Fog Cutter

The professor of journalism finally wore down the Boston Herald. As a onetime reporter, editor and news analyst, Boston University's Dr. David Manning White is allergic to newspaper cliches and "fog words" (i.e., seldom-used words), has been needling Boston papers about their use of them. Last week the Herald waved the white flag, editorialized: "In view of the Professor's unfortunate expose of Boston newspaper punditing, we have little alternative but to follow his advice . . ."

Henceforth, the Herald would strive for simple phrasing.

Three days later it backslid, ran the headline: HEARINGS STRESS ACHESON UBIQUITY. Professor White, 33, spotted "ubiquity" as one of the thickest fog words, made a bet with John Crider, the Herald's chief editorial writer, that few readers knew what it meant. To prove it, White stood in front of the Boston Public Library and polled 72 passersby. His findings: only 19.4% correctly thought that "ubiquity" meant "everywhere-at-the-same-time"; most thought (by association with the name "Acheson") that it referred to "errors."

Confusion. White began making his collection of fog words last spring, by picking 25 sentences from New York and Boston newspapers. Sample sentence: "He has marshaled his oft-reiterated and unproved allegations to obfuscate and postpone decisions." White asked some 200 students and parents whether obfuscate meant reverse, change, confuse or rearrange. Only 23 knew it meant confuse Results were similar for such standbys as plebiscite, inculcate, anomaly, shibboleth, indigenous, cataclysms, aggrandizement tantamount, statutory, encroachment, implementation and peripheral.

Such words, said White, are not used often enough in ordinary conversation for the average newspaper reader to know what they mean. For example, obfuscate is not likely to show up once in 4,000,000 words of ordinary speaking and writing (according to the Lorge-Thorndike Teacher's Word Book of 3,000 Words'). If newspapers would forget the elegant variation,* and use the simple word "confuse" (which appears 25 times per million), readers would understand them better.

Dereliction of Duty. White also clipped 20 examples of newspaper cliches and standard phrases out of six Boston papers, sent his journalism students through a night bakery, a waiting room, a steel mill and a railroad station, to see how well the phrases were understood. Samples: bipartisan foreign policy, act of overt aggression, fusillade of shots, dereliction of duty, titular head of the party, diplomat without portfolio, deficit spending, eschewing presidential ambitions, policy of containment. The average reader got nearly half the phrases wrong. Even "bipartisan foreign policy" had hard going; some of those questioned thought it meant that both Roman Catholics and Protestants should be employed in the State Department.

But the habit of foggy writing is hard to correct, as White himself showed in a wordy summation in Editor & Publisher recently. Wrote he: a newspaper should "strive continually for the simplest and most logical phrasing for the presentation of communication . . . The press should make its strongest impression on the youngsters in secondary schools, an impression that inculcates [one of his own fog words] the habits that will lead eventually to an enlightened citizenry."

*Says Fowler's Modern English Usage on "Elegant Variation": "The fatal influence ... is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence--or within 20 lines or other limit . . ."

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