Brief by Central Staff
Word usage – April 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
In our March edition, we gave the Wet Mountain Tribune a hard time about using the word “Nigonarian” in a headline to refer to someone who just turned 90.
Jim Little, the Trib’s publisher, sent us a fax:
“In a pinch, we at the Trib will gleefully make up a word if need be. But our headline defining Mrs. Branstine as a ‘nigonarian’ actually has its roots firmly planted in Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.” He pointed to a reference in Merriam-Webster’s Second Unabridged, and concluded that “It’s likely that it won’t show up on the WordStar thesaurus. But please feel free to pencil it in somewhere between ‘nighties’ and ‘nigrescence’ in your own thick, unabridged tomes.”
Jim’s reference was to the Anglo-Saxon root of the word ninety, which is nigontig — a word that didn’t have its own entry in our own aging (to the point of disintegration) Webster’s unabridged dictionary, but it was explained under “ninety” — which explains why we didn’t find it. Nor was “nigontig” or “nigonarian” in our Random House Unabridged.
The finest of our unabridged tomes is the Oxford English Dictionary (now supposedly available on-line, though we haven’t tried it). It doesn’t have nigontig either, except as the Old English root for ninety, which replaced it in about 1250 A.D. (There is an entry for nigon, meaning miserly).
So, we’ll concede that the Trib’s editorial staff was using the appropriate roots to construct a synonym for nonagenarian — albeit a devilishly difficult to find synonym.
Meanwhile, however, we managed to misspell Frantz as Franz in an item about Salida’s special election — even though Frantz Lake has been a staple topic in local meetings and media for months.
In such instances, we like to quote from Trib publisher, Jim Little: “Typographical errors in a publication are like weeds in a garden. You never eliminate them all, but you’ve got to try.”
And sometimes fail…
This month our attempts have been particularly trying. Several months ago, one of our printers went berserk — refusing to print, starting to print at random times, and printing in its own chosen format — so we replaced it. Then the adjoining computer refused to read command codes, so we replaced the old keyboard, and… Well, several other components.
Then, a few hours ago, as we called up the Agenda — for about the tenth or twentieth time today to make current changes — the computer started randomly studding the text with capital Zs. This actually gives us a fair idea of what was probably wrong all along. Yet we can’t help but wonder if this latest wayward electronic behavior wasn’t also an editorial comment on the part of our machines. ZZZZZZ…
