A fire fighter must turn the door knob

Addictive Telescopic Syndrome (A.T.S.): The tendency to blend, merge, fuse, meld or consolidate two or more words that never were designed nor intended to be one word. – James Clemon, late, great Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper editor

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Let’s talk about the unfortunate state of the language. As I see it, problems began with the word “football” at the turn of the previous century, 1900-ish. If you look at any newspaper (news paper) from that era, the game we love to hate was not “football.” It was “foot ball” — two dog-gone words. Same with basket ball.

But some boy-genius writer decided it was too taxing to type a space between the words and jammed them together. And some lazy editor(s) agreed with him.

“Outrageous,” some readers are shouting. “This Fogarty clown wants to break apart the word ‘football.’ ”

Maybe not. It has been one word for a long time. But I hasten to point out the following generally accepted constructions: soccer ball, beach ball, bowling ball, volley ball, (Whoops, “volleyball”), golf ball. Then there’s the annual coronation ball and the super ball that could bounce a hundred feet high. Remember those?

A language abyss

My firm position is that Addictive Telescopic Syndrome (A.T.S.) must be stopped in its tracks because it’s leading us into a language abyss. One, single, endless string of letters, impossible to distinguish as words, and signifying nothing. (Some English guy came up with that under-scored wording.)

A.T.S. is how we got “copyright” (yes, this column is copy-righted), “breakfast” (breaking our overnight fast), “doorknob,” “firefighter” and hundreds of other twofers-forced-into-one.

Newspaper man Clemon was the first to identify the A.T.S. plot to crunch our language into oblivion. He reasoned that if the “football” logic was correct then perhaps “offensive line” should be one word and “tight ends,” too.

What, pray, is coming next when there are endless candidates for A.T.S.-ing by writers too lazy to type spaces between words: Christmastree? Northcarolina? Mountrushmore? Coldfront? Kitchenchair? TVshow?

Unfortunate word pairs

If we don’t stop this thing now, we might not ever get our language back. Consider just one likely sentence from a future day …

Billy is a goodboy. He works hard on hisstudies and excels in his highschool work. He’s also athletically talented in varsitytennis and weightlifting (ugh). In his leisuretime he enjoys bookreading, coincollecting, snowskiing and pingpong. His parents love him verymuch.

Seewhat  Imean?

We also might try to break-in-twain some unfortunate word pairs already forced into one, like this …

Some times a fire fighter must turn the door knob.

Now hear this, journalism teachers, English professors, news directors, editors, on-air folks, word stewards everywhere: Let’s put a temporary 67-year ban on Addictive Telescopic Syndrome. I swear it’s a Russian plot, like everything else these days.