A Suspect Word

Because cops use the word suspect to mean, essentially, subject, and because too many journalists are parrots who just repeat what cops say, too many ordinary people have lost sight of the word's very simple and rather obvious meaning: As a noun in reference to a crime, a suspect is a person suspected of committing that crime. Keep that in mind, write what you know and attribute what you don't, and you'll be fine.

Some examples:

Police are searching for the suspects who robbed an East Side man Friday night. They have no suspects in the case.

Sometimes the parrots make things easy. If there are no suspects, of course, there are no suspects. But the first sentence would be flawed even without the second. Police are searching for the robbers. Or you could say they're searching for suspects in the case. And even if the phrase "the suspects" made sense -- if the police had actually identified suspects in the case but were still searching for them -- you don't know that the suspects are, in fact, the robbers. To write about "the suspects who robbed" would not only violate my "write what you know" guideline but also put you at risk of a libel judgment.

Surveillance video shows two suspects ransacking the store.

The video shows burglars or thieves. Again, if the police don't know who the burglars/thieves are, there are no suspects. If they think they know, you don't know whether they're right. Some reporters and editors shy away from burglar and thief and other perp-nouns because they think they're being super-duper cautious about libel. This is misguided not only epistemologically but also legally: If you go around saying that "suspects" committed crimes, where does that leave you when the word actually means something, when a name is attached? It leaves you as the reporter or editor who may have libeled the person behind that name, that's where.

The Boston Marathon case is interesting and perhaps counterintuitive. Because the photos and video clips released did not conclusively show a crime being committed, the word suspect actually was appropriate for a change in reference to the unnamed and then named men being sought by police. And even if the videos had definitely shown bombers, it would have been inappropriate to use that word to describe the actual men with actual names whom police identified as being the men depicted. Maybe they aren't the same people. So you'd have to use bombers in describing that hypothetical photographic evidence but suspects in describing the named men suspected of being those bombers. Write what you know.

The suspect was described as a white man in his 50s.

Such a sentence would make sense if the police had a specific person in mind and were instructing people to help them find him. Usually, though, there is no suspect -- the killer or rapist or robber or whatever is being described.

Police are confident all the suspects have been arrested.

The problem with this one is a little more subtle. Again, it's about that definite article. If there are, say, three suspects, the police don't need to speculate about their confidence; they know whether all of them have been arrested. The more likely meaning of such a sentence is that the crime was committed by a previously unknown number of people but the police are pretty sure the three guys they hauled in are the three and only three responsible. Police are confident no [insert perp-noun]s in the case remain at large. Police do not think they will be making any more arrests in the case.

Police are seeking a person of interest.

Person of interest. Possible suspect. I've even heard of police suspecting that somebody's a suspect. While it is important to attribute allegations and avoid putting words in authorities' mouths, there will be times when a news outlet has to go beyond weasel words and tell it like it is. Don't say police described someone as a suspect in a case if they didn't, but it might occasionally be appropriate, when the search for a so-called person of interest is clearly a criminal manhunt, to call a suspect a suspect in a lead paragraph or a headline. It's not a legal term. (Though you may want to run my advice by your lawyers; libel could be a concern.)

The confessed killer is scheduled to appear in court Monday.

If you saw the confession yourself, that's probably fine. If not, beware. Don't believe everything the cops tell you. In cases with possible confessions or seemingly obvious guilt, the news media are in a tough spot. You don't want to look foolish treating James Holmes as a random dude picked up by the police on a hunch, but you also don't want to set a precedent of pre-judging criminal cases. Hence, James Holmes remained a "suspect" long after it was obvious he opened fire in that movie theater.

You can read more about the problem of parrots in my new book, "Yes, I Could Care Less," which comes out June 18.

When It Pays to Be Pedantic

People write "Illinois senator" when they mean a U.S. senator from Illinois, and I change it, because there are also Illinois senators as in members of the Illinois Senate.

People write "last January" when they mean the last January to have occurred, and I change it, because there's also last January as in January of last year.

People write "Kansas City" when they mean the one in Missouri, and I change it, because there's also the one in Kansas. They write "Fairfax" when they mean giant Fairfax County, Va., and I change it, because there's also tiny Fairfax City, Va., which by a quirk of Virginia law is not part of the county that surrounds it.

I change these things over and over, and every once in a while I wonder why. And it never fails: The minute I'm about to give in, somebody writes "Illinois senator" in reference to a member of the Illinois Senate. Or "last January" in a reference to two Januarys ago. Or "Kansas City" in a reference to Kansas. Or "Fairfax" in a reference to Fairfax City.

And I smile a little smile and wonder what I was thinking and continue being a big, fat pickypants.

I "leave room," a concept I explain further in "Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk," coming June 18 to a bookstore near you.

More Stupid (if Not More-Stupid) Truncations

In "Lapsing Into a Comma," I hmphed about what I called illegal clipping, the too-common habit of oddly and sometimes misleadingly truncating a proper noun. USA Today becomes "USA," Consumer Reports becomes "Consumers," Mount Vernon Square becomes "Mount Vernon." (Oddly, I started my rant with the use of "Van Dorn" to refer to the Van Dorn Street station on the D.C. area's Metro system, which in retrospect doesn't seem that odd at all -- and isn't misleading the way "Mount Vernon" is.)

