There’s a particular language that journalists use in writing their articles and scripts. Reporters are usually pretty direct, they use particular monikers. Sometimes they use jargon, sometimes they fall back on cliches. And then there’s a whole particular suite of words and phrases that have been almost entirely wiped from English speakers’ vocabularies, apart from journalists’. Here are some of Crikey‘s favourites:
A blow
Axed
Backflipped
Beleagured
Boffin
Brouhaha
Bundle out
Bungle
Dumped
Dwindling
Embattled
Execution style
Fiend
Fingered
Fracas
Furore
Gaffe
-Gate
Imbroglio
In tatters
Lashes
Mayhem
On the brink
Ousted/ouster
Outbreak
Probe
Race row
Ramped up
Rebuked
Revellers
Saga
Scour
Sex scandal
Slammed
Slapped down
Sparked fears
Spat
Spearheading
Stoush
Swingeing
Tinderbox
Tryst
Under fire
How about “disgraced”. I have often wondered how journalists decide it applies to a person.
A couple more Emily. (1) If someone of note’s erotic adventures are exposed, say, by a hidden camera, the illicit activity is invariably described by journos as a “sex romp”.
(2) When a small country town becomes the site of a tragedy, the grieving locals are always referred to as a “close-knit community” who “close ranks”, (even if they are usually at each others throats.)
After all, the small community is in mourning!
And “melee” – who apart from sports journalists ever uses this word?
So glad to see “probe”. A long time favourite headline word, but never seen elsewhere. Well maybe, rarely, in medicine.
I am grateful that our journalists deploy so little of English’s redundant vocabulary. Crikey’s journos in particular write essays in plain English that frequently supply readers with a nifty turn of phrase in words that all of us can understand.
However, I want them to stamp out the concept of “n+1th century”. This is historian’s jargon! We want to know which hundred years contain the date in question, but we should not have to do arithmetic to find out which hundred years are being referred to. Just as you and I were born sometime “in the nineteen-hundreds”, youngsters today need only hear that they were born “in the twenty-hundreds”.
Dodger – be fair, those sort of people probably thought/still think, that the year 2000 was the start of the New Millennium.