Words are all we have
New words crop up all the time. Subs should not be nervous with them and should trust readers to understand, says HUMPHREY EVANS
COUCH POTATOES first thrust themselves into my consciousness about halfway through subbing one of those “Letter from New York” articles back in the mid-1980s. What a concept, I thought, and happily slammed it into the headline.
Half an hour later the deputy editor came over and slammed it out. “The readers won’t understand,” he said. The readers won’t understand? What kind of idiot can’t see that it is self-explanatory?
Readers, to my mind, pick up new words and phrases really easily and in fact quite gleefully. English is particularly good at pushing two words together in new combinations, as with couch potatoes, and lexicographers recognise this and list these doublets as words.
Credit crunch, extraordinary rendition, postcode lottery and carbon footprint all somehow came into being over the last few years with their meanings perfectly clear — though one dictionary did find it necessary to define “extreme ironing”, where people photograph themselves deploying board and iron in unlikely locations such as on mountain tops or underwater; of course there’s a website you can look at.
Single words seem more likely to need a bit of explanation, at least at first. Podcasting, metrosexual and phishing do now seem to be out there unassisted — though none are recognised by Microsoft Word’s spellcheck! But I’d be wary, in a general publication, of mentee (someone who is mentored), obesogenic (tending to cause obesity) or locavore, which apparently is someone who eats only locally grown food. These, if you use them at all, would need explaining.
I quite enjoy the playfulness involved in presenting readers with unlikely words. The Guardian managed it nicely with a piece about a scientific study of nose-picking among teenagers, featuring the unadulterated term “rhinotillexomania”.
If you do need to explain a strange word, tag on the explanation as gracefully as possible. Suze Rotolo handled this beautifully in an interview she gave to the Guardian — she’s the woman in a green coat arm in arm with Bob Dylan on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Her 28-year-old son, she said, is a luthier: “Only four people in New York know what that means. He makes guitars.”