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Have you ever wondered what some of the writing workshop lingo means? Here's another look at some commonly used workshop jargon.

Call it jargon, call it terminology, call it what you will. We have our own made-up words for things sometimes.

By Tony Harcup

Journalists are heroes to some and scumbags to others but the truth is that most are somewhere in the middle, trying to do as good a job as they can, often in difficult circumstances. That, at least, is the view of Tony Harcup, author of A Dictionary of Journalism. We asked him to tell us about some of the good – and not so good – things that journalists do. Do you agree with the below?

The nine best things about journalists:

1. We tell you things that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
2. Our default position is healthy scepticism.
3. We know that there’s no such thing as a stupid question.
4. Our way with words translates jargon into language that actual people use.
5. We juggle complex intellectual, legal, commercial and ethical issues every day, simultaneously and at high speed, all while giving the impression of being little deeper than a puddle.
6. Our lateral thinking spots the significance of the dog that didn’t bark (noting in the process that Sherlock Holmes was created by a journalist).
7. We speak truth to power (or, at least, we say boo to a goose).
8. Our gallows humour keeps us going despite the grim stories we cover and the even grimmer people we work with (perhaps the most literal exponent of the art was journalist Ben Hecht who wrote the movies His Girl Friday and The Front Page about hacks covering a hanging).
9. We identify with other journalists as fellow members of society’s awkward squad (which is why even those of us who have left the frontline of reporting and become “hackademics” still can’t stop saying “we”).

The nine worst things about journalists:

1. We have a tendency to tell young hopefuls that all the quality has vanished from journalism compared to when we started out (journalists have been harking back to a mythical golden age for well over a century).
2. Our scepticism can sometimes become cynicism.
3. We routinely demand public apologies or resignations from anyone accused of misbehaviour (except ourselves).
4. Our way with words is too often used to reduce individuals or communities to stereotypes.
5. We have been known to conflate a popular touch with boorish anti-intellectualism.
6. Our collective memory lets us down surprisingly often. (We won’t get fooled again? Don’t bet on it.)
7. We are in danger of viewing the world through the eyes of whoever employs us, forgetting that, while they might hire us, they don’t own us.
8. Our insistence that we are something of a special breed is a bit rich given that most journalistic jobs have more in common with The Office than with All The President’s Men.
9. We eviscerate politicians for fiddling their expenses while celebrating hacks from the golden age (see no. 1) for doing exactly the same.

Tony Harcup is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Journalism Studies, University of Sheffield. A Dictionary of Journalism, first edition, will be published 15 May 2014. It covers over 1,400 wide-ranging entries on the terms that are likely to be encountered by students of the subject, and aims to offer a broad, accessible point of reference on an ever-topical and constantly-changing field that affects everyone’s knowledge and perception of the world.

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Image credit: Meet the press. By stocksnapper, via iStockphoto.

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YALSA President Shannon Peterson and I have been talking about her presidential theme of Amplified: Speaking Up for Teens and Libraries, and we were discussing the effort to build strong ties between YALSA and our members and library administrators. In May and June, I wrote a six-part series for this blog on how to work with library managers and administrators. Those posts were based partly on a survey that YALSA conducted of members who identified as supervisors and managers. One of the things we asked was what were some of the buzz words, lingo, and hot topics that made managers prick up their ears and listen. So here are some of those terms and ways you might incorporate them into your conversations with your managers:

ROI. This is manager-speak for “return on investment.” It’s really pretty straightforward. Managers want to know that if the library invests time, money, personnel, and equipment on a service, program, or collection, there will be some return on that investment. What kind of return? Maybe you can demonstrate that the effort you invested in putting on a dynamite program resulted in increased circulation in a particular area or from a particular demographic. Maybe adding a service, like homework help, resulted in reaching a previously under-served segment of the community. The more you can collect data (track circulation before and after the program; keep count of the number of new cards that were issued to participants in a new program or service, etc.), the easier it will be for you to show your managers how much return you got from your investment.

