A curious case of linguistic “inventions” in journalism

The journalistic gaffe which was the subject of my earlier blog post reminds me of an imaginative word derivation achieved by a novice journalist. With a degree in mass communication from an Australian university, she came to Vijayawada with a lovely lilting accent at the dawn of this century and started working, at my suggestion, as a feature writer for an English language newspaper. Within a month, she did what lily-livered veterans couldn’t do: she introduced quite a lot of new words into the English language using the national newspaper as a medium for the purpose. The paper simply printed whatever she wrote – and she wrote a good deal, unleashing a veritable morphological and syntactical revolution. ‘The feature articles in your paper,’ I said to the bureau chief, ‘are Bold and Beautiful.’

Then one day, my wife asked me, ‘Do you know what “rangy furniture” means?’  I had heard of office furniture, patio furniture, lawn furniture, outdoor furniture, modern furniture, antique furniture, period furniture, and secondhand furniture, but never of rangy furniture.  But I liked that expression.  When I said I liked it, she began to laugh.  Then she showed me a newspaper article.  ‘Your young friend from Australia has written this,’ she said. ‘The house has rangy furniture,’ read a sentence in the article.  What the author meant was that the house had a wide range of furniture. But “a wide range of furniture” would be long-winded and wearisome, so perhaps my young friend added the derivational suffix “y” to “range” and put life into that tame expression. Quite a stroke of genius!

Rangy!  I tried to get my tongue round that interesting word.  It stayed for quite sometime inside the mouth until the tongue unwillingly loosened its grip on it and let it out with a vowel to accompany it.  And when it came out, it sounded nice.  Besides, it was crisp, laconic – and even Delphic! It made me reflect on the author who had taken the idea of compression thus far. I thought she was as inventive as Shakespeare.  And her guiding spirit must be the unforgettable Humpty-Dumpty.  Remember what Humpty-Dumpty said in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’

Come to think of it, what is wrong with “rangy”? Why shouldn’t it be used to mean having a great range?  When Richard Sullivan could talk about “rangy considerations,” why shouldn't our young newspaper correspondent talk about “rangy furniture”? 'Besides, “rangy” has an illustrious forebear in “hopefully,” another describing word.  Michael Beresford, in his Modern English, points out that “hopefully” was originally used to mean in a hopeful manner. But in the 1960s, when the word began to be used as a disjunct or comment adverb to mean “it is to be hoped” or “I hope,” there was a great outcry against it, first in America, then in Britain.  The protesters pointed out that, in the sentence, ‘Hopefully, the plan will succeed,’ the plan was not full of hope.  But “hopefully” as a comment adverb finally won the battle, as did “thankfully,” “mercifully” and “sadly” earlier.

“Reliable,” a commonly used word now, had had a stormier passage a hundred years before “hopefully” began its journey.  The objection was this: you don't rely something, but rely on it; so don't say reliable but rely-on-able!  Fortunately good sense prevailed soon enough.  Otherwise, we would now be using not only rely-on-able but account-for-able, dispense-with-able, dispose-of-able and a plethora of others.

Will “rangy” in the sense in which our inventive writer used it gain the acceptability that “hopefully” and “reliable” did?  Why not?  If the national newspaper the writer once represented doesn't wince at the word “rangy,” and uses it liberally not only in news stories but in editorials, the word will gain wide currency and become as commonplace as “prepone,” “bio-data,” “reputed” (in the sense of reputable), “good name” and “whybecause.” It may not become part of Queen's English, but it will certainly be part of Rani English. With the emergence of World Englishes, the erstwhile native speakers have lost the exclusive prerogative to control the standardization of the language; they can’t tell us “rangy” is wrong.

Heim, in his book, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, says: ‘What is the state of the English language?  No state at all.  It is in process… If languages have states of health, sick or well, then ours is manic.’  Manic indeed!  And rangy!

Thoughts occasioned by a journalistic gaffe

‘This diminutive writer has been an inspiration for many young writers and scholars,’ said the clumsily-written cover-page story on a Telugu playwright in a ‘Metroplus’ supplement to the Vijayawada edition of a national newspaper.

Diminutive? Did the reporter really mean this? Diminutive in what sense? In physical size or in literary standing? Asymmetrically inset into the text was a huge picture of a tall broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a lugubrious face making a pathetic attempt at smiling which deepened the mournful expression on his face. ‘This towering figure,’ I said to myself, ‘would perhaps be diminutive in a land of Brobdingnagians.’  Did the author of the article, then, mean that the writer was a man of poor literary reputation? But the caption to the picture dispelled this doubt. ‘Writer par excellence … … wears many hats with elan’ screamed the red-and-black caption.  As a matter of fact, the entire article, though marred by awkward syntax, was a panegyric on the playwright; “diminutive” was the only jarring note.

