If there’s one thing funnier than a prescriptivist, it’s a prescriptivist who’s clearly wrong yet doesn’t know it. I was therefore giggling as soon as I saw Neil tweet about my spelling of “jail”.

Either @stilgherrian has been transported to America, or I really am the only person who spells gaol correctly here (along with @jbugs14)

“Correctly”, eh? Hilarious, Neil.

Dictionaries record language as it is actually used, not as those with a dangerous little knowledge imagine it is used. Both the Macquarie Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary list “jail” as the primary spelling. And as Google’s Ngram shows, “jail” started to be used more often than “gaol” some time in the 1830s, at least in the totality of English.

The OED does record “gaol” as a second spelling in the entry’s head, but the Macquarie does not. Instead, it adds this note:

Usage: In general the spelling of this word has shifted in Australian English from gaol to jail. However, gaol remains fossilised in the names of jails, as Parramatta Gaol, and in some government usage.

Fossilised. See that?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, consulted online just now:

In British official use the forms with G are still current; in literary and journalistic use both the G and the J forms are now admitted as correct; in the U.S. the J forms are standard.

Looking through the OED’s citations, we see “Iaiole” dated to ca1300, “Iayle” to ca1440, “Iaile” to ca1660 and some bloke called Shakespeare, “jayl” to 1743–5 and good ol’ “jail” to 1860. Of course that last citation is R W Emerson, an American, so presumably Neil thinks that doesn’t count. But even if we imagine Australian English is derived only from British English — something that’s patently untrue — we still have precursors of the J form going back a mere 700 years.

“When spelling, I prefer The Queen’s English,” tweets Neil. Yeah? Which Queen? Elizabeth I?

I’ve nothing against people choosing to use different forms of language. Far from it. It adds colour, spice, variety. But that’s not the same as imagining that an older form is somehow “right” and newer forms “wrong”. Especially when your views are at odds with the vast majority of the language’s native speakers.

Just how far do you want to go back and freeze our language — or should I say “fossizlise” it — before it’s acceptable, Neil? A hint: When you’re “the only person” who thinks something is right, you’re probably not.

[Update 4.15pm: Google Ngram image added, with explanatory sentence. The graph showing all English usage is slightly misleading. Restricted to British English only, the "jail" form has been the more popular "only" since the 1940s. I'll post a further update in due course.]

“Do journos do it better?” Do journos do what better? I think this is actually the more interesting question: What is it that journalists actually do in our society?

Or, to stick with the question, what do they do in “social media communities” — although as I’ll explain, all communities are “social media communities”?

Now if I were presenting an Oscar I’d start by quoting the dictionary. “The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘journalist’ as ‘someone engaged in journalism’.”

Very helpful.

However “journalism” in turn is glossed as “the occupation of writing for, editing, and producing newspapers and other periodicals, and television and radio shows”.

So the question as stated is meaningless. Of course journalists are better at “It” — journalism — because they’re the ones doing it. If you’re not a journalist you’re not doing journalism, therefore you’re not merely bad at it, you’re not even doing it at all!

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid. Both sets of people are doing much the same thing — creating words and pictures, probably about current events, maybe for money, maybe for the love of it or for professional status. Maybe they’re doing it well, maybe they’re doing it badly.

But during the Industrial Age, journalism with a capital “J” ended up meaning, specifically, the employees of industrial mass-media factories — especially newspapers. Employees whose jobs were to create the specific widgets of news needed by a production line — a five-paragraph story, a 30-second radio news item or whatever.

Or, with respect to my friends at the MEAA, “journalist” meant membership of a certain trade union.

Now, coming back to that word “social” in “social media”…

Humans are social critters. We’re inquisitive. We’re hard-wired to look for ways of understanding the world, to find out what others are up to, and slot it all into a coherent narrative. Society provides mechanisms to meet that demand.

At one end of the spectrum there’s a folk craft called “gossip” — and as anthropologist Robin Dunbar has pointed out, gossip is central to keeping societies running smoothly.

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and The Media constructing narratives they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when threatened, refer to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Between them, folk practitioners and professionals and everyone in between manufacture enough news to fill our recommended daily intake. All choose from thousands of events those that support the narrative they want to construct — for whatever ultimate goal.

In the Industrial Age, only the big end of town was visible, with its cathedrals and newsagents. Everything else happened in small groups — socially! — and was ephemeral. We heard some juicy gossip, we laughed and smirked and, later, we exchanged knowing winks, but it wasn’t written down anywhere.

That’s changed. In the digital age, all that folk media — which I say again, has always been there — is now visible. Public. Permanent. Searchable. And pretty much everyone has, or soon will have, the tools for creating those permanent forms of media.

Eric S Raymond is one of the giants of open source software development. In 1997 he presented a paper called The Cathedral and the Bazaar which contrasted the traditional closed-shop process of developing software — the cathedral, where each release was packaged up with a big red ribbon before the public saw it — to the seemingly chaotic process of open source development, where everything happens in public, warts and all.

