Sisters Fans make the Guardian Style Guide....

[Doktor Gott]

(from the Grauniad..)


More than 80 years after it first appeared, a new edition of Guardian Style is published

The new edition of Guardian Style arrives more than 80 years after the first "Style-book of the Manchester Guardian", printed (for staff only, and not available to the general public) when the great CP Scott was well into his sixth decade as editor. We have included extracts from the 1928 book, as well as the whole of Scott's 1921 essay best known for the phrase "comment is free but facts are sacred", which we believe still informs and inspires Guardian journalists.

We have also included a number of anecdotes about Scott, including this recollection by WP Crozier, himself a later editor of the Guardian:

"Since the paper was critical, independent, and in frequent opposition to popular opinion, he felt that everything should be done to make it clear to the average man and woman. It was to appeal to the intelligent rather than to the erudite. He tried to keep out of it the pedantic and obscure, pretence and ostentation. He liked plain English, holding that everything in a foreign language, living or dead, that crept into the paper could have been said as well or better in English ... He constantly asked the question 'What does it mean?' or 'What does he mean?' "

Such an approach can still be seen, I hope, in the advice the new book offers to headline writers:

Imagining that you are describing an event, in words, to real people, is a good antidote to journalese: no one in a pub says: "Did you see that Clegg slammed Cameron in a dramatic power bid?"

Here are some more extracts from the new book. Today: G-L, with more later in the week.

geriatrics

branch of medicine dealing with elderly people, not an amusing way to describe them in an attempt to make yourself sound cool

Goths

Germanic tribe that invaded the Roman empire

goths

Sisters of Mercy fans who invaded the Shepherd's Bush empire

headlines

Some of the most fondly remembered headlines are, in fact, apocryphal: it is a myth that our reports of the exploits of the explorer Vivian Fuchs ever carried the headline "Fuchs Off To Antarctic". The following did, however, appear: "Sir Vivian Fuchs At Palace" (16 May 1958) and "Sir Vivian Fuchs For Antarctic" (6 December 1963).

Hermès

scarves and shawls

Hermes Group

stocks and shares

hotels

a hotel, not "an"; do not cap up "hotel": the Dorchester, the Ritz, the Grand hotel, Brighton, etc (but don't be silly and lower-case Hotel California)

iconic, icons

A selection of the things described in the Guardian as "iconic" in a heady fortnight in 2010:

Archaeopteryx, bluefin tuna, Castro's cigar, David Beckham wearing an anti-Glazer scarf, Grace Kelly in casual wear, Imperial War Museum North, Liberty prints, limestone stacks in Thailand, Nigel Slater, Mad Men, Variety, the John Hughes films Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Weird Science, postboxes, prints of the Che Guevara image, Stephen Fairey's Obama Hope design, the parliamentary constituency of Hove, Brandenburg Gate, Bach's St Matthew Passion, a community-owned wind turbine , Kraft cheese slices, salmon farming, the blue and white stripes of Cornishware pottery, Penarth Pavilion, Cardiff, the Norwegian church and Pierhead Building in Cardiff Bay, a multimillion-pound arena in Leeds, a "rock-built engine house at Bottalack near St Just", the Royal Albert Hall, wind turbines ("iconic renewable energy technology"), Wembley Arena, and the video for Kylie Minogue's Can't Get You Out of My Head.

Our advice, even if our own writers rarely follow it, is to show a little more thought, and restraint, in using this term

insisted

overused, especially in political reporting, perhaps to imply that you don't believe the speaker; "said" should normally suffice

judgment call

works much better without the word "call"

KitKat

chocolate; there is a KitKatClub in Berlin, named after the fictional Kit Kat Klub in the musical Cabaret

lilo

something you take to the beach to lie on

LiLo

Lindsay Lohan

London

Surprising as it may be to some London-based journalists, most of our readers do not work or live in the capital (or, indeed, the UK). So give location, not just name: ie King's Cross, north London, not just King's Cross; there is a Victoria station in Manchester as well as in London, so make clear which one you mean

[markfiend]

Heh. Good stuff.