Barry: Help for the tricky linguistic questions

Nov 25 2009 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

WHEN I’m stuck on a point of English I turn to my next-seat neighbour Henryk Zientek for help.

The Examiner’s business reporter has been writing every working day for more than two decades so he’s generally the man to answer a tricky linguistic question.

Like, is “licence” the verb or the noun? Or, is it “none were” or “none was”?

But last week even Henryk was stumped by my enquiry as to whether the word “transferred” should have two “r”s or three.

From the other end of the table, education reporter Hazel Ettienne announced that she would settle the matter and produced from somewhere a little orange booklet – the Examiner’s style book from 1985.

She told us it had been given to her when she started work at the paper, although the ever-youthful Hazel hastened to add she did not begin at the Examiner until several years after the style book was published.

Unfortunately, this 25-year-old artefact did not contain any entry for “transferred”. But Hazel loaned it to me nevertheless, so I could learn the proper use of English to which we all aspire.

All newspapers have style guides which serve three purposes. They provide reminders of commonly misspelt words – like “transferred” – and they clarify points of grammar – such as the difference between “continuous” and “continuing”.

Finally, they enforce a common style across the newspaper. For instance, in Examiner Land we use a capital “P” for “the Press” while most other parts of the Press do not.

Style guides are part of the fabric of newspapers and also a window into the past, into the way that language changes.

To illustrate this point, our features editor Val Javin furnished me with a copy of the 1958 style guide which was in use when she began work at the Examiner.

Of course, like Hazel, Val would want me to point out that she entered the employ of the paper many years after the guide was published.

It was interesting to compare the 1958 and 1985 vintages and to contrast them with Examiner English in 2009.

Some of the spellings in the old style guides appear archaic to the 21st Century eye.

For example, both the 1958 and 1985 versions insist there is a country in the Middle East called “Irak” and that its capital is “Bagdad”.