Events | 2009.09.07
David Marsh on … commodious collections of annoying cliches
The style guide editor on … commodious collections of annoying cliches
You\'d think that years of dodging metaphorical bullets in the sniper\'s alley that used to be known as Fleet Street would have given me a thick skin. But I\'m a sensitive soul.
I can cope with being told by one of my most dedicated online critics, in an increasingly hostile series of comments which followed last week\'s column: "The truth is, David, that your style guide is an appallingly amateurish collection of peeves, invented rules and straightforward mistakes." (Don\'t be coy – tell me what you really think.) Intemperate, humourless and at times abusive attacks are the norm in these days of anonymous online postings, even when the most controversial thing you write about is punctuation rather than politics. I shudder to think what poor Polly Toynbee goes through.
However, I admit to being a bit upset when a former editor of this very newspaper recently denounced what he called "the sacred book of ordained coinages" and "commodious collections of consistency designed to make readers believe their morning sheets are computer-standardised".
This at least explains why, when I arrived at the Guardian in the mid-90s, I couldn\'t find a copy of the stylebook ("Everyone here knows what our style is"), but it also betrays a disappointing failure to understand why we, like just about every media organisation in the world, have a house style guide.
Yes, part of it is about consistency, trying to maintain the standards of good English that our readers expect, and correcting former editors who write such things as "This argument, says a middle-aged lady in a business suit called Marion …" But, more than anything, the Guardian style guide is about using language that maintains and upholds our values – which may be why our first stylebook appeared in 1928 under the auspices of another distinguished former editor, one CP Scott.
Just like CP, I have no desire to make the Guardian read as if it were all written by the same person (or computer). Anyone familiar with the contributions of, say, Charlie Brooker, Ian Jack, Lucy Mangan and Matthew Norman will agree that they have more than managed to maintain their own distinctive voices. And not one of them has ever been subjected to an inquisition for straying from the sacred writ of Guardian style.
Actually, many of our readers might prefer it if the rules, invented or otherwise, were enforced more rigorously. One writes: "I cannot bear to read avoidable cliches in your paper any more. You really should expand the style guidelines to forbid more of them. I did a quick search of the Guardian website and discovered that the phrase \'eye-watering\' appeared an eyebrow-raising 1,710 times. Please stop."
And from another reader: "Can you please use your influence to prevent \'the Bank of Mum and Dad\' (page 1 today) from becoming the next \'elephant in the room\'?"
I\'ve written about "elephant in the room" before and can report that this tired expression, if not quite in the elephants\' graveyard, is definitely on the endangered list, with just 15 mentions in our pages this year – and one of those, in a travel piece, was about an elephant that was literally in the room. Quite a fall since the heyday of elephantiasis in 2006, when 38 elephants wandered around the room (up from just two in 2004).
The pace at which a fresh metaphor becomes a tired cliche seems to have increased in recent years. Although 1,710 usages of "eye-watering" is exaggerated, the reader is right to have noticed a big increase in its popularity: 69 mentions so far in 2009 if we include "eye-wateringly" – although curiously, while "eye-watering" is only ever applied to money ("eye-watering sums"), its near relative is more versatile ("an eye-wateringly beautiful woman", "an eye-wateringly sharp sauvignon" and so on).
This marks a fivefold increase since 2004, and that is too much eye-watering – the danger, as ever, being that the expression loses its force from overuse. Time will tell if this this fate is about to befall "the Bank of Mum and Dad" – just six mentions in 2009. So far.
www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ge-style-guide-cliches-grammar
