper pronunciation of Chicagoland expressways. If the morning traffic women say "Kinnedy" one more time, it might be my untimely death they next report on.
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"Eye Rack or Eye Ran"
That's OK, Stevie Wonder wasn't going to stop by anyway. I'm going to have a corn beef with cold slaw in Mr. Michaels' honor.
The phrases I would like to see banned from all media of every kind are "critics say", "critics have complained" or any other similar use of the word "critic" in that context. That is one of the clearest demonstrations of lazy journalism that one could do. If you think it is important enough to report what another side of an issue believes you can come up with more specific language to describe that side than "critics". Unfortunately, I think I encounter those phrases in the media at least once a week.
Having read the list, I find that I agree with most of his choices. Finding fresher and more direct ways of informative expression is a goal worth pursuing, and most of his listed offenders are pervasive, especially on TV.
Whether a CEO should be the one micro-mandating such matters is another matter. Where are the editors and veteran writers who might mentor the intern army of aspiring Drudges, kicking these copy crutches out from under them? But I know... such things require time, and in today's news world, the speed at which you post to the web seems to be more important than how succinctly you express yourself. "Mentor" is a word you don't hear too much any more... like "citizen."
It's one thing to recommend that certain words and phrases not be used. It's entirely another to ban them and ask co-workers to keep tabs on slip-ups. I defy any of you to give the news twice an hour every day and keep in mind 119 words that are forbidden. Does anal retentive have a hyphen?
And another thing. (Sorry about the sentence fragment.) In my work experience (not media-related) I've noticed that people start to micromanage when things have gone downhill since they took over. Instead of thinking, "Gee, maybe we need a whole new approach." they think, "These people still aren't getting it right! I'll need to make up a lot of new rules so they'll do things correctly."
