We, all of us, get awfully het up when people on the news misuse words and mispronounce things. They say 'venal' when they mean 'venial', they use 'crescendo' to mean a climax and they put the emphasis in a funny place when they say 'controversy'. It's a wonder that we can even bear to look at a broadcast journalist some days.
It is against this backdrop, this history of misdeeds, that we should take pains to recognise the good. We ought to celebrate those few instances where broadcast journalists come across something tricky and consistently get it right. In this way they will come to associate good behaviour with reward.
An example of such a success is WMD. The acronym is used cheifly in relation to the build up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The question was whether Saddam Hussien's regime had programmes for building weapons of mass destruction. In this case we are almost always talking about WMD in the plural so it would be tempting to say 'WMDs'. This would be wrong because the pluralisation happens back next to the W: we are not talking about weapons of mass destructions.
Now, you watch: they almost always get this right. They have mastered it. This is particularly impressive when you consider that in the associated discussions about the progress of wars in the Middle East they often have to refer to IEDs and older journalists will have been used to talking about ICBMs.
So when, later this year, you're out for your regular fast buck compiling that dreary annual of yours (the one with all the journalists' cock-ups in it) think about all the times they said the right thing. Think about WMD.
