Times Literary Supplement

May 8, 2009

By James Campbell 

…a “man bites dog” story [is] the basis of all journalism.  The term is traceable to the city of the New York Sun, John Bogart, who in the 1880s said “If a dog bites a man, that’s not news.  If a man bites a dog, that’s news.” 

Dog-bites-man story is a “retroterm,” a word coined by Ralph Keyes in I Love It When You Talk Retro.  According to Mr. Keyes, retroterms dominate everyday discourse, even though others don’t know where their expressions come from.  The journalistic term deadline, for example, originates in American prisons, “where a dead-line was demarcated.  Any prisoner crossing it was liable to be shot.”  Deadline is now used for due dates of all kinds.  The word muckraking derives from Pilgrim’s Progress, in which “the Man with the Muck Rake” appears, while scoop is borrowed from merchants “who used that verb to mean going one up on competitors.”  In 1884, a tabloid was a “compressed medical pill;” by the turn of the century it had been applied to a newspaper in compressed form.  Mr. Keyes notes that spike means different things on each side of the Atlantic: to spike a story in Britain is to kill it, whereas in the US the term is used to suggest a rise in sales.

Prolonged exposure to I Love It When You Talk Retro leaves you wondering what you are alking about.  In one brief section, “Hats and Gloves,” Keyes explains hats off, a tip of the hat, the practice of eating your hat, the abject process of going hat in hand (cap in hand, surely), kid glove and white glove treatments, and the cosy business of being hand in glove.  Don’t get us started on red herrings, red letter days and being in the red.  We’ll see red.  I Love It When You Talk Retro is published by St. Martin’s Press at $25.95.