Sustainability. This is a big one for managers. They want to know that any new (or existing) program, service, or collection is sustainable. Doing a program or creating a collection with one-time funds, like a grant or gift, is fine as far as it goes, but what happens next year and the year after? If you start a grant-funded homework center, for example, how are you going to pay for it in future years? Will you have to continue to seek grants or raise funds every year, or will it become part of the library’s budget? If it becomes part of the budget, will something else have to go? Who will be responsible for deciding? Sustainability requires long-term thinking.

Community Engagement, Community Health, Fostering Community. Managers have to see the library as part of the larger community. Your library director may sit on various community-wide committees or boards, or work closely with other city or county department heads. It is important to them that the library be seen as part of the community, not as something off to the side. This is especially true if the library is in effect competing for funds with these other departments. So the more your programs and services can demonstrate that the library is engaging the community and helping to create and sustain a healthy, enlivened community, the better. When you report on your teen volunteer program, for example, don’t just say how many teens volunteered for how many hours; talk about how the program helps teens be engaged in their community, and take pride and ownership in it.

Workforce Development; College and Career Readiness. These topics are related to community engagement. The library is excellently placed to be part of the greater local effort to ensure that community members are able to be productive members of society. Just be sure that your manager knows how your programs are helping teens get jobs, get into college, and prepare for careers. Highlight the skills your teen volunteers are learning. Promote any programs you do for SAT prep or college application writing. Be sure your director is aware when teen volunteers move on to become paid library workers.

Output Measures. Output measures tell how the library is being used: circulation, visits, reference questions, program attendance—as opposed to input measures, which tell you what you have to work with: collection size, budget, cardholders, etc. Output measures are often of great interest to library boards and administrators, so the more output measures you can supply to your director, the better. Some of these are simple counts; others can be calculated, like circulation per capita. So, for example, if you know how many teens are in your service area, and how many teen items are circulated (or how many items are checked out by teens), you can calculate teen circulation per capita. If you can show that this number is growing, as a result of your programs or collection decisions, this will get the attention of the people who make the decisions in your library.

Value-Added. This is pretty much what it sounds like: the “extras” of your services, programs, and collections, the things that go beyond expectations and make a positive contribution to the library and the community. Maybe you can show that your program not only entertained the teens, but brought in new users, and also recruited new volunteers for the library or other organization in the community: that’s value-add!

Organizational Culture. Every organization has its own culture, meaning its own values, vision, norms, systems, even language. Making sure that what you do fits into that organizational culture is a good way to be heard in the organization. Of course, sometimes we think our organizational culture needs to change: to be more positive about teens, for instance. It’s all right to strive to change organizational culture, but it is wise to do it gradually and, as much as possible, within the norms of the organization. And if you can show that something you want to do fits in with the vision and strategic plan of your library, you are more likely to be successful.

These are just a few terms that came up. You have probably heard others—maybe you have even wondered what they mean, or how you can fit into your manager’s view of the library. If you have questions, comments, or other examples to share, please do so in the comments. We all benefit when we understand one another!

Sarah Flowers

YALSA Past President

By Dennis Baron

Apparently an English professor was ejected from a Starbucks on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for – she claims – not deploying Starbucks’ mandatory corporate-speak. The story immediately lit up the internet, turning her into an instant celebrity. Just as Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who couldn’t take it anymore, became the heroic employee who finally bucked the system when he cursed out nasty passengers over the intercom and deployed the emergency slide to make his escape, Lynne Rosenthal was the customer who cared so much about good English that she finally stood up to the coffee giant and got run off the premises by New York’s finest for her troubles. Well, at least that’s what she says happened.

According to the New York Post, Rosenthal, who teaches at Mercy College and has an English Ph.D. from Columbia, ordered a multigrain bagel at Starbucks but “became enraged when the barista at the franchise” asked, “Do you want butter or cheese?” She continued, “I refused to say ‘without butter or cheese.’ When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want. Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English.” When she refused to answer, she claims that she was told, “You’re not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!” And then the cops came.

