The spoken word - not just errors, also biases

When we deal with usage of words, it tends to be of written words, But there are spoken words too on news television which also are grammatically incorrect or are misused, sometimes not conveying much.

Madhu Trehan, who does a weekly analysis of television news in her weekly offering Clothesline on www.newslaundry.com finds that choice of words convey biases.

Watch this.

But Trehan, does one put them to dry before or after wringing them dry?

A letter and mixed feelings

There is an interesting item in today's The Times of India about how it took a letter mailed in Anand, Gujarat to reach the addressee in Navsari 31 years - yes, you read it right. The two cities are about 200 km apart.

When received, its  recipient was 'grateful' and also 'shocked'. When he read it, he was 'thrilled' as well. He also said, "I appreciate" the postal department for "preserving the letter" and then delivering.

Gratitude and shock don't go together, thrill does. Appreciation and shock? No. If the letter was well preserved, then, as the item says, why was it in tatters? If the postal official did not know where it was all these years, how does it get thanked for preserving something it did not even know was with them?

But 31 years is a long time in the life of a letter in transit. The sender did not remember why he wrote that letter but the addressee now knows. The gentleman from Anand had referred a patient to his friend, an eye specialist. We don;t know what happened to the patient and his eyesight.

The strangest part is at the end of the news item. The postal official says he was "surprised as to where the letter had been lying all these years". The reporter could easily have told him, "Sir, it was on its way".

Know your English, but she has no opposite for 'sin'

The Hindu has a reputation for good English. It has been said time and again that one improves on his or her English language skills by reading that newspaper. This may not necessarily hold good for every printed item in the newspaper these days, but it most certainly it is the case with its editorial pages.

For long, the newspaper has been doing another service of a weekly column, Know your English, published every Monday. The columnist S Upendran responds to questions from readers and explains the meaning and usage of words and expressions.

This column is printed regularly but in some corner of the newspaper's Monday pull-outs. Navigating to it is quite a task. Therefore this blog would, as and when it is able to spot one, provide the hyperlink to it, as it has here.

In this Know your English on May 6, 2013, Upendran explains the difference between effeminate and womanish. He also tells you, "Most Indian languages have an opposite" for sin, like punyam, punya, etc.but English does not have an exact opposite. Many people make do with words like 'virtue, 'grace'., etc. as opposites".

Now Mr Upendran may want to tell that while a comma precedes the etc., should it be followed by another comma? Etc., being an abbreviation of et cetera, the Latin words for so on and so forth, should invariably end with a full stop but a comma could follow?

Railway or Railways Minister?

A huge network which carries people and freight across India is the Indian Railways, that is Railway with an 's' attached. Like the plural of the word.

The minister in charge of that department is almost always referred to as the Railway minister. The 's' is missing.

Shouldn't it be the Railways Minister?

The annual budget he or she presents to the Parliament is, again, most often, the Railway Budget, not the Railways Budget. 

Even the Indian Railways uses it as a singular on its portal where the budget is uploaded, and headlined the 2013 budget as the 'Railway Budget' - the 's' missing. Some newspapers trim it to Rail Budget.

However, some newspapers, do use it in the correct form but only occasionally.

Makes one wonder, which is right - the one in popular usage or the way the Indian railways calls itself?

This confusion is confounded when the entity calls itself 'Bharatiya Rail' as its Hindi version.

There is much confusion at the official level itself. The body, which was later registered under the Indian Companies Act, came to be under the Indian Railways (yes, with that 's'). However, in an amendment to that Act in 1989, the law-makers used both railways and Railway.

The head of the unit that provides the oversight on safety is the Commissioner, Railway Safety, and each of its several zones are only a railway. There is the Central Railway, the Western Railway etc.

Interestingly, the top group that administers the entire network is not the Railways Board but Railway Board.

Civic body, no civic sense, but Sackrifice?

Headlines have to say a lot in few words, space being a constraint. The idea is to attract attention to a news item and them draw the reader into the text underneath it.

The Times of India has in the past used puns in some headlines, as if they were all written by Bachi Karkaria. She is a punster and read this to estimate her incorrigible capacity for playing with words. She writes a regular column, Erratica.

Yesterday's (May 10, 2013) one headline in that newspaper deserves an applause. Mumbai's city government was told by a judge of the Bombay High Court that the civic body that "you are not behaving as the municipal corporation for the maintenance of Mumbai, but as the municipal corporation for the destruction of Mumbai".

Of course, what Justice Dhananjay Chandrachud said was not part of an order or a judgement but a part of the proceedings on a public interest litigation (PIL).

Instead of the trite stuff like 'Judge raps' the civic body etc., the headline said this: High court slams BMC for lacking civic sense. A civic body without civic sense.

Compare it with this headline, Sackrifice for survival, in DNA, of May 11, 2013, for a story on how Railways Minister, Pawan Bansal had 'sacrificed' a goat to remain in office but had to finally quit when asked to by the Prime Minister following a bribery scam involving Bansal's nephew. It was a combination of 'sack' and sacrifice'.

It has to be noted that we don't know if the goat was sacrificed or fed since the media - newspapers, television and social media - speak of both.

It rings false, but such headlines, such coined words always do.

Do losses increase or widen?

Profits remain steady, increase or decrease. Adjectives can be used to describe its pace of change dependent on, well, the pace of change. It can be a slow, steady rise, a sharp surge, or even a gentle, soft curve on the charts or even a point where there is no profit or no loss.

Losses, whether slow or quick, can be traumatic for any business, and one just has some or heavy losses but these are subjective. They can be big or small.

But have you heard of 'wide losses'? If you haven't, then read this headline in the Business Standard of May 7, 2013: Adani Power's losses widen to Rs 586 crore in Q4.

Of course, losses can increase too, that is, what was a loss in revenue or profits yesterday could be have some more added to it  today, thus increasing it.

"Wide loss(es)" is, however, not entirely wrong, provided it is properly used to describe something else. For instance, If every other scrip or a a sector on the stock market slide on a given day, then it is indeed a 'wide loss'. Not otherwise.

A good example of the use of 'wide loss' is in Financial Times, (February 4, 2013) which can be read here.It would suffice to read the headline and the first paragraph where losses in all major 10 sectors were reported.

'Boston bomber' is charged, but remains a 'suspect'

This blog likes to look generally at the usage of words in the media, mostly print. Mostly, among them, newspapers.

That takes us to the use of the word 'suspect' in stories dealing with news about crimes. In this particular case, the Boston Bombings.

The latest, and a fine example, is its use in a headline by The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper. When referring to Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers, he is a 'suspect', in a New York Times syndicated piece.

In the text, he is mentioned as having been 'charged', though the 'suspect' is missing in the NYT's headline. It points to the man being already 'charged' and of the on-going investigations. In both the newspapers, he is prefixed with the honorific, 'Mr.'. This is a practice even in The Economist - pointed, but polite, courtesies to even suspects and, yes, to convicts as well.

Indian newspaper could refer to Dzhokar Tsarnaev as 'an accused' since he has been charged. Once he is, if he is, convicted, then he becomes a convict. But the tendency in Indian media is to refer to any person picked up for suspicion becomes an accused, an unfortunate tradition.

The television news networks are worse: a man could well be tried well before legally being charged. These days, even hanging is described as the best punishment in the trial by television.

Elsewhere, the law enforcers look for the suspect first. here, we look for the 'accused', even if unidentified by name.

It is all to do with the finer points of a situation. The implications of a suspect being let off but being accused of a crime in the media are not understood. The police may be poor in use of words, the media needn't be.