I’m getting stressed about stresses. About the words people stress. I’m becoming like my father, who’d bark corrections at the radio when people mispronounced place names. The thing that really gets me going is the way people have started stressing prepositions. Having noticed it, I hear stressed prepositions everywhere. And the place I mind it most is on the news.
In the 1980s, I was a TV reporter and newsreader myself, one of the first generation of journalist/newsreaders on the BBC. Our predecessors had been actors, whose entire role was to deliver the news perfectly, picking up on every nuance. When we took over, theirs was the example we followed.
It was different then, before 24-hour news and before the newsroom was computerised. With three main bulletins a day, there was (usually) time to think about the scripts and decide which words should be stressed. Autocue was on a strip of paper, which we’d check first, underlining words and adding squiggles to help with emphasis.
And there were fewer of us. If we’d presented the news with the ludicrous stresses that you hear today, it would surely have been noticed and commented on. Now, with all the satellite news channels, regional programmes and local radio stations, there are hundreds of people reading the news. And the tendency to stress prepositions — and not just prepositions, but conjunctions, pronouns, parts of speech I don’t even know the names of — is spreading like a virus.
At this point, you’re either shouting “Yes, at last someone’s giving voice to my irritation”, or you’re wondering what I’m on about. For those in the latter category, I’ll give an example, from a recent BBC Breakfast bulletin. Read this sentence, then say it out loud (in your head if you’re on a train): “Some of the oil refineries in the Gulf have shut down ahead of the arrival of the hurricane. ”
You probably emphasised the words “oil refineries”, “Gulf”, “shut down”, and “hurricane”. Now say it again, but take into account that you’ve just been talking about the hurricane in the Gulf. If you stressed “oil refineries”, “shut down” and “arrival”, but didn’t stress “hurricane” and used a slight upward inflection for “Gulf”, give yourself a pat on the back. But I bet you had to think about it. This is how it was delivered on air (I promise — I’ve got it on tape): “Some of the oil refineries in the Gulf have shut down ahead of the arrival of the hurricane.”
Are you with me now?
Michael Buerk, my former colleague, says that newsreading isn’t difficult; it’s just a matter of reading out loud. To an extent that’s true. But first it’s necessary to think about the sense of what you’re reading — something that doesn’t seem to matter to many of the newer generation of newsreaders. I suspect that it’s the lack of thinking time in rolling news, where presenters are on air for hours, that has led to stressed prepositions.
I can imagine the thought process: “I’ve talked about the hurricane and the Gulf, so I can’t stress those words again. I know, I’ll stress the ‘in’ and the ‘of’!” After a while, the thought process is no longer necessary, because stressing prepositions (conjunctions, etc) becomes second nature. Then new people arrive and assume that stressing prepositions (pronouns, etc) is the right way to do it. Soon there ’ll be nobody left who makes sense of reading the news.
To reverse the trend, I propose a Campaign against the Unnecessary Stressing of Prepositions. We’ll give it the acronym Cusp — not that the lack of an A or an O will deter the newsreaders I’ve heard recently calling the HFEA the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and the CRE the Campaign for Racial Equality! Others will call us pedants, but we’ll be smug in our certainty that we know better. But will we succeed in our aim? I’d like to think so, but from experience I know that once these things have become ingrained, they’re very hard to undo.
In the 1980s, if a video report had been run a second or two late, one of my colleagues would attempt to pad out his introduction by inserting a “now” before the word “reports” (as in “Kate Adie now reports”). Within weeks, TV news producers were writing “now reports” into scripts. Then it spread to radio. Robert Williams, my co-presenter on PM, would say “now reports” just to wind me up. You still hear it. The “now” is ungainly. It doesn’t add a sense of urgency — even as originally used, it added a mere third of a second — but it caught on and it stuck.
In the 1990s, Today presenters would say “good morning” to some (but only some) of their interviewees. Then other interviewees took it upon themselves to say “good morning” when it hadn’t been said to them. So Jim Naughtie would ask a question and the interviewee would say “good morning”, to which Jim would say “good morning” to avoid giving offence; and by the time the interviewee had got round to answering the question, the listener (and sometimes the interviewee) had forgotten what it was.
And so it is with the Unnecessarily Stressed Preposition. On some programmes,it has become a kind of house style. When it pervades Radio 4, I’ll know I’m fighting a lost cause.
The other night I dreamt that certain members of the Breakfast team went to the BBC canteen after the programme and ordered bacon and eggs, beans on toast and a cup of tea. My husband thinks I’m obsessed, and I am beginning to wonder if he is right. He asks me what is the most famous line from Gone with the Wind and I say, of course, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” (rather his view on stressing prepositions). He asks if it would have been so famous if Clark Gable had said “I don’t give a damn”?
Probably not. But that is dramatic licence. Newsreaders are there not to be dramatic, but to give us the news straight, in a way that can be easily understood. Give us drama in the pictures and in the language, but please not in the stresses.
Changing Emphasis
Wrong way
“Some of the oil refineries in the Gulf have shut down ahead of the arrival of the hurricane”
Right way
“Some of the oil refineries in the Gulf have shut down ahead of the arrival of the hurricane”
Is Frances Coverdale right? Send your views to:
www.timesonline.co.uk/debate
