Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

Piggy? Party? Porky?

At long last, The Washington Post, which sensibilities are we protecting here? Even if you have trouble settling the one-word-or-two question, surely a quick search will suggest that "pussyhat," at least, has had some currency in your pages in recent days.

The naughty-words question is part generational, part cultural and part routine. When I started working at America's Newspapers in 1977, the possible appearance of "damn" or "hell" in print called for a consultation with the managing editor. Two decades on, we get-off-my-lawnists were at the barricades against the Butthole Surfers. By now, even the AP Stylebook has capitulated on "snafu" ("acceptable despite its vulgar origin"). News language is historically conservative (with rare exceptions, like Trib spelling), and it's certainly less unpleasant to be attacked as a prude than as a vulgarian.

As with "major league asshole" in 2000, there's also a heat-of-the-moment factor. It's hard to define the point at which an event stops being news, but the farther we get from the event, the more likely it is that a vulgarism -- or another taboo violation, like an image of death -- will be seen as gratuitous. "Seen by whom" is yet another question; you might be offending someone, but it's fair to calculate whether it's nearly everyone or those dwindling few who actually call the office and offer to proofread the paper for free at the sight of a wayward comma. And at some point, someone has to make a decision.

Much as I enjoyed the "Fuck You Cheeto Voldemort" sign, I wouldn't have waved it into a newspaper. But I would gently suggest that anyone who's tempted to cancel the old subscription over "This Pussy Fights Back," in this story, probably shouldn't have started reading it in the first place. As a rimrat, I might ask whether we're sure it wasn't "This Pussy Grabs Back,"  but I probably would have hyphenated "major-league asshole," too.

Today in news language: Whaddaya, nuts?

Looks like a little confusion on the Language Arts Desk over at New York's Hometown Newspaper. The thug in question speaks "perfect English" on the front; inside,* he has something called a "North American accent," but on Twitter, it's "unaccented English." Given the interest last month in the accent of evil -- "linguistic experts studying the voice on the YouTube clip believed the voice bore a definite British accent, most likely from London," the same reporter wrote -- what could it possibly be?

The story doesn't make things much clearer:

The newest voice of Islamic State terrorism sounds alarmingly like a son of the Midwest.

Alarmingly? What did he do, say "Missouruh" at graduation or something?

A newly released Islamic State propaganda film ends with the gun-toting jihadist speaking in perfect English, raising speculation that he’s a homegrown Muslim militant.

The man with the North American accent then joins in a mass execution.

Which sounds a bit like backtracking -- from Midwestern to "perfect" and then back to, um, "North American." Wonder what that could mean?
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