From Netflix’s sponsored article in the New York Times:
Don’t Say
| Instead, Say |
cells
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rooms
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blocks or walks
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pods or wings
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shake down
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safety check
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lug her
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take her to a secure area or document an infraction
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Don’t talk about the science. Talk about the problem.
Don’t Say
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Instead, Say
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Emissions
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Pollution
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Carbon pollution
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Pollution
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Greenhouse gases
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Pollution
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Impact on the climate
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Impact on people
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Impact on the environment
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Impact on people
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The environment
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The air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink
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Carbon tax
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Making polluters pay and putting a price on pollution
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Emissions trading scheme
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Making polluters pay and putting a price on pollution
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Cap and trade
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Making polluters pay and putting a price on pollution
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Rising sea levels
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Extreme weather causing more hurricanes, floods, and wildfires
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Rising temperatures
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Extreme weather causing more hurricanes, floods, and wildfires
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Renewable energy
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Clean energy
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Parts per million
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Pollution is getting worse
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Polar bears
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People
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A memo from the Journal’s Deputy Editor in Chief Matt Murray:
In a regulatory era, we naturally find ourselves writing a fair bit about regulators, probes and regulatory issues. That’s a big source of news these days.
But when we do so, it is vital that we write in neutral terms and that we don’t take sides with either regulators or their targets, either willfully or implicitly through language choices. It is important on every such story to ensure we think through the dynamics on all sides and convey the facts as directly, clearly and objectively as possible, to make sure that as writers and editors we are in no way tilting toward one view. Adding to the complexity, there is sometimes a sourcing imbalance, and we must do all we can in articles to correct any such imbalance, make sure all parties comment and treat all assertions with appropriate caveats and skepticism.
A particular trap in the very construction of many such stories is the often inadvertent implication that regulators are correcting/fixing/addressing what is objectively seen—or should be seen—as an existing problem. Be aware that in many instances there is a range of opinion on what constitute problems and what constitutes an appropriate response, and we should vigilant about the difference between facts and assertions. We should always strive to report the facts of what is happening, aggressively, while we attribute assertions and allow readers to draw their own conclusions.
As always, sensitivity to the meaning and use of words is important, especially in our standing effort to eliminate newspaper clichés, since words do carry connotations we may not intend. For instance, when an agency “cracks down” on something, the words suggest they are rolling up their sleeves and cleaning up an existing, generally acknowledged problem. Better to say “focusing on” or “paying increased attention to.”
This can be tricky stuff, but that’s why it’s so important. Our readers depend on us to be factual, neutral and to play it straight. As always, the best test is to ask yourself how a passage would read from various angles.
When the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence wanted to promote more restrictions on firearms after the Connecticut school shootings in December, it turned to a firm to help publicize its position. The firm’s name? Point Blank Public Affairs.
When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised ideas for responding to the massacre, he said he was “shooting for Tuesday”—even as he warned that there is “no silver bullet” for stopping gun violence. When President Obama noted that he was reviewing those ideas, he said on a different topic that he would not negotiate “with a gun at the head.”
No wonder it is hard to get rid of gun violence when Washington cannot even get rid of gun vocabulary. The vernacular of guns suffuses the political and media conversation in ways that politicians and journalists are often not even conscious of, underscoring the historical power of guns in the American experience. Candidates “target” their opponents, lawmakers “stick to their guns,” advocacy groups “take aim” at hostile legislation and reporters write about a White House “under fire.”
I frequently have used the phrase, "To call a spade a spade." Recently, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick employed the phrase, as did the editors of the popular Web site, RealClearPolitics.
A friend insists that the phrase is a racist one, since it refers, or at one time referred, derogatorily to black people. Wanting to avoid both bigotry and political correctness, I asked the fine lexicographers at Merriam-Webster two questions:
1. Is this true?
2. If so, does Merriam-Webster's research show evidence that the phrase still carries racist meaning?
Associate Editor, Neil Serven, replied as follows:
While some construe the phrase “to call a spade a spade” to have racial allusions, its history suggests that no such allusion exists.
According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase ultimately traces back to a Greek expression appearing in Plutarch's Apophthegmata. Plutarch's phrase contained a noun meaning "trough, basin, bowl, boat," which, it seems, was later mistranslated by Erasmus, who mistook the word for a derivative of a Greek term meaning "to dig." The error was carried over into English, where the phrase came to be rendered as “to call a spade a spade”; the first citation of the phrase listed in the OED dates from 1542.
The earliest usage of “spade” to refer to a black person in English dates from 1928. Most etymologists agree that this usage stems from the comparison of such a person’s skin color to the black markings found on playing cards.
The spade referenced in “to call a spade a spade,” then, is clearly of the digging implement sort, and has nothing to do with the offensive racial epithet.
Some folks may interpret the phrase to be racist only due to their not knowing which sense of “spade” it originally referenced. We do not have any valid evidence of anyone using the phrase with deliberate racial allusion, and its contemporary meanings—“to call a thing by its right name however coarse” and “to speak frankly”—make no racial allusion.
However, Google shows a number of instances of people uncertain about whether the phrase should be considered offensive. This would suggest to me that there are a significant number of English speakers who choose to tread carefully with it despite its innocuous meaning and history. This kind of information, while interesting, really only pertains to the circumstances surrounding the phrase, and not to the meaning of the phrase itself, and so it wouldn’t factor into how a lexicographer would define the phrase.
Daniel Okrent, the first in-house press critic of the NYT, applauds an article on abortion for
avoid[ing] the euphemistic use of those specious and self-serving slogans "pro-life" and "pro-choice," and instead us[ing] "anti-abortion" and "abortion rights" to describe people who are, as it happens, against abortion or are supporters of abortion rights.
