What's an 's' between friends?

Looking through the company's email address book today, I was surprised to see a colleague of mine down as having the job title of 'new editor'.

Either there have been some big changes at the top, or someone mistyped 'news editor'...

Senior sustainability officer for air blah blah blah

Just a quick one today, because it's now Friday evening and the pub is calling.

One of my colleagues stumbled across this less-than-pithy job title:

Senior sustainability officer for air quality in Camden Borough

Can anyone beat that?

And now I appear to work in IT

I may not have mentioned, but I was promoted a few weeks back from 'senior layout sub editor' to 'assistant web editor'. Fear not: I still spend a goodly proportion of my day subbing, for both print and web.

Anyway, I was stopped at lunchtime today by a couple of middle-aged female market researchers, who wanted to know whether I could help them with their survey.

"Um, maybe," I said.

"First we have to check that you don't work in any of these professions," market researcher A told me, handing me a list.

I looked at the list and there at the top was 'journalist'.

"Sorry, I'm a journalist," I ventured.

"What's your exact job title?" market researcher A asked me.

"Assistant web editor," I replied.

"Oh, that'll be OK, it's only IT," market researcher B told market researcher A.

I didn't stick around to complete the survey...

Job titles: heavyweight journalism

No one can accuse my colleagues of lightweight journalism.

As well as recently gaining an 'editor at large' (which appears to be publishing's equivalent of a 'minister without portfolio'), we now have - thanks to recent job title changes - a 'heavy commercial reporter'.

I believe that's a reference to the journalist's specialist field of heavy commercial vehicles rather than to any penchant he may have for pies.

Job titles: Head of Spatial Policy

A regular reader of this blog sent me the following local government job advert a while back:

Head of Spatial Policy

Due to promotion we are now looking for a first class planning professional with the drive and innovation to help build on our success.

With the ability to manage a cutting edge and high performing team, you'll have the opportunity for personal development within an integrated planning and transport section.

So - something in planning? But what's the difference between town planning and spatial policy?

What is interesting, though, is that while Googling 'Head of Spatial Policy' throws up only 173 Google hits, limiting the search to 'pages from the UK' increases that number to 185. Very unusual to see that happen!

And I don't know about you, but I think that public sector job titles should be chosen so that they make sense to most members of the public. I'm not sure this one is very easily understood.

House style: job titles, positions and ranks

We're currently overhauling our house style so that it is consistent across two print publications and one online publication, and the issue of job titles has come up. Currently, on one of the print publications at least, we use lower case for job titles but initial caps for "positions of public office and police ranks", for example:

• senior reporter John Doe
• Prime Minister John Doe
• Police Constable John Doe

(I know, that John Doe has had a very checkered career...)

This approach has several drawbacks, notably a) it can look inconsistent to readers who don't understand the rules behind it, and b) it leads to interminable discussions as to whether local councillors really should get initial caps.

So we're thinking of taking the lead of The Guardian and using lower case for all job titles and positions of public office. However The Guardian does use initial caps for police ranks (I don't know how it treats military ranks, but I imagine it also gives them initial caps).

What do you think? And if you work for a publication, what approach does it take?


Incidentally, I really like The Guardian for putting its style guide online and making it so clear and easy to use. The guide also displays both wit and grumpiness, which I think are necessary components of any style guide (or sub)...

PR speak

Spotted in a press release by one of the writers in our care before it reached the engine room: "Vehicle maintenance can be a headache for small businessmen and women." Funny, you'd think vertically challenged businessmen, or women, would be less likely to bang their heads when crawling beneath vehicles than their taller colleagues.

The PR person responsible for this howler can almost be forgiven – if a business is run by a businessman (or woman) then a small business...

What's more worrying to those of us trying to hold the line against a tide of sloppy usage is that the release came from a large company, which presumably employs large PR people, and certainly has a large PR team. Someone should have noticed.

But spare a thought for the PR person, of whatever size, who sent in a release from an oil company which described the author of a report as the "heavy duty marketing manager". Yes, it's logical that the person in charge of marketing lubrication products for heavy-duty vehicles should be called the heavy duty marketing manager. But we wonder what the woman who holds that post thinks of her job title?

We flipped her job title to refer to her as the marketing manager for heavy-duty lubricants and hope her bosses take the hint.

Hyphenation hazards

Life's not easy on the subs' desk (as the apostrophe implies, we share it).

A page proof came my way today which had been read by our magazine's webmaster. As well as his webbing skills, the webmaster is a wordsmith of the first water so I was surprised to see he had inserted a hyphen between the words 'well' and 'established' in the phrase "a well-established favourite".

Having checked with JD that he too eschews hyphens between verbs and their adverbs, and being reluctant to gainsay my erudite colleague without ammunition, I checked my Fowler's Modern English Usage (2nd edition) and found: "When the first word of the compound is an adverb no hyphen is ordinarily needed, though one may often be found there." In support of this Fowler's quotes Sir Winston Churchill: "Richly embroidered seems to me two words, and it is terrible to think of linking every adverb to a verb by a hyphen."

Assured of victory JD and I brought this to the attention of the webmaster, who cooly pointed to the Fowler's use of the word 'ordinarily' and pointed out that the prime use of a hyphen is to avoid confusion. He cited the phrase "a little-used car", where the absence of a hyphen would clearly shrink the automobile in question.

We accepted this as a valid exception to the no-hyphen rule and beat a hasty retreat. Belatedly checking JD's 3rd edition Fowler's we discovered that all reference to verb-adverb hyphens, or their absence, had been dropped.

But our challenge had obviously got under webby's skin. Having scanned previous entries in our blog he posed a question: "Does your job title take a hyphen – sub editor or sub-editor?" It seems we've used both forms – JD inserted a hyphen; I didn't. When in doubt, check the OED... where we discovered that we are actually subeditors. Even webby was surprised by this rather ugly word so he checked his Chambers dictionary which gave the same spelling.

The Fowler's section on hyphens opens: "No attempt will be made here to describe modern English usage in the matter of hyphens; its infinite variety defies description." And on that, at least, the webmaster, JD and I are in full agreement.

Just the ticket

Taking a train out of Finsbury Park, North London, last night I noticed that the ticket inspectors are now badged Revenue Protection Inspectors. Nice!

It does raise the question, though, that if ticket inspectors inspect tickets, do Revenue Protection Inspectors inspect revenue protection? If so, what does that mean? The RPIs certainly weren't inspecting any tickets on my train..