JOURNALISM

I have a friend who takes writing and language very seriously. After college, with a degree in journalism she took a job with a small news paper in Wisconsin. She went through several papers, all the progressions, reporter, marketing, advertising and ultimately an editor. She met deadline after deadline, over and agin for a career of meeting deadlines. Now, like me, she listens mostly over coffee with friends while people with jobs are pushing their rock up the hill. We share an appreciation for the other’s experience and writing style even though their likeness is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to a chorus of crows; guess which is which. She is disciplined to the Associated Press Style with its do’s & don’ts, rules for every occasion. You don’t give the reader any credit, just (KISS) keep it simple stupid. On the other hand, I’m a free range chicken with few rules and no boundaries. In my case, creative license supercedes rules. My first writing class back in the 1960’s, it featured a professor who professed, “If in doubt, leave it out.” 

Kay wants words to be universal constants, for ever. Metaphors are devious at best and she hates it when someone uses words like “anxious” when they mean something else, like “excited”. With a long list of pet peeve-commonly misapplied words she mumbles a lot. But we get along, even share some inside - jokes would be the wrong word - ‘Story’ would satisfy my need for clarity but probably not hers. 

I remind her that English is a dynamic system where vocabulary evolves with the culture. After all, the word ‘gay’ used to mean happy and ‘bad’ can now mean either bad or good. She hates it but concurs, elevating her displeasure with grumbling and thinly veiled insults, either changing the subject or digging deeper into that corrupted hole. I think that’s what happens to good people who concede to deadlines and advertisers. I write because the voice inside my head, the one I don’t control, it tells me to write down whatever it says and I do. 

I expand the subject, wanting to keep the conversation going. Maybe the news is a brain-wracking business and one has to be naive or a masochist to go there. She laughs at that, “What! You locked yourself in a room with teenagers for 30 years and you think I’m the naive masochist?” When she does that I fake a stupid spasm and make cuckoo sounds. Her sense of humor is a machete while mine is a water balloon. But in the end we stay friends and it’s me who remembers, “I’m not the one complaining.”