Stickler for good English she may be, but management countered that the customer then made a scene and hurled obscenities at the barista, and according to the Post, police who were called to the scene insist that no one was ejected from the coffee shop.

I too am a professor of English, and I too hate the corporate speak of “tall, grande, venti” that has invaded our discourse. But highly-paid consultants, not minimum-wage coffee slingers, created those terms (you won’t find a grande or a venti in Italian coffee bars). Consultants also told “Starbuck’s” to omit the apostrophe from its corporate name and to call its workers baristas, not coffee-jerks.

My son was a barista (should that be baristo?) at Borders (also no apostrophe, though McDonald’s keeps the symbol, mostly) one summer, and many of my students work in restaurants, bars, and chain retail stores. The language that employees of the big chains use on the job is carefully scripted and choreographed by market researchers, who insist that employees speak certain words and phrases, while others are forbidden, because they think that’s what moves “product.” Scripts even tell workers how and where and when to move and what expression to paste on their faces. Employees who go off-script and use their own words risk demerits, or worse, if they’re caught by managers, grouchy customers, or the ubiquitous secret shoppers who ride the franchise circuit looking for infractions.

I’m no fan of this corporate scripting. Calling customers “guests” and employees “associates” doesn’t mean I can treat Target like a friend’s living room or that the clerks who work there are anything but low-level employees who associate with one another, not with corporate vice presidents. I don’t think this kind of language-enforcement increases sales or

Megan Branch, Intern

What do you think of when you think of slang? Maybe you think of a bunch of teenagers running around saying “OMG, like, LOL.” The truth is that everyone, not just young people, use slang –sometimes without even realizing it. In his new book, Slang: The People’s Poetry, Michael Adams suggests that our use of slang “outlines social space” and that “attitudes about slang partly construct group identity and identify individuals as members of groups”.

Adams, English language professor at Indiana University and author of several books on slang, writes that in addition to allowing slang users to be accepted into certain social groups, slang also acts as a barrier to keep those who aren’t “in the know” out. This is why someone over fifty may have trouble understanding the slang words of the under-twenty set. Below is a list , taken from Slang, of the top 10 slang words that are so hip they don’t even sound like slang.

1. Morning glory More than a flower, this slang term has existed since the early 1900s and has meant “something which or someone who fails to maintain an early promise” as well as, in the 1950s, “the first narcotic injection of the day.”
2. Gone Borneo This absurd-sounding phrase had a fairly short lifespan of about 10 years and was used in the 1980s to mean “intoxicated”.
3. Flash Still in use today, flash was used at least as far back as Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist to mean “hip”.
4. Suck Although many people want this word to originate somewhere far more off-color, suck is simply a shortening of the phrases “suck eggs,” “suck rope,” and “suck wind”—all of which can be used to mean “disappointing.”
5. Wig It sounds like a hairpiece, but wig is the clipped form of “wig out,” a less widely-used synonym for “freak out.”
6. Duck A pretty, but “snob[by], stuck-up young woman,” who often requires a lot of “lettuce ‘cash in bills’” to please.
7. Pegging Used at a dance, much to her embarrassment, by Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women.
“’I suppose you are going to college soon? I see you pegging away at your books—no, I mean studying hard,’ and Jo blushed at the dreadful ‘pegging’ which had escaped her.”
8. Bad Used “to mean its opposite, as well as ‘stylish, sexy, wonderful, formidably skilled’”.
9. Snack From a dictionary of terms “supposedly used by the criminal element” published in 1698 or 1699. After stealing your possessions, the thieves would snack ” ’share, go halves’ on them.”
10. Trouble & Strife A Cockney rhyming slang term that originated in London’s East End, trouble and strife is used to mean ‘the wife.’