McCOMB - It was bad enough when automobile wrecks became car crashes. Now people "went missing," whatever that means.
Those are just two of the terms commonly used by the media - there's yet another - that are irritating to a retired editor.
When I studied journalism and became a newspaper reporter back in the Eisenhower era, if cars or trucks collided or ran off the road and hit a tree, it was called a wreck. If a train jumped the track, it was a train wreck.
Airplanes crashed.
At some point, someone came up with the notion - either by design or accident and I suspect the latter - that when two cars collide, it's a crash.
Technically, I guess crash is correct, but I prefer wreck. If I hear there was a crash, I want to know in whose field the airplane fell.
Call car wrecks crashes if you must, but what is this "went missing?" As in: "He has been a suspect since his wife 'went missing' two weeks ago."
How about disappeared or has not been seen or even has been missing. How does someone "went missing?"
It's a media thing, I guess. Someone in the media, which includes newspapers, television, radio and I presume even the Internet and billboards, came up with the term, and like a herd of sheep the rest of the media followed.
There I go violating another precept that was hammered into my consciousness by a hard-boiled city editor 47 years ago when he asked me about a detail in a story I had submitted and I responded I presumed something. "You don't presume a damn thing in this business," he admonished. "You check facts."
Of course that was back when the business I was in was called the "press" instead of the "media."
Media, which includes the various forms of journalism and news, is the correct term these days, and I can't argue with that. Press alludes to newspapers, which traditionally have been produced on printing presses, although you can now read them electronically on the Internet.
But I still like the word press. For one thing you can find it in the Bible - at least the King James version.
Look in the 19th chapter of St. Luke and you'll read that a tax collector (they were called publicans then) couldn't see Jesus "for the press."
Granted, later translations of the Bible have changed press to crowd, but I challenge you to find "media" anywhere in the Bible.
I guess I'm just getting old.
I can remember when to say people were "gay" merely meant they were happy. The word originally had no sexual connotations. Homosexuals were called just that or other things but not gay.
Pioneer meant people who went west in covered wagons in the early 1900s. Now you read about pioneers in science, space, television and even journalism.
And those in journalism are doing too much "pioneering" with the language for my tastes.
- Charles Dunagin is a retired editor of the Enterprise-Journal. He has been a member of "the press" for 47 years but does not yet consider himself a "pioneer."
