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In pursuit of an elusive goal

K.NARAYANAN

"Appropriate words at appropriate places shine like gems," said Winston Churchill. Dr. P. Yenadi Raju of Tirupati, citing these words, says The Hindu used to give such gems, "but now proper usage looks to be taking the back seat."

That view, in different words, recurs in quite a few messages every day: they point out inappropriate usage, wrong grammar and syntax, and much more. As I mentioned last week, while errors of fact are corrected in the daily column that appears on Op-Ed page, typographical and grammatical mistakes are dealt with internally. In the imperfect craft of journalism, these are the result of various pressures — an explanation that not all buy. T. Shanmugavelu of Chaliyam, Kozhikode (his regular postcards list such slips with precision), for instance, says: "To err is human, but not every day, round the year. Please rectify these evils and let us have a perfect The Hindu." (But it is not one human who is responsible; there are hundreds.)

Another reader, unnamed here because he has not provided his address, has an additional angle: "... the corrections you publish day after day ... show that ... your journalists are not trained properly or insufficient people are recruited ... your recruitment process as well as training system need complete overhaul."

S. Chandra Sekharan of Secunderabad is trenchant: "Journalistic training is a continuous on the job process. Please improve it. Let there be a token salary reduction or honorarium reduction for every mistake any reader finds from your staff or contributor respectively ... Tighten the internal set-up to be more alert. It cannot be left to the readers to be vigilant against mistakes."

Then there are those who suggest a different role for the Readers' Editor. "Can you think of an occasional column, `Back to basics', so that people in general and journalists in particular do not continue to commit such mistakes?" asks R.K. Jagadeesh of Mysore, a retired professor, whose vigilant eye picks out any errors in the use of technical terms. Sreekar L. Bhandarkar of Bangalore has this advice: "Recurrence of a clarification should be avoided by instructing your editorial staff to study your column with a view to imbibe corrections."

Good suggestions, well intentioned, from readers keen to see a cleaner paper. A common refrain in their communications, as from others who point out mistakes daily, is that "this was not The Hindu's standard." Granted that pressures of deadlines and volumes of copy have expanded exponentially, the fact is that a very large part of the mistakes readers point out could have been avoided.

* * *

What follows is a small selection from the errors pointed out by readers:

Among those present included ...

... at the World Health day observations

He or his party now have

The reason is because

The visitors were there to wish Mr. Singh on his birthday. (K.R. Menon, Thiruvananthapuram)

To reach by foot, they come by walking (B. Theodore, Narasapur)

The refugees disbursed.

French citizens were exercised their franchise

Thousands of sq.ft. of illicit timber (M. Khader Mohideen, Chennai)

Unless and until the High Court does not reverse the ruling it could be cited (R. Venkatachar, Chennai)

Knowing fully well, pretending as if (M.S. Ramakrishna, Secunderabad)

this had went on for more than 10 days

When information reached her (for his) mother (K.N. Narayana Pillai, Chennai)

Who do they come with stay? (J.G. Kanagaraj, Chennai)

one could be able to get (A.K. Kulathu, Chennai)

... her husband also hung himself (K. Chandrasekaran, Sivaganga)

"a relic of the past"

"a security personnel"

"He had fell into a deep cave ... "

"... before the surgeon could arrived"

Even when he was ill, my former colleague the late B.S. Padmanabhan, occasionally voiced in his characteristically gentle manner his sadness over the decline, pointing out errors such as "although he was old but he walked," alternate for alternative, it's for its, and so on.

B.N. Bhat of Ernakulam, citing mistakes such as "He said the deal did do through," and "free, air and credible elections," breaks into ditty:

Oh dear Hindoo

You do mix up go and do

And do not seem to care

While making light as air

A word so good as fair

Beware of printer's devil

We can do without such evil.

* * *

Well, I can cite many more such evils; it is a collection that expands by the day and is an inexhaustible resource base which I can make use of from time to time for future columns. It is a major problem against which reader's editors/ombudsmen the world over battle all the time with the aim of improving quality. As Ian Mayes, President of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen (ONO), says: "I can say this by virtue of experience I share with colleagues in ONO. Between us we work in 15 different countries. We toil in the same stony field. We do not know whether our patron saint should be Sisyphus or Pinocchio."

* * *

To conclude on a cheerful note: Raghu Tagat of Chennai, who has been reading The Hindu from 1932, has a list of rarely used words and new phrases which he has picked up from the paper: It is interesting and informative. One entry in it was "supererogatory" — that appeared in the Religion column. He could not find the meaning. The Religion desk located the word in some American online dictionaries. It means more than is needed, desired or required.

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

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