In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy wrote: “That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.” That is a view shared by many Guardian readers. A doctor writes: “I wonder if you could give some thought to what I consider to be the lazy use of the term ‘battle with’. I have noticed recently that anyone who has any sort of illness cannot ‘have it’ or ‘endure it’, they always have to ‘battle with’ it. At this level it seems to be much the same, as no one in ‘journo land’ can promise or say they will do something – they always have to vow and they cannot ever be upset or angry but are always in a fury.
“My specific complaint is about Saturday’s [6 June] page 2 story about Charles Kennedy. Now I loved him as well as any Guardian reader, and I am sure he did ‘battle with’ the condition during his lifetime (although he might equally have struggled or given up the struggle latterly). However, in reporting his cause of death, it is simply not accurate to say that the ‘major haemorrhage’ was caused by his battle with alcoholism”.
The use of the word “battle” frequently jars with readers in the context of illness, suggesting as it may do that, if a person succumbs, he or she hasn’t fought hard enough. I agree.
The budget threw up a different problem with the use of words: “In your article [George Osborne introduces new ‘living wage’ but cuts working-age benefits, theguardian.com, 8 July] you use three ways to describe the government’s new ‘living wage’: ‘living wage’, in the headline; “living wage”; and living wage.”
It wasn’t the use of inverted commas that was the problem – a journalistic convention to indicate that the word or phrase within may not be literally true – but the phrase itself. As the reader went on to say: “As the director of the Living Wage Foundation makes clear, with the changes to tax credits and other measures, this is effectively a higher national minimum wage, rather than what is normally known as a living wage. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at George Osborne’s slightly Orwellian behaviour trying to change the meaning of this expression, but I hope that the Guardian style guide will suggest an appropriate style – maybe ‘living wage’ with inverted commas.”
David Marsh, the editor of the style guide responded: “We have been considering this. There are, at least for the moment, two living wages – the long-established living wage as defined by the Living Wage Foundation, and Osborne’s ‘national living wage’, which will replace the minimum wage. The important thing is to differentiate between the two, which we will do.”
It’s not just the use of English words. There is one word that has been essential to the coverage of the Greek financial crisis that has really irritated a reader – the Greek for no: “I have complained about this before. Can the Guardian please transliterate the Greek word for no correctly? The Greek word is όχι. In [a] piece on page 5 of today’s G2 [14 July] this appears as ‘Oxi’. But Greeks do not say ‘oksi’ when registering a negative. The middle letter is not an ‘x’, although in Greek script it looks rather like an enlarged ‘x’; it is a ‘chi’, which is pronounced in most of Greece as ‘khai’, a guttural sound. Chi is in fact the first letter in the Greek words for Christ and chrome, and in English we have correctly retained the Greek sound. It is only when capitalised that χ becomes X, as in the illustration to [the article].
“The proper way to transliterate the Greek no is: ‘ókhi’, with the accent (as in the Greek) on the first syllable.”
This problem had also caused widespread debate on the “backbench” – the word used by journalists to describe the clustered desks of senior editors and production staff. The following note was circulated to subeditors last week as a result: “A closer transcription of the Greek word for no would be ohi or ochi. However, we have been using oxi because that is what it looks like on the banners and posters pictured as part of our Greek coverage. And as Helena Smith [the Guardian’s Greece correspondent] in Athens points out, oxi has ‘gone global’ and has been adopted by anti-austerity protesters in the UK and elsewhere. So we will stick with that.”
Three ways to encourage people to at least like us a little more.
