The nitpickers

In the olden days, women with spare time on their hands would grab the nearest child, seat him or her on the floor with the head between the knees, and begin sifting through the mass of hair for lice and their eggs, called nits.

It wasn’t that there were no lice combs, in fact there were even certain oils that decimated lice. But picking out the eggs that clung firmly to the roots of the hair was the most effective way of (literally) nipping the problem in the bud. Today, when a number of shampoos are available to effectively root out lice and nits, women are increasingly abandoning what was once a favourite though laborious pastime.

However, subeditors in the newsrooms all around the world continue to relish what some irate reporters and writers dub ‘nitpicking’. In fact, many subs pride themselves for having mastered the craft. Give them any piece of writing and they’ll find something or the other to nitpick at. They claim to use shorter or better words, weed out redundancies, strike out clichés, etc, but leave some writers moaning that their ‘style’ has been spoiled.

Yet this is what the subs’ basic job is: they may not be very proficient in the language otherwise, but they instinctively know the nitpicking – or hairsplitting.

From the very beginning of our careers, our seniors have taught us what is correct and what is not. When I say the Korangi Creek Cantonment Board, the officials there correct me and say that its name is the Cantonment Board Korangi Creek – I, of course, insist that it should be the way I write it. We subs say ‘Sindh governor’, not ‘governor Sindh’, and replace ‘from’ with ‘on’ in sentences such as ‘the work begins from Sunday’. Similarly, it is ‘on’ the premises or campus, not ‘at’. ‘At’ is commonly used for a hotel when an event takes place there, but we were taught to use ‘in’ for any place bound with walls: for instance, ‘The function was held in Katrick Hall’; ‘The press conference was organised ‘in’ the club.’

It’s a complicated business, subbing. We were told why was it is ‘troop pullout’ and not ‘troops pullout’. We learned that it was incorrect to say ‘due to’ where ‘owing to’ or ‘because of’ or ‘since’ could be used. We do not say ‘acres of land’, arguing that nothing else is measured in acres. It is sufficient to say: ‘She owns 200,000 acres in her hometown.’ We also learnt that just ‘escaped’ or ‘fled’ would do where the reporter writes ‘the suspect managed to escape the scene’. (As someone asked, quite correctly, “Was the suspect supposed to linger after committing the heinous crime?”) We also learned that it is the ‘small hours’, not the ‘wee hours’ of the morning and ‘under way’ should be two words to conform to the newspaper’s style. People may die in ‘accidents’ but not in ‘mishaps’, while blasts don’t ‘leave people dead’, they simply ‘kill’ them.

The list is endless and enough to fill several volumes. And, of course, there is much more to the craft of subbing.

We disagreed with our seniors over some points. Now our juniors, when their attention is drawn towards a debatable error, simply smile as if to say, ‘This is nothing but nitpicking.’

When we worked on what is called hard copy in journalistic jargon, it was all either in uppercase or lowercase. So we marked instructions to the composing section with a pen. To admit to our shortcomings, this was mostly to underline a particular letter, asking for it to be capitalised with all the other letters to be set in lowercase. A slash across a capital letter meant that it needed to be treated as lowercase, while a circle around a word would mean ‘correct the spelling’. Of course, there were many editing marks a subeditor had to learn beforehand.

To reporters, we were just coasting along. They would mock us, saying: “What do subeditors do, just put in the launderer’s marks on our neatly typed copy.” A couple of reporters would justifiably insist that their copy be spared of nitpicking without consulting them first.

When the legendary news editor Salim Asmi joined Dawn in the late 1980s, the era of real subbing and editing began. That was before the age of computers. He told us how a picture could be edited and measured, how many words would take up one centimetre in a column, how many characters of a particular font size would fit in a single column, and pointed out that an ‘l’ or ‘i’, for instance, took one-third of the space an ‘m’ occupied. He convinced us that subbing was not that boring a job after all, and if we put some hard work into it, we might enjoy it.

Every day, Asmi Sahib marked the day’s newspaper to point out our errors and suggest improvements. We were sometimes embarrassed by the number of errors pointed out by him but one day, he told me that there was nothing to be scared of as long as we did our best. This exercise, he said, was meant for our education only.

The computer has made many finer points irrelevant but there is still room for nitpicking. Occasionally, a reporter comes up with the complaint that his report was ‘butchered’ or the rewritten version was off the mark.

Debating incessantly on television, politicians and political analysts have never ceased to split hairs. Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming has, however, ushered in a real season of nitpicking.

Observers have already extensively nitpicked a common Benazir welcome slogan: Har shakhs banay gaa abb Bhutto/Aur raaj karay gi Benazir’ (Everyone will play ZAB now and his daughter will rule the roost).

The author of the Daughter of the East, speaking the after the tragic midnight carnage, said: “I ask why the streetlights were ‘closed’.” I may be nitpicking but after all, English is the only language she can claim to know. A couple of sentences she reportedly uttered in Sindhi, years ago at a Thatta gathering, are still echoing among popular political jokes. If she speaks Urdu, her detractors enjoy it as a comic show.

Yet Ms Bhutto is not supposed to speak better English than George Bush, whose tongue trips more often than KESC high-tension wires.