THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510220007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
What's in a name?
Plenty, but probably not enough.
Three times in eight days, I have been involved in discussions about the importance of what we call things - especially when we hope to change them.
The first discussion involved a panel of journalists, including top editors of the Dayton Daily News in Ohio and the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis.
At a journalists convention, these two editors argued that what we call things - ``nomenclature,'' editor Max Jennings of Dayton said - helps us change the way we think about them.
At these two papers, various job titles have been changed as the newsrooms have been reorganized to get more people involved in decision-making. For example, Pam Fine of Minneapolis is the news leader - a new name for a job similar to what most papers would call managing editor.
On Saturday, editors and publishers on the board of directors of the Virginia Press Association discussed helping create an organization devoted to promoting open government and public access to state records and governmental meetings. It hopes to do this in collaboration with broadcasters, librarians, universities, on-line services and anyone else interested in the free flow of information in a democratic society.
The board talked about what this new organization might be called. Focusing its name on the First Amendment might not convey its primary emphasis on public access to government; focusing on open government might not convey the constitutional importance of this work.
In both these cases, the primary impact of change comes from the initiatives themselves; the names are clearly secondary.
The most heated discussion occurred Friday, when I talked with a group of educators, social workers and others in the human-services field at a conference on violence and children organized by Family Services of Tidewater and Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters.
One conference participant objected to the newspaper's occasional use of ``public housing projects'' to describe government-run, low-income housing. She said this lowers the self-esteem of people who live there and ignores or demeans efforts to improve these areas. Another participant argued that the newspaper's use of the term was part of an effort to please some readers at the expense of others.
In fact, we generally refer to these areas as ``public housing communities,'' especially in formal news stories. But we don't ban the use of ``public housing projects'' - especially when that reflects common usage or the language of the people we quote.
A check of our electronic news archives shows that we used ``communities'' and ``projects'' 20 times each in 1994 and 20 and 23 times each so far in 1995. The shift in usage follows continuing changes by public housing administrators, who have moved from ``projects'' to ``parks'' to ``communities.''
Many an English teacher would like the newspaper to publish only language that meets the strictest standards of grammar - standards most of us don't observe in our everyday life. Many a politician would like the newspaper to publish his or her rambling comments on any given topic, even when the politician speaks in circles to avoid having to stake out a clear position. Many an advocate of change would like the newspaper to adopt new phrases compatible with such change.
We do try to be sensitive to the words we pick, but never at the expense of clarity and grace. We are especially suspicious of euphemisms - whether ``news leader'' in Minneapolis or ``the village had to be destroyed in order to save it'' in Vietnam.
So we generally use the language of ordinary citizens, the standard usage of the community. As the community's understanding of a word or phrase changes, so does ours.
That's been true since Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1840s that Americans are prone to grandiloquence when trying ``to attempt a more poetical diction.''
``The inhabitants of the United States have then, at present, properly speaking, no literature. The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their country and make themselves heard.''
So when the country struggles to find new words to encourage or accelerate change, we struggle along with it.
We'll revisit our use of ``public housing projects'' alongside ``public housing communities.'' And we will struggle for clarity and grace in communicating the news.
We'll leave it to the community to debate how much what we call ``low-income housing'' matters, as opposed to how much we devote to improving it. by CNB