The term 'Stuff-up' has taken on a whole new meaning

Newspaper readers are confronted daily by depressing proof that we now have a generation of journalists with only a limited command of their most vital tool, the English language.

Here’s a small example from Stuff today, in a story about the group of bird watchers who died tragically when their boat capsized off Kaikoura.

“Arriving in Kaikōura on Friday night,” the reporter wrote, “11 people got together at the local dive lodge, a two-storey, inauspicious building, ready for an exciting day on the ocean.”

Hang on a minute. An inauspicious building? My New Zealand Oxford Dictionary defines inauspicious as ill-omened, unpropitious or unlucky. “Unfavourable” or “not conducive to success” are other synonyms.

I’ve never seen the word applied to a building before. Inauspicious circumstances, an inauspicious event or an inauspicious start, yes. But unless it was draped with ominous warning signs, I don’t think a building could be described as inauspicious. 

I suspect the reporter meant “inconspicuous”. I googled “Kaikoura dive lodge” and the building that immediately popped up on my screen could probably be described accurately using that word.

I see clangers like this every day. They are one more reason why media credibility is steadily being eroded, especially in the eyes of people who value the correct use of English. People may say I’m nitpicking, but the English language is a precision tool and the job of journalists is to convey information succinctly and accurately. They shouldn’t leave their readers scratching their heads and wondering what they mean.

That’s why newspapers used to have sub-editors – typically older, more knowledgeable hands who intercepted and corrected solecisms before they got into print. (A sub once saved me, as a young reporter, from describing a man's extravagant sideburns as verdant - which means green - when I really meant luxuriant.) But sub-editors, along with proof-readers (another line of defence against error), were discarded in the bizarre belief that reporters could check and correct their own copy. How they're supposed to correct their mistakes when they don’t realise they’ve made them has never been explained.

And here’s another obvious question: why do they become journalists in the first place if they don’t value and understand words? (One likely explanation is that many see themselves as being on an ideological mission. Words, grammar and syntax are of incidental importance.)

The puzzling thing is that Stuff, even after years of hollowing out, still employs a surprisingly large cohort of experienced editorial executives. You wouldn’t guess this from looking at the company’s papers or website, which are routinely riddled with errors. Whatever these executives are paid to do, their duties obviously don’t include correcting what might be termed Stuff-ups by their bright-eyed but ignorant reporters. Either that or they’ve simply given up caring.

It’s notable that Stuff journalists take great care to be correct in the usage of Maori words, right down to the placement of the appropriate macrons. That’s as it should be. But English is still the language by which we communicate and convey important information. Generations of newspapers took pride in doing this properly and it’s a symptom of Stuff’s profound decline that it no longer bothers.

Footnote: On an atrocity scale of one to 10, Stuff’s misuse of the English language probably rates a 3 at most. But The Dominion Post’s flagrant and wilful manipulation of “news” to promote favoured politicians, as documented here by David Farrar, is a 7 at least.