Cannibalism is a rare but not unknown practice in the magazine business. Last week Street & Smith got ready to gobble its eleven-year-old Pic.* Once a cheap pictorial stuffed with cheesecake, Pic had been restyled in 1945 as a serious magazine for young men. It was not making money, but circulation had grown to 622,000 a month (compared to its rival Esquire's 665,076). Thus, Editor Vic Wagner and his staff were surprised when they got the bad news: their magazine would be killed with the December issue, to give its paper and press time to Street & Smith's booming quarterly, Mademoiselle's Living.
Living, a child of Mademoiselle, is only four issues old. But it is a newsstand sellout at 220,000 copies, and as a "magazine for smart young homemakers," was treading on Pic's toes. The publishers will step up the print order and turn Living into a bimonthly in February. quote to read: "He's trying to criminally assault me! Help!"
Snakes & Fiats. The U.S. press has broken free from some of the outdated taboos and cliches that still keep news-writing stilting along behind the racy spoken word. But many still survive. The late, great Editor William Rockhill Nelson barred the word snake from his Kansas City Star because he thought readers couldn't take it at the breakfast table. Colonel Bertie McCormick has let some of his simplified-spelling decrees lapse (foto-graf has been compromised into photo-graf), but his Chicago Tribune still uses monolog, tho, frate.
On the Hearst papers, points of style may be changed between editions by a peremptory wire from the Chief. When Hearst first turned against the New Deal, Hearstlings were ordered to refer to it as the Raw Deal. Some zealous copyreaders even changed the phrase in New Dealers' speeches in praise of the Administration. And when W.R.H. once got mad at Stanford University (it refused to fire a professor he suspected of Communism), and banned its name from his papers, his sport editors went grey trying to fit such substitutes as "Men from Palo Alto" into headlines.
It's the Style. Some other style notes reported last week by TIME correspondents:
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch admonishes cubs, with good reason, that probe is to be "generally reserved for surgeons," and is not a synonym for investigate. (But, like aid, bar, ban, hit, quiz, curb, and other short verbs, it is a constant temptation to headline writers.) Since the days of famed Managing Editor O. K. Bovard, the P-D has had a ban against hit &run driver. It's bad taste, said O.K., to refer to a traffic tragedy in sporting terms.
The Detroit Free Press, among many others, tut-tuts careless reporters who write over when they mean more than. The inconsistent Page One slogan of the Free Press: "On Guard for Over a Century."
Southern papers still prefer War Between the States to Civil War. During the Spanish Civil War, a New Orleans Times-Picayune copy-desker wrote with tongue in cheek, "The Spanish War Between the States." Few Southern papers will Mr. a Negro in print; some steadfastly refuse to capitalize Negro.