Are you stuck in linguistic limbo?
The glossary was an amalgam of classic Fleet Street favourites — “shoe-leather journalism”, “angle”, “sweep” and “colour” — mixed with terms that reflect more digital times. Several of the terms listed spoke quite generally to the profession, others had evolved according to the whim and personalities of those within. Today’s lingo now includes words such as “computational journalism” and “fastcharts”, to reflect our data-driven dynamism. But even though we think digitally about our stories, old print-media terms such as “drains” and “decks” persist.
Journalese boasts a long, arcane tradition. When I first started on a paper, at the turn of the millennium, the language of the newsroom was still rooted in the letterpress. It was an era of “busted headlines”, where words wouldn’t fit the allotted type space, “galley proofs” and “copytakers”, which referred to a team of, mostly, women who would type out stories dictated over phones.
One editor would harry us about our deadlines, continually fretting about how we had to be “off stone”. He was referring to the old practice of assembling the letterpress into its final format, after which no one could make any changes and not one comma could be moved. The expression was already deeply anachronistic — the printing site had long been digitised — but I liked to imagine some old dude like Moses at the printers, heaving engraved tablets of rock around the room.
