Journalists are language professionals. If we get the best information but we don't know how to transmit it accurately and clearly, our mission fails. Each word has its meaning and nuance and you have to know how to choose them. And our readers and subscribers trust our professionalism so that we hit the right word, the one that best conveys the meaning of each fact, statement or idea that we describe. For this reason, they are surprised when we make a mistake in something as fundamental as the choice of the right words.
“One of the things that should be asked of a good newspaper like La Vanguardia is that it watch its language”, subscriber Josep Altur wrote to me a few weeks ago, surprised that in an opinion article the verb to engrave (whose meaning is “load on someone or something” or “impose a burden”, according to the definition of the RAE) with engraving (“point out with an incision or open and carve in hollow or in relief”). Altur pointed out that "this error appears repeatedly in many articles and columns."
The subscriber Joan M. Verdú, for his part, has already written three times to the Ombudsman's mail (defensor@lavanguardia.es) to warn of articles in which the verb to infringe (“break laws or orders”) was used when in fact the proper expression was to inflict (“inflict harm” or “impose a punishment”). Two other readers, Carlos Argemí and Josè Pablo Rivadulla, have recently alerted me to articles in which the fractional numeral twelfth (“said from one part: That it is one of the twelve equals into which a whole is divided”) was confused with the twelfth ordinal (“which occupies the twelfth place in a series”), and fifteenth by fifteenth. "Your journalists should not commit these grammatical errors," Rivadulla pointed out.
They are all right. Newspaper readers enjoy well-written texts and when an error of this type escapes us, we not only disturb the pleasure of reading, but also cast a shadow of doubt on the care with which we do it. That every night the presses print a newspaper that selects the most important news has always been a small miracle, in which small errors have inevitably slipped. For a few years now, this challenge has been joined by the challenge of a digital edition that adds new subscribers every day who demand the same quality even though the cover and news evolve live as events unfold. The miracle, however, must continue to occur and our articles, both in their printed and digital versions, must continue to aspire to perfection and demonstrate it in the quality of their texts.
