WIN?

Count me in as suckered. I was thinking the same thing about the thread title.

 

Then it was worth it.

 

The chair is not my son.[/classicletterman]

 

"They pelted us with rocks and garbage"[/doors]

 

A former editor and I came up with a victory-victory solution about this topic.

 

I know it's hard for many of us to accept, but language evolves.
We can put guidelines on it, but hard and fast rules don't always work.

 

"Impact" and "chair" as verbs isn't the language evolving, it's DEVOLVING the language.

 

I am efforting to come to terms with the evolving and devolving language I occasionally call English.

 

This is me; I used to be iron-clad on this, but not anymore. For one thing, it would mean changing AP copy pretty much every single time.

So I try to hold on to it personally, but it's no battleground with the staff.

Add: Another issue is the whole pitcher's record thing. Nobody in baseball says "victories" to refer to that, and it looks dumb. So another reason.

 

Making copy cleaner, with more active verbs and fewer echo quotes, and writing punchier headlines with precise decks are far better uses of a copy editor's time than victory-win-defeat-straight-consecutive word changing (although I had a boss at a previous stop who was adamant about putting a hyphen between seven and straight as in seven-straight completions).

 

Uh oh ...

 

That's the whole reason copy editors have shit fits about using "impact" or "chair" as verbs. And dear God, don't get me started on the non-word "impactful."