WALLACE, Idaho — Good Heavens: To quote a story from last Sunday's Coeur d'Alene Press:
“SILVER BEACH — Saturday's results? We got 'em. Today's lineup? We got that, too.”
Although this egregious prose appeared on the front page of the News-Press, it was typed by someone in Coeur d'Alene.
Bubbling with either personal or corporate-ordered enthusiasm, the writer was referring to his newspaper's coverage of the Labour Day weekend of thunderboat racing on Coeur d'Alene Lake. That such gibberish emanates from such a cultural backwater as Coeur d'Alene is no excuse for its vapidity — explainable, perhaps, but not excusable.
It. Would be. Nice to. See. A complete. Sentence. In the. Coeur d'Alene. Newspaper. Period.
Time was, newspapers were reasonably well-written. There was at least one curmudgeonly grammarian on the copy desk every shift to catch the cub reporter's errant diction. There were also the typesetters in the composing room, who, unlike the reporters feeding them copy, were not by nature transients and knew the correct spellings of family names and the local idiosyncrasies of language.
The final arbiter of what passed and what flunked for correct newspaper English was and is the Associated Press Stylebook. First published in 1953 and updated every June, the AP Stylebook presumed, in its first edition, that the reporter using it had a “solid grounding in language and (access to) a good reference library.”
There's not much “solid grounding in language” taught in journalism schools these days. And it's been a long time since we wandered into the newsroom of a daily newspaper and caught sight of even an Encyclopaedia Britannica, much less an actual reference library.
The last newspaper we were billeted to didn't even possess an AP Stylebook — all of which may explain those fractured sentence fragments quoted above.
The decay of language is a deplorable thing. As our use of language gets fuzzier and fuzzier, so do our thoughts and our ability to, um, like, communicate them.
Precision of language is paramount to a precise understanding of one's environs. Recognizing this, the Associated Press published a specialized Stylebook for Alaska journalists because Alaskan speech is more idiosyncratic than most other states.
There, the word “Outside” is capitalized, even mid-sentence, and means to refer to some other place than Alaska, as in “The governor was Outside attending a conference and could not be reached for comment.” What we call snowmobiles are snow-machines up there.
One chap who passed through the newsroom of the Coeur d'Alene Press with his language and thought processes intact was Tony Hopfinger, now editor and co-founder of the Alaska Dispatch, an on-line and well-written daily newspaper that is cleaning the editorial clock of the knee-jerk Anchorage Daily News.
(Now how's that for a segue, sports fans?)
Reports today's Dispatch, in a headline reminiscent of the pun-addled hijinks of yesteryear's copy desks: “Gold miners near Chicken cry foul over 'heavy-handed' EPA raids.”
(Yes, Chicken is a small gold-mining village 140 miles southeast of Fairbanks. Belay the McNuggets jests, please.)
Continues the article: “Miners from the Chicken area — a gold mining town of just 17 full-time residents and dozens of seasonal miners off the Taylor Highway, between Tok and the Canadian border — said that during the third week of August they were surprised by groups of four to eight armed officers, who swarmed onto their mining claims with little or no warning.
“The officers were armed and wearing body armor. They were part of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and were there to check for violations of section 404 of the Clean Water Act, according to several miners who were contacted by the group. Section 404 governs water discharges into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans.
“The task force's methods are now being questioned by the miners as well as the Alaska congressional delegation.
“'Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say POLICE emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,' said C.R. 'Dick' Hammond, a Chicken gold miner who got a visit from the task force. How would you have felt?'”
These raids are no isolated incidents of federal thuggery there. Three years ago shotgun-pointing National Park Service rangers tackled and arrested 70-year-old Jim Wilde for cursing at them when he pulled ashore rather than let them conduct a safety inspection of his boat in the middle of the Yukon River.
Such is the style these days, one supposes.
