Analyzing Star style: What’s in a word?
Here’s why some words are spelled in quirky or contentious ways
This story is part of the Star’s trust initiative, where, every week, we take readers behind the scenes of our journalism.
At the beginning of this year, as part of the Star’s ongoing transparency project, we published a feature looking at how our newsroom style committee strives to maintain a sensitive, clear and consistent presentation of content.
The article, which delved into the role of the style committee and its decisions on word usage, proved popular with readers. In light of that, we thought it would be fun — and, we hope, of value — to look at the reasoning behind why the Star has made certain style decisions about specific words. The examples we have chosen for this feature are a sampling of words — some quirky, some contentious — from the Star Stylebook, a newsroom resource providing guidance on everything from spelling, capitalization and punctuation to the use of numbers, measurements and foreign words and phrases. We sat down with Anthony Collins and Jon Ohayon, co-chairs of the Star’s style committee, to get the goods on who is winning the name game in one Toronto neighbourhood and whatever happened to that reliable staple, the good old hot dog.
Days of blunder: The Canadian Press, the national wire service that publishes a well-respected guide on style, prefers daylight time but Star style is
daylight saving time, on the grounds that it’s more commonly used. Many say daylight savings time, but it’s less common than the singular. Daylight
time is convenient in headlines, though — a useful fallback (ward) position. Flipping the bird: Canadian Geographic magazine ruffled some feathers in 2016 when it proclaimed Perisoreus cana- densis to be our “new national bird,” but spelled its name the American way: gray jay. We knew that wouldn’t fly, so the Star used the Canadian spelling grey jay in our coverage, relying on the Canadian Oxford Dictionary for backup. The species was recently renamed the Canada jay, so patriotic birdwatchers and word watchers can both breathe easy. To Beach his own: It’s a decades-old debate that may never be resolved: what to call the east-end Toronto neighbourhood by the lake. Many longtime residents insist on the singular form the Beach, but others swear it’s always been the Beaches. The Beach won out in a 2006 neighbourhood poll, and that’s the name that appears on street signs along Queen St. The Star planted its flag in the Beach camp, too, in 2009, when it created a neighbourhood map of Toronto with input from readers. You’ll still see “Beaches” in the Star: in quotes, for instance, or in the name of the federal/provincial riding, Beaches—East York. But when it’s our choice, we prefer the Beach. Tweet science: Though we capitalize Twitter, we lowercase tweet as both a noun and a verb. In the early days, around 2008-09, our archives show we capitalized tweet quite often, as it seemed exotic. Stuck on neutral: The Star stylebook advises writers to “use gender-neutral terms such as spokesperson, chair, camera operator, firefighter and letter carrier whenever possible.”
As with any style rule, there are always exceptions: words like actress, freshman and fisherman are still so common that they’re hard to avoid (and don’t get us started on ombudsman, which many insist is genderneutral). On the other hand, firefighter and flight attendant are so widespread that their gendered antecedents are seldom heard now. In between are phrases like business person and humankind that will sound natural to some readers and drive others up the wall. Preferring gender-neutral terms may lead to accusations of political correctness run amok, but the language is constantly evolving, and what sounds odd or stilted today may soon be common parlance. Voyage of the God damned: The Canadian Press’s two-word style seems a bit archaic: God damn/God damned. (There’s also a note that it should be used with discretion.) Star style — goddamn — seems much less jarring and less clunky as an adjective, though we also use it with discretion and it mainly appears in quotes. Readers often remind us that God should be capitalized, though in this common phrase, we disagree. Mike dropped: The Star follows Canadian Press style on the abbreviation for microphone, which used to be mike. In 2015, it was changed to mic. The phenomenon of the mic drop would have looked bizarre in print as mike drop, and mike drop is much less prevalent online. How the sausage is made: CP’s longtime preference for spelling hotdog as one word didn’t pass mustard — er, muster — with some readers. It always looked a little strange to us, too. So we were glad when the CP Caps and Spelling guide recently changed its entry to hot dog — no doubt avoiding many future bunfights.