Until now, journalism — the making of news — has worked on that cathedral model. Journalists beaver away in their media factories and The Story is bestowed upon the grateful citizenry. You were told what the narrative was.

Now, though, the citizens are using new, cheap tools to figure out the narrative for themselves. In the eyes of an old-fashioned journalist it looks messy, “unprofessional”. The term “citizen journalist” grates. This is not journalism, they think — because it isn’t. It isn’t how they, as employees of media factories, do things.

An example to illustrate my point: the dust storm of 23 September. What was the journalists’ role in developing that narrative?

Well for a start, the dust storm actually started the day before in places like Broken Hill. But because industrial-scale news travels east to west in this country, it wasn’t officially a story until it hit the Sydney-based media factories.

On that morning, everyone woke up to an orange sky and started talking about it. Through their own conversations they soon worked out the extent of the storm, and through their own photos they created a shared cultural experience.

Like ants mapping out food trails, people did this by passing signals to each other — interesting photos and factoids and emotional responses — without central control. And because they knew the people they passed them to, these messages had plenty of personal resonance.

When the industrial media factories creaked into action, maybe only minutes or an hour later, what were they adding to that process? Were they just packaging that collective narrative for the folks who aren’t yet connected to the live global hive mind?

When everyone is connected, what does the capital-J journalist do that’s worth charging money for?

I’m disappointed with the choices. The criterion is “the most valuable contribution to the English language in 2007.” All of these words pre-date 2007, and in this category the Macquarie faces its strongest criticism for being slow to add new data.

Four of the terms refer to quite specific technologies or phases of Internet development, and I reckon all of them will sound completely yesterday in just a year or two.

cyber cheating

noun 1. plagiarism of material sourced on the internet.

2. engagement in an online romance, the conduct of which constitutes unfaithfulness to one’s spouse or lover.

flog

noun a blog which is contrived for marketing purposes. [f(ake) + (b)log]

microblog

noun 1. an internet posting which is extremely short, designed to give a brief but immediate text update.

–verb (i) (microblogged, microblogging)

2. to issue such an internet posting.

–microblogging, noun

–microblogger, noun

web 2.0

noun a perceived altered state of the world wide web, equivalent to a second generation of a software product, which features social networks, creative commons, wikis and other such sites that encourage user input and information sharing.

“Blogging” as a concept will soon sound as outdated as “desktop publishing” does now. Anything with “cyber” in it will fade fast too. Cheating is cheating, no matter what the medium.

So that leaves as my choice:

griefing

noun the sabotage of online computer games, virtual sites, etc., by players intent on causing havoc rather than abiding by the rules of the game.

–griefer, noun

I like this because it echoes English working-class slang. Perhaps I’ve watched The Bill too much over the years (I’ve dropped it now), but I can hear a Cockney “He was causing me grief, Sarge.” And “griefer” also echoes “grifter”.

So that’s my vote. Griefing. Do you agree?

Here’s what they say:

electronica

noun the broad array of music created electronically.

If we want to improve the reference, we have to prove it. Send info!

In the “online” category you can choose from:

cyber cheating

noun 1. plagiarism of material sourced on the internet.

2. engagement in an online romance, the conduct of which constitutes unfaithfulness to one’s spouse or lover.

flog

noun a blog which is contrived for marketing purposes. [f(ake) + (b)log]

griefing

noun the sabotage of online computer games, virtual sites, etc., by players intent on causing havoc rather than abiding by the rules of the game.

–griefer, noun

microblog

noun 1. an internet posting which is extremely short, designed to give a brief but immediate text update.

–verb (i) (microblogged, microblogging)

2. to issue such an internet posting.

–microblogging, noun

–microblogger, noun

web 2.0

noun a perceived altered state of the world wide web, equivalent to a second generation of a software product, which features social networks, creative commons, wikis and other such sites that encourage user input and information sharing.

My immediate reaction is that some of the terms are perhaps older than 2007. However Macquarie Dictionary is a mainstream dictionary of Australian English.

1. Mainstream means that the words have to be used in mainstream publications and broadcasts such as daily newspapers and TV news bulletins without further explanation. Three independent usages are needed before a word will be listed.
2. Australian English means those citations have to be in Australian media (obviously).

So my innate geekery means I’m probably ahead of the pace when it comes to adopting new words.

In any event, I’ll go through their lists and post more considered thoughts before I cast my votes. I’m happy to take side-wagers on the eventual winners.

Sure, my trusty Macquarie Dictionary says “whitewash” can refer to “a defeat in which the loser fails to score”.

But even though there’s still some editors employed in this country, virtually every news outlet parroted “whitewash”: SBS (where I first heard it, but I doubt they were first), ABC, Murdoch, NineMSN, The Sydney Morning Herald and virtually every news outlet from Kenya to Korea.

Would you like me to buy you a thesaurus, you lazy bastards? Because if it were my job to write the news, I’d be embarrassed to be so unimaginative!