Cow orkers and style
Hooray! The official guide to house style for The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and Telegraph.co.uk. is now available to all and sundry. Here's something we really like: "Use hyphens with care to avoid confusion or unwanted hilarity. Use 'small-business men' to make it clear that they are not diminutive traders." That's good, and so is this: "In contrast to the old style book, email no longer has a hyphen and internet does not take a capital."
And then there's the vexed matter of political correctness. This is excellent: "The word 'partner', when used to denote an unmarried cohabitee, is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Use girlfriend, boyfriend, companion, lover, mistress, concubine, friend or any other apposite word."
And here's a huge chunk of commonsense: "Increasingly, as the distinction between publishing the newspaper and producing the website fades, we will stop using such words as 'yesterday' and 'today' in copy except when necessary to avoid confusion or to promote exclusive stories. On the internet the priority for any headline is to inform search engines (and therefore readers) what the article is about. Its language should therefore be concrete, not abstract, and contain full names."
And now, a dissenting voice. It's that of the great Thomas Sowell. Sez he: "Style manuals have become anti-style manuals. Since style is a variation on a convention, rigid conformity is the antithesis of style." Ain't that true? The style manual, says Sowell, "is an instrument of power for the copy-editor, while engaging in a compulsive activity in which readers have long since been forgotten." And this brings us back to the hyphen, for Sowell says that, "One of the many fetishes of copy-editors is getting rid of hyphens. As hyphens are exterminated like vermin, readers find themselves forced to pause to confront puzzling new words that might be pronounced 'rein' vest' or 'cow' orkers' instead of re-invest and co-workers. To ask what useful purpose is served by such practices is to betray ignorance of the Zeitgeist of the bureaucrat. It is rules for rules' sake, like art for art's sake."
Having defended the contraction of "e-mail" to "email", we could be accused of wanting to have it both ways here, but our guide since 1996 has been "Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age." Turning to page 84, we find the injunction: "When in Doubt, Close it Up". Addressing what she then called "email", Constance Hale described it as "A telegraph, a memo, and a palaver rolled into one." Sure enough, email has become our daily telegraph.
