A New Resource Is Helping Journalists Choose Their Language Carefully

As journalists, our whole business is words. Words that capture concepts, communicate important information, and paint pictures for the public populate our articles, which fill our career with the various pursuits of truth we undertake. But vocabulary changes rather quickly and as we expect to be in our careers for longer than a few years, it can get a little confusing to keep up.

Enter “Language, Please,” a resource from Vox Media. The source brought together 275 entries from various sources in order “to provide the greater context of these debates [around word choice], dig into some history you might not have known about a term, connect related terms, and inform thoughtful decision-making.” The site acts as a de-facto thesaurus with extra features, finding synonyms of common words or phrases while also providing origins, etymology, and notes on usage in history.

“Our goal was really inspired by two interconnected ideas,” said Christopher Clermont, Vox Media’s head of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “One was that we wanted to build a tool that could help newsrooms better cover social, cultural, and identity-related topics. The other was to fulfill a major human resource need of not relying on marginalized individuals in our newsrooms for this work.”

Language change is not linear. Language changes in response to social progress, of course, but also oscillates back and forth. Archaic words come back in fashion and mean other things, phrases go from meaning something incredibly racist to becoming a cliché. It’s impossible to predict when language is going to change, but moreover it’s even more impossible to measure when popular speech is going to come around to include that language. With “Language, Please,” developers said they hoped to get journalists ahead of the curve. 

In order to do this, Tanya Pai, the style and standards editor at Vox, said that digging into why vocabulary changes was the most important step:

“When we started pulling together this guidance, we really wanted to lean into the why of it. We don’t just want to say, here’s the rule. There’s so much nuance in it, and we really wanted to create a resource that would get into that context and give people the tools they need to make the decisions for themselves and their newsrooms and their audiences.” 

This resource comes at an interesting juncture: journalists and the public are discussing cancel culture and its reactivity while weighing the speed at language changes against the societal acceptability factor. “Language, Please,” contains a lot of wisdom for balancing this from its 275 contributors. Several entries point out that the usage and implications of this terminology largely depends on how the journalist engages with the subject and continues to engage with it. 

“We really focused on trying to write this in a way that leaves space for those debates,” Pai said. “The debate over Latinx, for instance — a lot of newsrooms will use that right now, but it does not necessarily resonate with everyone that it’s supposed to describe. We wanted to make that clear. Maybe your style is to use Latinx, but there’s not going to be 100% agreement on it.”

The point of learning new language is to continue to capture new concepts and challenge old views conveyed by the outdated language. The learning process can be difficult and even overwhelming, but having the “why” behind it all and going forth armed with that knowledge can really change a journalist’s relationship with new terminology.