Retching Over Reaching Out

If I hear one more television news person use the words “reached out” as a synonym for called, I think I will barf. My wife has become accustomed to hearing me yell at the television set when perfectly good words and phrases are sacrificed to ignorance or artifice.

Blame my high school English teachers and a newspaper copy editor named Chick Ober.

When a reporter says, “Channel X reached out to Mr. Smith for his comments, but he was not available,” it sounds as if the reporter was being a really swell person by trying to get Mr. Smith’s side of the story, but isn’t that what a reporter is supposed to do?

What the reporter did was CALL Mr. Smith or send him an email. Why not say, “Channel X left three telephone messages and sent two emails to Mr. Smith, but he has not responded.”

Reached out — yuck.

HOW DO THESE things start and spread so quickly?

I first began hearing “reached out” on local newscasts and dismissed it as an example of a lack of care for the language. Then ‘reached out’ began popping up everywhere. Several times recently I have heard a reporter on one of the national networks, supposedly staffed by educated people, use the term. Double yuck.

Did it start way back with AT&T’s commercial urging viewers to “reach out and touch someone”?

So many depredations of the language seem to begin in advertising.

It was in an automobile commercial that I first heard a perfectly useful term — begs the question — under attack. After the commercial established a beachhead, there was no repelling the assault, and “begs the question” no longer means what it once did. Now, if a writer uses the phrase correctly, the reader is not likely to understand the writer’s intent.

In its previous usage, to “beg the question” meant to carry on a false argument where one assumes as proved the very point that is being argued, or more loosely, to evade the issue at hand.

IF, FOR EXAMPLE, someone asked why Donald Trump gets so much attention, and you said, “He’s in the news a lot,” the response would be, “That begs the question.” At least it would have been.

I spent a career trying to communicate clearly. Whatever success I had is due largely to those teachers and to Chick, who took a green young reporter under his linguistic wing.

I did not really appreciate those English teachers at the time. They had markedly different personalities, and only one of them inspired affection. All of them were demanding, and anything you got was earned. If you were motivated by grades, you worked.

At the St. Petersburg Times, where I began my career, the editors on the copy desk were generally an older and more experienced lot, and they saw themselves as guarding the gates of English usage against the barbarians on the reporting staff.

One of those guardians was Chick Ober. He had a round face and round glasses and he wore a bow tie. He looked like nothing so much as a toad frog terribly pleased with the fly it had just swallowed.

The newspaper had a tough, three-month probationary policy, which a good many people did not survive. Chick claimed not to learn the names of any of the new staffers until they’d passed probation. “No use cluttering up my head with the names of a bunch of people I won’t ever see again,” he said.

IT WAS SOME TIME after I was safely beyond probationary status that Chick stopped by my desk only long enough to say quietly, “I notice you used the word ‘evidently’ in that police short,” he said. “I think the word you wanted was ‘apparently.’ There is a difference. You could look it up.”

I looked it up in the big dictionary that was on a wooden stand in the newsroom. He was right, of course. I don’t recall whether I thanked him that time or whether he just saw me go to the dictionary, but he stopped my desk to talk about other word choices, always ending his brief visit with “you could look it up.” I always did, and I found myself looking up other words before I even turned a story in. (I still prefer a printed dictionary to one that pops up on the computer screen and gives only a bare-bones definition.

It is apparent, perhaps even evident, that local television stations and national networks don’t have room for a Chick Ober any more. Nor do many newspapers, for that matter.

The language — and clear communication — mourn the loss.