A story in the Guardian headlined “Condi’s party surprise cost Britain $10,000″ ends with a quote from a British official: “There were 111 people there - some of them the most influential Americans in the administration. Do the math - it’s good value for money.”

Apart from the evidence that the British official has gone native in Washington, it is a fair point.

The headline use of $10,000 gives us what looks like a big number, translated in the text to £4,900. Simple arithmetic shows that the cost was around £45 a head for a dinner in the British embassy.

You can spend that sort of money for dinner in some pubs so it looks like a pretty good deal for a celebration for the woman who, at the time, was soon to become the US secretary of state.

I feel that the paper should have done the sum for its readers. But I guess a headline saying UK spent £45 a head on dinner for the Condoleezza Rice, President Bush and 109 others might have changed the complexion of the story.

David Marsh, editor of the Guardian style guide, can, I have decided after a few minutes thought, be described as an iconoclast — in the nicest possible way. He sets about the overuse of the word icon to describe everything from Jordan to record covers and Vodemort with all the zeal of William Dowsing who defaced churches in the 17th century.

The excesses of his colleagues are enjoyable debunked by Marsh who concludes with an email from a reader in Canada, saying:

I suggest you reserve anything to do with icons to the Virgin Mary, Elvis Presley and a very limited number of people whose faces are recognised and revered, maybe also little figures on computer screens. Otherwise it becomes devalued and is just a trendy way of saying famous or memorable.

Readers do care about these things. Last month I linked to a post on the BBC Editors Blog by Alistair Burnett, of the World Tonight, on the overuse of “crisis”. The number of hits on Wordblog coming from the BBC as a result has convinced me of the success of the Editors blog.

Dare I call the way some words are over used as a disaster?

 Alistair Burnett, editor of the BBC’s World Tonight, has a good post on the overuse of the word crisis by journalists. On The Editors Blog he writes:

One of the values BBC journalism puts great emphasis on trying to live up to is accuracy. On top of that, language is the most basic of tools for a journalist. So using it accurately is essential. Though dramatic words help make our stories stand out, we have to guard very carefully against being tempted into hyperbole.

If he needs a little more ammunition to get his message across the his BBC colleagues, these are the first ten results from a Google News search for "crisis" on the BBC news site this morning:

• Tories ponder major crisis force (What on earth does that mean?)
• Debt crisis hits Chrysler buyout
• Warning of children’s TV ‘crisis’ (Note the disassociating quotes)
• Flood crisis operation launched
• In pictures: Darfur crisis
• Flood crisis test for Brown
• Leadership crisis hits Togo FA
• Land ‘no cure for housing crisis’
• Darfur crisis ’spilling into CAR’
• The “L” word (liquidity crisis, it seems)

Comments in brackets are mine. Burrnett’s point is made: what a lazy lot of headlines.

It often seems that history began some time in the early 1990s. While the internet has given us unprecedented free access to information, it is not good for the facts and opinion that give us the longer perspective.

From the desktop, the 1980s seems like the dark ages. So it is disturbing that libraries are under threat from cost-cutting. The Guardian reports today that the British Library, the greatest of the British deposit libraries, is threatened by government imposed cuts which could lead to charges.

The county and city libraries have long suffered from financial cuts and the need to make themselves “popular” as well as a lack of investment in storage. The result is that they throw out old books.

This is akin to bulldozing castles and ancient houses: it diminishes our ability to understand the past and how it affects the present.

Use of the word “prostitute” in coverage of the Ipswich murders has come in for predictable complaints from those who felt that “sex workers” was the more appropriate term. Prostitute is an uncomfortable description to apply to any woman but in context of events in the Suffolk town it had a necessary precision.

Not only does sex worker seem to sanitise the work, it is an all encompassing term for escorts and massage parlour workers as well as those vulnerable on the streets.

But there is something else here. The murdered women were local girls, daughters, school friends, former girl friends; they belonged to the community. They have been seen locally not only as victims of the sex trade but as victims of drugs. Parents have talked to the media of daughters “lost to them” because of drugs.
Unusually, for this kind of case the local media, day-after-day, has talked to people who knew the women and spoke about them in very human terms. BBC journalist Tim Fenton who still lives close to the town where he was brought up, wrote on the corporation’s Suffolk website:

With a population of about 140,000, Ipswich is big enough to be a proper town but not so big as to feel impersonal. It’s noticeable that the TV crews have had little problem finding people who knew and will talk about the murdered women.
Many remember them as schoolgirls or neighbours and offer the cameras personal recollections. There’s ready sympathy for the addictions that drove them to sell their bodies and risk their lives. I wonder if that would be true in a big city.
Everyone is affected.

