Going out of style

IT’S late at night and the office is empty. I’m waiting for a phone call from a man eighty miles away who, I hope, is going to tell me he’s received all the pages for tomorrow’s edition of the Nitherley Observer and Bugle and his press is rolling. Then I can go home and sleep.

I’m browsing the internet and have landed on a site called Grammar Party. It’s a blog about the finer points and intricacies of the English language, written by a young woman who is obviously passionate about the subject. She’s just uploaded a piece called Titles of works: italics or quotation marks. She delves into the Chicago Manual of Style and The Associated Press Style Book.

When you care about words, how sentences are constructed, how to get your message across with clarity and accuracy, you read stuff like this. It reassures you. It touches a nerve in your brain that warms your body because the realisation dawns that there are other people in this world – perhaps thousands of miles away – who share your concerns. So I read her piece as I wait for my phone call.

Then I leaf through this morning’s paper, and in a story about illegal travellers’ sites notice the word Gypsy spelt in two different ways. And I recall a conversation from the previous evening.

Trout Man: “I say, how do we spell Gypsy these days? Dashed if I can remember.”

Mrs Strop: “Upper case G with a Y.”

Trout Man: “Could have sworn it was lower case G with an I.”

Mrs Strop: “No, it’s upper case G with a Y. They facking changed it.”

Trout Man: “Gosh. Just as well I asked. Things do reinvent themselves rather rapidly these days. Can’t keep up.”

There was a time when we adhered, with an almost religious fervour, to the Westminster Press Style Book, as did most British regional newspapers. Style was upheld, it was the identity that shaped your product, a benchmark of quality – and it was enforced by an angry man with an em-rule who barked across the office if you inadvertently spelt “advisor” with an E instead of an O.

Now style has become a casualty of the headlong race for the digital Holy Grail. It’s lying in a ditch at the side of a road while people who don’t give a toss about the English language upload badly-written copy onto newspaper websites in the unproven belief they are the vanguard of the future.

Meanwhile, people like me – sitting in an empty office while the rest of the world sleeps – are being made redundant in their hundreds, while clinging stubbornly to the certainty that readers don’t just want a stream of real-time information, they want quality, an experience, and reassurance that values still exist and are zealously defended.

The phone rings and a man says: “Wi hev aaahl yer pages, marra. Divvent hing aboot. Get yersel hyem.”

The English language: it bends and it flexes, it plunges and soars – it binds and enlightens. I switch off the lights and walk through a dark and empty newspaper office, comforted by the knowledge there are tiny beacons of hope all around the world.