The list keeps growing. I've been biting my tongue for 15 years while my co-workers referred to Lotus Notes as "Lotus." (If anything, the e-mail program originally produced by Lotus Software is "Notes," the way Microsoft Word is "Word" and not "Microsoft.") Thankfully, the Post just switched from Lotus to Microsoft -- I mean, from Notes to Outlook.

And I was rather surprised to learn that everyone but me refers to the restaurant chain Noodles & Company as "Noodles."

Then there was the cellphone conversation I overheard today, in which a woman was telling her kid's father or nanny or babysitter that it was almost time for "Sesame." Not "Sesame Street" or "The Street" -- "Sesame." Maybe she can get together with the "Noodles" people and do some Chinese cooking.

Order Now!

My third book, "Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk," is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Place your order now to ensure it's dispatched to you as soon as the clock strikes June 18 (and also to maybe get that Amazon sales rank above 1,776,740).

The Breaks

The following is an outtake from my forthcoming book, "Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk." My editor considered it too inside-baseball for an audience larger than newspaper copy editors, and she was probably right.

TINY ACTS OF TYPOGRAPHICAL ELEGANCE

In the arcane subculture of the headline writer, there is a concept called the bad break. As with pretty much everything else I’m writing about, those rules have relaxed over the years. There was a time when many newspapers would have rejected the following:

President
heads to
Europe

Are you horrified by that preposition at the end of the second line? Yeah, me neither. But I’m still enough of a traditionalist to consider the following break — leaving a preposition at the end of the first line — undesirable. I don't rule out such breaks, but I try to avoid them.

President heads to
Dominican Republic

Chances are, if you’ve never been initiated into the headline-writing fraternity, you didn’t see an aesthetic problem with that break either. And you’d be onto something. For many years now at the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society, Alex Cruden, now retired from the copy desk of the Detroit Free Press, has invited civilians into our world and asked them to evaluate headlines. He’s found that they rarely if ever care or even notice how headlines break — and not only in the case of obscure technical violations involving prepositions, conjunctions and articles.

Cruden and others argue that the utter lack of reader awareness of such things is a good reason not to worry about them. That viewpoint has clearly gained traction, even among copy editors who remain largely hidebound when it comes to the dictates of their stylebooks. The following examples come from my own paper, the Washington Post.

N.Y. banker contributed
money, time to cancer
group for young people

Fifteen years after discovering taekwondo at a mall
kiosk, Alexandria’s Jennings is bound for London

Savage gives first crash
course in sex on campus

Whistleblower sues IRS to get reward
Claims disclosures showed how Dutch
bank helped clients avoid paying taxes

Are you horrified? Please be horrified. Sparing readers a preposition at the end of the first line of a headline is a tiny act of elegance that you can take or leave, but — except in narrow one-column headlines, in which all bets are off — readers should not be led to believe even for a nanosecond that a New York banker loves cancer. Dan Savage gave a crash? Oh, a crash course. A Dutch bank is a Dutch bank, not a Dutch ... bank. We can debate just where these examples fall on the continuum from tiny act of elegance to colossal act of courtesy, but line breaks separate; they cause a reader to pause, however briefly. To dismiss the importance of line breaks is to deny poetry.

It’s mainly the poetry — the rhythm — of the headline that I’m talking about here, but occasionally a bad break can be a fatal flaw, changing the message conveyed. A Columbia Journalism Review compilation of humorous headline gaffes includes this one:

Man shot in back,
head found in street

The humorous misreading is still possible with the “back, head” part unbroken, but I think it’s a lot less likely. One of Jay Leno’s headline-mocking books offers a similar example:

Helicopter
powered by
human flies

I’m not sure whether any of Alex Cruden’s people-off-the-street sessions included headlines like those. Obviously, any literate person would notice the humor in those examples as they were published; the question becomes whether they would feel precisely the same way about them laid out like this:

Man shot in back, head found in street

Helicopter powered by human flies

Or this, if you’ll excuse the problem of line lengths (a problem that’s also on our radar):

Man shot in back, head
found in street

Helicopter powered by human
flies

While I consider Cruden’s research admirable and useful, especially when I’m worried about a questionable break and have no time to fix it, I have to raise the question: Is what readers would notice really a valid criterion upon which to base editorial judgment? We spell supersede and stratagem and, heck, judgment the way we do because those are the correct spellings, even though a large majority of readers would never register supercede or strategem or judgement as an error.

Furthermore, I’ve always thought that bad breaks carry a subliminal message of sloppiness. Readers may not think they notice them, but I’d like to see a controlled study in which they’re presented with two otherwise identical pages, one following the old conventions and the other ignoring them. I’d bet my green eyeshade they would rank the former as somehow more polished, more professional, even more credible.

That cumulative effect, I think, holds true for all tiny acts of elegance. A bad break here, a usage not quite finished evolving into universal acceptance there, and the next thing you know, there’s a general aura of sloth.