Filtered By: Topstories
News

Media struggles to spell Noynoy's folksy new name


As editor of this web site, I need to get used to the tedious typing involved in frequently spelling out the new president’s long and complicated name: Benigno Simeon C. “Noynoy" Aquino III. I guess we should just be thankful he chooses not to spell out Cojuangco as well. But what of headlines and references in print when the complete name is impossible or inappropriate, when the call is for some kind of abbreviation? In the first days of the Aquino administration, the effort by media to come up with just the right contraction has prompted allusions to J.Lo, jologs, balut, jeje, basketball, and a host of other concerns not usually associated with the presidency. Much of the discussion begins with the new President’s politically fortuitous nickname Noynoy. Rhymes with Pinoy (along with the barbed derivative used by his critics), so it didn’t take much imagination for some media organizations to start using PNoy in headlines once he won the election. Now as President Noynoy settles into his post-inaugural role and media settle into a six-year period of headline writing, editors have begun testing other versions: our web site has used P.Noy (without a space) along with PNoy. The GMA News crawler on TV employs P-Noy. Yet others propose P’Noy. We’re not the only news organization with an internal disagreement over his moniker. The Inquirer has been using P-Noy in its headlines, but its editorial writer John Nery recently wrote a bylined column advocating P.Noy. Nery objects to P-Noy for being a “made-up term," while “’P. Noy’ accurately captures what we think when we wish to say or write ‘President Noy.’ In other words, the abbreviation of ‘President’ into a solitary ‘P,’ with its emphatic period, comes naturally to us." Nery’s argument caught the fancy of Aquino’s Liberal Party ally Neric Acosta, a politician with a doctorate in political science. “P.Noy is a blend of the majesty of the office with Noynoy’s folksy, one-with-the-people leadership style," Acosta told me via sms. That had me convinced so I pitched the idea to my staff, who would have to implement that form countless times. Web producer Candice Montenegro just liked the look of it, “parang J.Lo," a comparison that certainly didn’t conjure the majesty of anything, aside from J.Lo’s majestic derriere. Then I got a compelling techie argument against P.Noy from our online community manager TJ Dimacali: “Using ‘special characters’ (period, dot, exclamation point, question mark, asterisk, quotation marks, etc.) in our headlines forces our newsfeed to compensate by changing the headline to turn it into a valid URL. The problem is that, sometimes, the changes can have an unintended effect on the media as it's shared across social networks. It could result in garbled headlines, for example, or headlines that are cut short." The imagery of garbled headlines about our president quickly doused my enthusiasm for P.Noy. “I vote PNoy because it's simpler and avoids a lot of potential formatting problems," TJ commented on our email thread. True to our age of crowd-sourcing , we tossed the question to GMANews.TV’s Facebook fans, and we got a healthy dose of dissent from any of the above variations, with many arguing PNoy will just lead to jokes about balut. Surprisingly, many Facebook fans were formalists in their response, insisting on us using President Aquino in our headlines. “Wag kayong JEJEMON!" Fords Agatep Abenir scolded. But the formal nomenclature begs the original question of what to use when even simply Aquino won’t fit in headlines. There’s the easy fall-back of using the president’s initials. Yet that opens a brand new debate of which initials to use. The President himself has reportedly objected to PBSA because it sounds too much like the school near his alma mater the Ateneo (for the record, that’s PSBA, the Philippine School of Business Administration along Aurora Blvd.). Adding the digit 3 as in PBSA3 doesn’t seem to help that option any. Then there’s just PBA3, which some have supported. That’s where the basketball allusion comes in, in this case season 3? His mother was occasionally referred to as PCCA and his predecessor PGMA. The first President Aquino was more often just called Cory or even Tita Cory in headlines. Gloria Arroyo’s spin masters tried to popularize “Ate Glo," but that attempt to make her warm and fuzzy fizzled out in favor of GMA or the sterner “Arroyo", which was at least shorter than Macapagal-Arroyo, her full last name. Perhaps just BSA without the P may be simplest. But then that negates the advantage of a president having a common tao nickname that everyone already knows. Noy or PNoy? Former newspaper editor and veteran headline writer Vergel Santos, who wrote the famous headline “Millions came for Cory" in 1986, says, “I’d myself accept Noy. Don’t know about PNoy or any of its variations because it could create confusion with the national nickname." There's a precedent for just using Noy of course: Erap was simply that throughout his presidency. No one, except for satirists, proposed putting a P in front of it, as in PErap. President Aquino himself has said he prefers being called PNoy-P.Noy-P-Noy, which is “medyo formal but a little less formal and might bring me closer to the people." But he didn’t offer any opinion about the spelling. His spokesman Edwin Lacierda didn’t want to go there, and pointed us to Manuel L. “Manolo" Quezon III, an informal presidential adviser who is known online as mlq3. “If you follow past conventions, e.g. PCCA and PFVR, then it would be PNoy," Quezon texted. The Office of the President web site is still being reconstructed, but the Office of the Press Secretary site has been using P-Noy. “Please disregard what OPS says, we haven’t updated it yet," says Aquino communications officer Mai Mislang, who followed him from the Senate. “It’s PNoy." Mislang adds, “We haven’t made it official yet but it will be." Until it is official, many in media will have a field day experimenting with the nickname of the President, just another colorful element in this brave new world. GMANews.TV will, of course, continue to use President Aquino in news reports and just plain Aquino in headlines when it can fit. But otherwise, for reasons of brevity and convention, and for fear that the dot and hyphen in the other options will not be web-friendly, we choose PNoy. – GMANews.TV

Tags: PNoy, P.Noy, P-Noy
LOADING CONTENT