The Moose Lexicon, #2009
I read a snippet of a newspaper article from the 1930s the other day, and I was struck by how punchy, stylish, and compelling the writing was. Granted, the subject matter was the arrest of a New York gangster, so it was inherently exciting, but the wealth of action verbs and the presence of an actual "voice" on the part of the reporter who wrote the article was refreshing and fun. I could just sense the fellow breathlessly pounding out the article on a typewriter, a lit cigarette smoldering next to him on the desk.
These days, in a world of print journalism in which the likes of USA Today set the bar low and bland for writing style, reading newspaper articles in most papers is about as compelling as reading the ingredients on a cereal box, but slightly less shocking. Action verbs are limited, sentence structure is painfully contorted, and nobody but a few cantankerous sports critics and opinion columnists has anything that I would seriously call a writing style.
What makes this a Moose Lexicon entry, though, is the use of one word to replace a staggering number of prepositions in newspaper writing:
"IN."
The perfect example comes from today's Indianapolis Star - the online edition. (The Star was bought by Gannett, the company that publishes USA Today, some years ago.) A headline reads:
Indy teen arrested in IMAX theater fire
"Wow," I think, "that sounds like a dangerous place to make an arrest!" What they mean is not so dramatic - merely that this kid was arrested today because he allegedly set a fire in said movie house last week. Look at the headlines of the Star for any given week and you'll find several such substitutions of "in" for another, more appropriate word (or words). In this case, all they would have to do is make a replacement of one tiny word to make the headline more meaningful - and say "Indy teen arrested for IMAX theater fire." There! That tells a more accurate story and doesn't even mess up the spacing of the headline on the page.
Maybe the Star's style guide contains some kind of rule that dictates how and where to use the word "in" in headlines. It's a pretty dumb stylistic choice, but that would explain its prevalence. Then again, pure laziness is also probably a good explanation. The Star is not the only place I see this, of course, but it's where I see it most often.
It may or may not be verifiably true that the vocabulary of Americans has declined significantly in the last century of moving away from a print-based society -- but when people who get paid to write cannot even remember a reasonable variety of prepositions, they make reading duller and less effective for everyone.
These days, in a world of print journalism in which the likes of USA Today set the bar low and bland for writing style, reading newspaper articles in most papers is about as compelling as reading the ingredients on a cereal box, but slightly less shocking. Action verbs are limited, sentence structure is painfully contorted, and nobody but a few cantankerous sports critics and opinion columnists has anything that I would seriously call a writing style.
What makes this a Moose Lexicon entry, though, is the use of one word to replace a staggering number of prepositions in newspaper writing:
"IN."
The perfect example comes from today's Indianapolis Star - the online edition. (The Star was bought by Gannett, the company that publishes USA Today, some years ago.) A headline reads:
Indy teen arrested in IMAX theater fire
"Wow," I think, "that sounds like a dangerous place to make an arrest!" What they mean is not so dramatic - merely that this kid was arrested today because he allegedly set a fire in said movie house last week. Look at the headlines of the Star for any given week and you'll find several such substitutions of "in" for another, more appropriate word (or words). In this case, all they would have to do is make a replacement of one tiny word to make the headline more meaningful - and say "Indy teen arrested for IMAX theater fire." There! That tells a more accurate story and doesn't even mess up the spacing of the headline on the page.
Maybe the Star's style guide contains some kind of rule that dictates how and where to use the word "in" in headlines. It's a pretty dumb stylistic choice, but that would explain its prevalence. Then again, pure laziness is also probably a good explanation. The Star is not the only place I see this, of course, but it's where I see it most often.
It may or may not be verifiably true that the vocabulary of Americans has declined significantly in the last century of moving away from a print-based society -- but when people who get paid to write cannot even remember a reasonable variety of prepositions, they make reading duller and less effective for everyone.