The women killed in Ipswich have not been traded around the world for sex nor have they fled from their homes for the anonymity of a big city: they are “the girl next door”.

I live about 12 miles from Ipswich. All I hear is sympathy for the dead girls and their families. The people round here see an inextricable link between drugs and prostitution. There are drugs in our village, and with them the recognition that every family is vulnerable.

In this context the word prostitute is a recognition of reality and not “dehumanising” or implying a “value judgement” about the lives of the women, as readers of the Guardian have suggested to Ian Mayes, the readers’ editor.

Writing on the use of the terms “prostitute” and “sex worker”, he says: “The terms will probably continue to co-exist, carefully one hopes. Once again context is all-important and indicative.”

The BBC is not following NBC in describing the conflict in Iraq as “civil war”. The fighting there, says Jon Williams, the BBC’s word new editor, “defies simple categorisation”.

He writes in the broadcaster’s Editors blog that Harvard professor Monica Toft believes Iraq meets all six of the objective criteria she has identified as being shared by all modern cvil wars . But Williams wonders if using the term civil war “really aids out understanding”.

There are, he maintains, at least two other dimensions. “In Anbar province, the violence in places like Fallujah and Ramadi is driven by the original insurgency against the US-led occupation. Anbar is a Sunni stronghold – the targets, by and large, are not Shia Muslims, but American servicemen and women. Further south, a third battle emerges – fighting between rival Shia militias,” he writes.

He arrives at the view that, “there is no single picture in Iraq – no single term can do justice to the complexity of what’s going on there.”

Job titles at the BBC sometimes seem to come from the realms of science fiction. The Controller of Knowledge is clearly a sentient organism controlling the universe from somewhere on the outer spiral of the galaxy.

Not really, it’s Glenwyn Benson.

That is her role in the newly formed BBC Vision division. And what will that entail? Her new boss Jana Bennett explained it to Media Guardian:

Glenwyn will be the chief architect of the BBC’s knowledge building mission as we enter the new charter period, while Emma [Swain, Deputy Controller of Knowledge] will ensure that our award-winning slates maintain momentum as we develop 360-degree commissioning.

I’ve been brushing up my klingon but clearly that is not what is spoken at the White City of the outer spiral. jIyajbe’

A lifetime in journalism has drummed into me a belief that a consistent style in writing is important. One of those areas is how we name people. The traditional British newspaper approach has been to give people’s full names at first use, eg John Smith, and afterwards Mr Smith. The exceptions are sportspeople, entertainers and those who have been convicted by a court. They are just “Smith” after first use.

In a blog, I felt, first names seemed inappropriate in many cases and would certainly lead to inconsistencies but the use of Mr etc was too formal. So I have taken what seemed to me to be a more American approach of using surnames with no Mr, Mrs Ms or Miss. I am not entirely comfortable with this as it reminds me of school.

Andy Bechtel, a journalism teacher at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has raised the matter of inconsistency in his Editor’s Desk blog.

He cites the Druge Report’s home page links to reviews of the new CBS news anchor Katie Couric’s performance:

SHALES: No News Not the Best News For Katie Couric’s Debut…

PEYSER: SHE LOOKED LIKE A LITTLE GIRL WHO HAD TO GO POTTY…

ALESSANDRA: A Subdued Beginning…

VARIETY: ‘The new news looks quite a lot like the old news’…

Bechtel finds the use of two surnames and only the given name of Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times “vaguely patronising”. I agree.

Since restarting Wordblog a month-and-a-half ago I have become increasing aware of the lack of a sub-editor. However long I spend reading copy, I find huge errors of grammar, punctuation and spelling creeping in. Too often, what I intended to say is less clear when read a few days later.

On the whole bloggers are too kind to point out these mistakes. Newspaper reporters have always faced readers ready to write a letter to the editor blaming “the decay of the education system” for a misplaced comma.

India too has long been a country where the correct use of English is highly regarded. Writers there may now find themselves the subject of a post on the mediaculpa blog. It is part of the Newswatch India site.

This minute examination of a front page last Friday is an example of the mediaculpa approach:

Here’s a look at the front page of today’s Times of India, Delhi edition.

Today’s lead has the same fault about inverted commas as it was with yesterday’s anchor. Single quotes are used for quotations within quotations. Elsewhere, even if it is a phrase or just a word, double quotes are used.

Incorrect use around artificial in the intro…

The post is long and certainly holds the Times of India to account. But I do wonder if “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” has moved to Simla.

Sometimes radio news items are surreal. Did they really say that? you ask. Amit Chaudhuri did. His verse on mishearing the BBC in last Sunday’s Observer was the funniest thing in the paper.