Back when I was a reporter and the news organization was not so flat, editors wielded great power. One year, a colorful and opinionated editor decided to start a list of words that were to be banned from copy. The idea was to bar jargon and imprecise words and phrases. Forget about cop-speak such as "the perpetrator fled on foot." Don't say "area man wins Nobel Prize," just name his hometown. And then there was the word beloved of municipal engineers and planners: "infrastructure."Basically, the word stands for everything of service to a city or town, including roads, bridges, sewers, traffic systems, lighting and assorted cables, wires and pipes of every kind. Here is a good graphic image from the New York Times that sums it up.
In recent times, the word has come up quite often in the big debate over where people should live. Suburban sprawl (is that a banned term?) has caused some planners to advocate development in the cities where the, uh, infrastructure is already in place.
The term also comes up when somebody has to figure out how to pay for repairs. "Infra-" means "beneath" in Latin, and much of the stuff is under the ground or maybe, in the case of bridges, beneath our notice until they start falling into rivers. Then we see public fretting about the upkeep of these vital systems.
Anyway, the recent use of the word in an actual headline last week as well as in the lede (newsroom speak for lead paragraph) gave me a start. The editor who once banned it from copy is long gone from New Jersey and a lot of copy editing is now done in a galaxy far, far away from the local newsroom. The rules and the times have changed and no offense is intended to current reporters and editors. Still, it was disconcerting to me to see the word.
Even as a blogger, I try to keep in mind the tenets this editor upheld. Five years after retiring, I wrote this recommendation on LinkedIn: “Karen's news sense was remarkable, both for gleaning story ideas from multiple sources and for working with reporters to tell stories in the most concise and engaging way.”
Kren, as she preferred to be called, will always be my lodestar for clear writing.
--Bernice
You might be pleased to know that my own editors to this day continue to preach this same piece of advice: one example that comes to mind is the word "adjacent," which we reporters routinely are instructed to change to "next to" in copy (the "fled on foot" example also happens to remain a source of consternation whenever it pops up). Also, CN news copy still gets its first reads and edits performed by on-site staff before being sent southward to Monmouth County for processing.
ReplyDelete...and in defense of a colleague, the event being covered did feature the word in its name: the Somerset County Business Partnership and U.S. Chamber of Commerce's "Water Infrastructure Summit." -Mark
I don't think "infrastructure" is any more imprecise than "public safety" or "education" or "social services" and those seem to continue to be used with impunity. But thanks for the lovely continuing soliloquy on copy editing.
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