Perfectly Cromulent

By Joe Diorio

Local television news often provides great content for this blog. Just recently a local network affiliate aired a story about a new police training center and referred to the building as a “facility” no less than seven times in a two-and-one-half minute long story. And to reiterate, “facility” is my least favorite word; it’s a sign of lazy writing.

But local television also is a great source for inspired prose, especially when Taylor Swift is in town for a concert. You need to calm down, shake it off, and breathe (see what I did there?) and tip the collective hat to Chris Long, a sports anchor for KSTP-5 in Minnesota. When Taylor Swift’s Eras tour arrived in Minneapolis, Long used his television broadcast voice to deliver his sports report, weaving in the title of 47 Swift songs in his report. That’s above and beyond in the creativity department. You can click here to see Long’s report.

Don’t talk like you’d write (and don’t write that way, either).

One of my favorite episodes of “The Simpsons” shows Mrs. Krabappel, Springfield’s fourth grade teacher, questioning whether “embiggen” is really a word (I checked the dictionary – it is. First recorded use was in 1998, meaning it may well have come from “The Simpsons” TV show.) and Miss Hoover, Springfield’s third grade teacher, tells Mrs. Krabappel that embiggen “is a perfectly cromulent word.” (And one of my proofreaders said she once heard Frank Zappa use “cromulent.” So there.)

Sometimes we trip on words as we are trying to sound smart. That may explain the language used by Joe Cronin, general manager for the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association. Cronin described a recent meeting he had with player Damian Lillard as a “good dialogue.”

OK, I get it. Saying “good dialogue” is an acceptable substitute for “good conversation.” Both “dialogue” and “conversation” are nouns, and each word shows up in the dictionary definition of the other. Still, we should watch out for that deep desire we all have for fancy talk, no matter how cromulent the words are.

Almost 50 years ago television journalist Edwin Newman, in his book, A Civil Tongue, lamented the use of overly flowery talk, citing a Kansas City, Missouri meteorologist who said, “the heavy storm system that performed over our area last night.” (“Music by Rossini?” Newman asked.) More recently, Jeff Butera, a television journalist in Southwest Florida, author of Write Like You Talk: A Guide To Broadcast News Writing, urged writers to avoid what he calls “journalese” when they write. Both men offer everyone a good dialogue on how to embiggen their writing. (OK, I’ll stop.)

I wrote this, RIGHT?

Just as my skin crawls when I hear the word “facility” overused, communications consultant and media interview trainer Julie Parker feels the same way about the word “right” being used at the end of a sentence.

“It’s still happening. The question dropped at the end of a sentence that’s not really meant to be a question. ‘Right?’ is everywhere. On podcasts. On TV. On Peloton. It can distract your audience, or worse, annoy them. Gently tell people they’re using it. Help eliminate it,” she writes on her Twitter feed. She calls the use of “right” at the end of a sentence a verbal crutch that just isn’t necessary, adding that it “can muddy your message.”

Revenge spending is making a comeback.

On June 13 The New York Times reported that the travel industry is witnessing a significant increase in “revenge spending,” money spent to travel because we were cooped up at home for several years during the pandemic.

According to Google n-gram, revenge spending first showed up in our lexicon in the 1980s. It peaked around 1993 and slowly started to vanish by 2003. But it’s back as are so many delayed vacations.

Let me know if you heard this one.

I’m curious about the term “Pinned Tweet,” referring to a tweet one can have permanently show up at the very beginning of their own Twitter feed. I’m using it in my next book and wonder if it is familiar to readers. Let me know. (Yes, there is a next book on the horizon. This one is about crisis communications. You have been warned.)

Let’s write carefully out there, people.

Joe Diorio’s first book, A Few Words About Words, is available now. His next book, Murders at Trask: Crisis communications and the art of making nothing happen is forthcoming.