The other day we wrote about some students hanging out in front of a cement sculpture. Our reporter on the piece, who is very conscientious, realized her mistake. It was more than likely a concrete sculpture, cement being a part of concrete.
The larger question is this, outside of the
Portland Cement Association(yes, such a trade group exists), does anybody care about this distinction? Cement and concrete are essentially interchangeable in most people’s vocabulary, and many, many folks use cement when they really mean concrete.
Journalism is like that. We can be very persnickety about rules. Our copy desk in particular is an army of smart folks who value precision. For example, most people just say Sheetrock. We don’t. We say wallboard, Sheetrock being a brand of wallboard. Or this morning, we had a brief about man killed after his car hit a utility pole. Many people might say telephone pole and not care whether it’s really a power pole, a telephone pole or both.
Rules about language and grammar are important. They seem less important today, with the lingua franca of the Internet and the idea that if we’re all sending messages from our BlackBerrys, our thumbs don’t have time to mess with punctuation.
I disagree. In the end, language is about communication and communication is about being understood. Precision leads to understanding. Language evolves, of course. But concrete is forever.
Your host is Ken Otterbourg, the managing editor at the Winston-Salem Journal. It's a forum to discuss the media, from
I think we’re talking about two different things here.
One is superbrands that have become so successful that the brand name is now used generically (Kleenex, Coke, Clorox, etc).
The other is the English language and how it is being hijacked and rewritten faster than you can IM your buddy with your Blackberry. I would venture to say that not many people care anymore and that is sad. I am glad that print media remains a bastion of perfection for grammar and spelling.
I’m sure you hear a lot of grief when you do make a mistake. I’m saying thanks for the 99.9999% of the time you don’t make any.
There are two issues at play here. The first concerns using language properly and effectively to convey what we really mean. The second concerns arguing about words rather than ideas, which is just plain silly.
Of course, language changes as time goes by. New nouns are needed to name things that didn’t previously exist. Words are changed from nouns to verbs by adding appropriate suffixes. Dictionary compilers agree that “ain’t” ain’t as bad as our grandmothers thought.
What is appropriate in e-mail is not necessarily appropriate in the newspaper, just as one wouldn’t wear a bathing suit to a wedding. And while I appreciate integrity from news writers, no one needs to jump off a cliff because concrete ain’t cement!
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