However, what caused this curious incongruity was not hard to understand. Newspaper reporters who want to embellish their stories often depend on online dictionaries and thesauruses; the dependence seems to be excessive in provincial towns where, for want of competent writers in English, people with a nodding acquaintance with the English language are appointed as reporters. Not having the advantage of wide reading which can help one to be discriminating in one’s word choice, these novice reporters mindlessly pick up high-flown expressions from online thesauruses and use them in their stories with amusing results: the words either fail to collocate or sound pretentious or produce paradoxical figures of speech. Perhaps the journalist who wrote the story wanted to say that the playwright was a great writer and looked for grand-sounding synonyms for “great” in an online thesaurus which displayed both synonyms and antonyms for the word. Perhaps, instead of picking a synonym, he hastily picked up an antonym which didn’t quite roll of his tongue (When an English word doesn’t roll off an Indian tongue with ease, it is considered powerful.)

Interestingly, the goof-up doesn’t seem to have provoked any protest; in any case, the Reader’s Editor (RE) hasn’t listed it in his errata so far. But if all the goofs and gaffes on the regional pages of English-language newspapers were to be listed, an entire broadsheet of errata would have to be published every day with a large team of senior editors dealing exclusively with corrections. Mercifully, newspapers don’t do that. Even the best of newspapers correct less than 2 per cent of their errors, the majority of which, I must hasten to add, are factual rather than grammatical ones. Correcting grammatical errors will never be more than a pipe dream.

Let me explain what I mean with some examples from a newspaper that ranks well in accuracy, both factual and grammatical. At the ELT Centre of Gudlavalleru Engineering College, I offer a 70-hour FDP on writing. As part of the programme, the trainees, consisting of engineering faculty, analyse discourse features of written texts. Newspapers come in handy here; as often as not, the trainees choose newspaper reports for their analysis. In March 2017, the trainees, under the guidance of the trainers, identified errors of different kinds – clumsy syntax, elephantine constructions that tend to obscure the meaning, poor connection between ideas, weak grammar, incongruity, and tautology – in news reports from the Vijayawada edition of one particular newspaper which I don’t want to name here. Here are some of the discourse-level corrections from that long list:

March 14, 2017

Nod for 11 private universities to set up campuses in State

Vijayawada

 

The representatives of private universities are seen making rounds in the corridors of Secretariat these days to find out the status of their applications. The government, sources say, however, is insisting on the schedule of academic year and admissions.

The representatives of private universities which have not yet received permission are seen making rounds in the corridors of the Secretariat these days to find out the status of their applications. Sources, however, say that the government insists on the universities announcing the schedule of the academic year and admissions first.

The universities are expected to commence the admissions from the coming academic year. The buildings and infrastructure could be developed in a phased manner. “The universities would have to start functioning immediately if they get permission,” says an official, who didn’t want to be quoted.

The government expects the universities to commence admissions in the coming academic year and then develop buildings and other infrastructure in a phased manner. ‘Once permission is given, the universities will have to start functioning immediately,’ said an official who did not want to be quoted.

March 14, 2017

Nellore

Collector seeks to allay fears over airport project

In the backdrop of reports of a possible shifting of the airport project, the district administration has allayed the fears stating that there have been no hurdles for the implementation of Dagadarthi airport project near Kavali town in Nellore district. District Collector R. Mutyala Raju said there were no plans to shift the entire airport project from Dagadarthi regardless of the fact that demands came up for location of the same nearer to the Krishnapatnam industrial area considering the potential for cargo traffic.

The district administration has sought to allay the fears of the people of Nellore in the wake of speculations that the Dagadarthi airport project might be shifted from Kavali. District Collector R Mutyala Raju has reassured them that there are no such plans though there have been demands for relocating the airport project closer to the Krishnapatnam industrial area, considering its potential for cargo traffic.

March 21, 2017

Guntur

Central parking at Brodipet evokes mixed reaction

The Guntur Urban Police have begun enforcing a proposal to have central parking on the busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of commercial shops. While the results have been encouraging so far as the space is just enough for parking of two-wheelers, parking of cars is becoming extremely difficult.

The Guntur Urban Police have started enforcing their decision of central parking on the busy Brodipet 4th lane, a hub of commercial shops, and the results have been encouraging so far. However, there is room for only two-wheelers, and it is difficult to park cars there.

Nihal Singh, who had a five-decade-long distinguished career in journalism, said in a blog post a couple of months before his death on 16 April 2018: ‘The mélange of Indian English, British English, American English and plain bad English is a unique contribution of our newspapers to world journalism.’