A grueling look at the perfect storm of wordgate

In a news article today about this upcoming book, a writer used the word "grueling" in reference to my Last Great Race. Not many readers will realize that was a joke. In the early years and still, writers use that word so often it should be named officially "The Grueling Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race." Partly as a joke and partly as a source of pride, I have written two books and several articles about the race and have never once used the word "grueling." This reporter knows that and put the word in quotes just to make the dig. It's all in good fun as far as I am concerned but it brings up a long-standing issue for me of writers picking up trending words and then using them so often they lose all impact.

Along the same line, not too long ago there was a post on Facebook about grammatical errors and one commenter said he gets furious when someone puts two spaces after a sentence (something new to me when I went back to editing a few years ago). Furious, mind you, over an extra space. There's a fellow headed for a heart attack before he's 40.

After a period of working with those hard and fast grammar and style rules, I learned that lesson. Editing writers from all over Alaska, one of whom actually submitted a story written in crayon on a brown paper grocery bag (remember those?) I learned to hold back on judgments. Many of those writers knew very little about grammar, spelling, syntax or anything else. But what they could do was tell a good story. To edit them I shut off my elitist attitude toward editing and did what I could to make those stories presentable without destroying the writer's voice. I had learned to adjust, fit the rules to the situation, not fit the situation to the rules.

Then, when I first joined Facebook I came across a large number of posts correcting people's grammar and spelling. I even commented in a time or two, unable to resist. But I should have known, in my years as an editor I had learned to leave that habit at the office. Friends and family do not appreciate you constantly correcting them and pretty soon you find you have no one to talk with. Also it seemed to be a sign of a newcomer to the social media to correct those errors or post memes about grammar. After a while it wears thin and then you go on to cute cats or Hillbilly Hangout.

A simple misspelling or a grammatical mistake once in a while became tolerable as long as the message came across all right. The only exception comes when someone who is supposed to be a professional writer consistently makes these mistakes that a comment might be apropos.

More often than those mistakes, though I have noticed those trending words. A writer somewhere will employ a new term for something and before long every writer across the country will be using the same term until it grates on the mind like a loud bell between the ears.

One such fairly recent one is the word "roughly," used to mean about or approximately. Once a story is enough.  Once a day is already too much, and when it gets into every story in every publication throughout the country it has lost all of its impact. That term started with one writer at the newspaper where I worked and within a couple of weeks everyone was using it and only it to express an approximation. Example: "The ship was roughly the length of three football fields." And, answer this, why is "football field" the distance measure most often used for lengths of more than 300 feet? Does the writer think the audience is so stupid 930 feet can't be envisioned? Some writers will go to amazing lengths to use the football field comparison. It's only a matter of time until space is measured in football fields instead of light years.

There are others, among them this list of "enough-already" terms:

The first two relate to each other.

"met up" It seems no one any more can write any form of the verb "to meet" without the "up." Met up meet up, meeting up with. Just "met" is fine.

"Back in …" Every announcer on television news and sports now has to say "back in" and then some date in the past.  Instead of "back in 1978" just say "in 1978."

And here are some terms we have just had enough of (yes I know about prepositions):

Anything 'gate.

Perfect storm – how often is that used to describe a congestion of elements? I remember in the movie when the satellite weather photo of the storm came on the screen saying way too loud "geesus." It was one of those times my daughter dug her elbow into my ribs hard enough to leave a bruise. That was a perfect storm. There are very few others, particularly not when the term is extended to contexts like politics.

Boots on the ground – come on, once was enough, twice was almost too much already, but about a million times later it has lost its punch.

Baby bump – good grief, enough!

Poop – this has become the acceptable word for human excrement even in the most serious of contexts.  Can't writers find anything less cute? There are several options.

Arc – This is a fairly new one that refers to the area influenced by an event. It was used for the Newton school shootings to describe the general area where those victims lived.

Hitler;

Nazi;

dictator; Please, if the president were any of these things, you would:

a) be in prison of dead just for saying any of those;

b) not be able to say them anyway because you would not have free access to this Internet we have come to know and love.

Hero – enough said about that, overused. Heroes are actually rare.

Amongst – this has been showing up more frequently.  It is principally a British usage. "Among" is the way Americans spell it. Like "grey" is British, "gray" is American.

Admittedly this is a personal prejudice, but "bikers" ride motorcycles often in gangs. "Bicyclists" are those daredevils who challenge pickup trucks the size of houses for the right of way on slushy winter streets.

Newspapers have their own usage difficulties. Headline words make up a group of those. Headline words are used when the correct, but longer term won't fit in a headline, for example "heist" instead of "robbery" or "prep" instead of "high school." They are last resorts even in writing headlines, but when they show up in copy where there are fewer space restraints they are just hack words, jargon. Still they appear frequently. The TV show Castle had a great running gag on shortened jargon words. A detective asked the writer, Castle, why writers always called the criminals "perps" from perpetrators.  Then for the rest of the episode every time they met, the detectives tossed out another synonym for the word. It's what all writers should do when they recognize trending words and cliches in their work. Look for another term.

This is a subject that can go on and on to grueling extremes and obviously this post isn't the last word or any sort of list of hard and fast rules, and certainly not worth suffering a heart attack over. More like a blood-letting on my part releasing some irritations that have been building over the years. It will pass or a bigger and better list will show up some day.

Here is a humorous list of crimes against the language seen on Twitter

Banned words for 2015