 This month's newsletter is guest-written by Sidney Madden, the BuzzFeed News copydesk's summer 2019 Dow Jones News Fund editing intern. I walked into BuzzFeed's office three months ago, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hot off the Dow Jones News Fund's 10-day copyediting residency at the University of Texas, Austin. Outside of the residency, I didn't have much copyediting experience. (Hell, I didn't even know a hyphen from an en dash, and now I made a whole quiz testing the difference.) But I've always loved words — the way they flow, the way you can make them fit, the way they can make you feel. So when Dru Moorhouse, BuzzFeed News' copy chief, first told me that "copyediting is an art, not a science," I thought I knew what she meant.
Not long after I started, the copydesk added the Q to LGBTQ. Only a few years before, the copydesk had felt LGBT was suitable as the all-encompassing term.
Language, like art, evolves. Cubism. Surrealism. Pop art. The pieces of work produced during these respective eras capture how people saw the world and expressed themselves within it. Is language not the same? When language changes, it's indicative of the times changing — something to be celebrated, not feared. The age of the internet has accelerated language evolution — will Hot Girl Summer make it past Labor Day? — and more people are shaping language than before.
Language evolves. Times change. Style is not set in stone. One day, everything is hunky-dory and the style guide says doughnuts. Then, days before you start your internship, it's donuts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All that is to say, language matters. The words we use and how we choose to address and acknowledge people matter, especially regarding people who have been historically under- and misrepresented in media.
Because we have this platform, we also have a responsibility to be mindful and aware of the words we use and how they seep into everyday language and, thus, our culture.
From championing gender-neutral language to avoiding the use of -phobic when it's not necessary, the copydesk makes conscious decisions daily to exercise this mindfulness. The late Toni Morrison said it best: "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge." And oppressive rhetoric becomes even more dangerous when hateful words lead to hateful actions.
The back-to-back shootings in El Paso and Dayton happened over a weekend, when I and most of the newsroom were off the clock, but editors and reporters alike logged online to debunk any misinformation and to report. When I came in Monday morning, the news cycle was saturated with articles from every desk addressing the aftermath — including the revelation that the suspected El Paso shooter had posted a racist manifesto online before going on his rampage.
The news team has a set of guidelines for how to cover mass shootings — because, yeah, we live in a world where mass shootings have become common enough for us to need a somewhat standard process. As far as the copydesk goes, we handle these stories with extra care — for example, by diligently fact-checking the names and biographies of the victims. Names pulled from police scanners or press releases are often wrong, so the least we can do as copy editors is honor the victims and their families by getting their stories right.
As a young journalist and person trying to figure out what their role will be in this world, I feel lucky to have been part of a news organization, even briefly, that cares so much about not only what stories we're telling but also how we're telling them. —Sidney Madden European Space Agency / Giphy equinox (noun) (ˈē-kwÉ™-ËŒnäks) Some days drag on, and other days fly by. But there are two days a year that are equal parts daytime and nighttime everywhere on Earth. Centuries before it was a trendy gym celebrities were trying to boycott, equinox was coined to describe the crossing of the sun over the equator. Equinox is derived from the Latin words aequus, which means equal, and nox, which means night, according to Merriam-Webster. In contrast, the summer and winter solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year.
Used in a sentence: Just before the sun crossed the celestial equator and the autumnal equinox began, Gabe canceled his gym membership.
What's New? Here are the newest words, names, and updated guidelines to the BuzzFeed Style Guide:
- Facebook Groups
- Cantopop
- strap-on (n.), strap on (v.)
- first-year (n. and adj.; not freshmen or freshman)
- first-term (adj.; not freshmen or freshman for officeholders)
- finsta
4 Things We've Loved Over the Last Few Weeks - Kate Mooney distills the divisive thoughts on "the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. A freewheeling scofflaw. A rebel without a clause" — the em dash.
- Mary Norris takes a look back at this "long hot summer of grammar."
- For Vulture, Lauren Leibowitz wrote an open letter to Hollywood movie title-makers (four years before the awkward ellipsis appeared in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood).
- Our copy intern, Sidney Madden, made a quiz testing the differences between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Give it a try!
Copy quibbles? Grammar questions? Something you want to see here? Talk to the BuzzFeed copydesk: @styleguide on Twitter or reply to this newsletter.
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And make sure you check out the BuzzFeed Style Guide.
All definitions, etymologies, and other information in this newsletter were found via Merriam-Webster.com, the Online Etymology Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Wordsmith.org, unless otherwise noted. BuzzFeed, Inc.
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