POWER PLAY: PLEASE TRUST US IN OUR USAGE OF `TRUSTY'

Daily newspapers are guilty of errors, but some readers take them too seriously.

Putting out a daily newspaper is similar to Buddhist idea of Nirvana, a level of pure and perfect enlightenment that can never be fully attained but for which the faithful strive.

That explains transcendental daze in which editors always seem to be. Either that or they have bottles of tequila stashed away in their desks.

Achieving perfection in the pages of a daily newspaper is as impossible as attaining Nirvana.

Unlike monthly magazines -- which have battalions of copy editors with plenty of time to read copy, send it back to the writer for improvement, re-read the copy, take a short nap, send the copy back again, pop down to the pub for a nice pint of Guiness, take another nap, re-re-read the copy, order the writer flogged and then completely re-write the story themselves to make it fit for publication -- newspapers are under the howitizer of daily deadlines.

Considering the heavy pressures of time -- we're talking maximum PSI -- no matter how closely stories, captions, ads and everything else are scrutinized, things will slip through in the never relenting bustle to put the paper to bed on time.

However, like those striving to reach Nirvana, we try to come as close to perfection as possible and keep errors to a minimum. All writers immediately wince when they find even one typo or grammatical error in a published story with their byline.

And nothing horrifies an editor more than looking at the paper in the morning only to find that the headline on the day's top story, which he thought he wrote as "Mayor and City Council butt heads," appears as "Mayor and City Council buttheads."

We deserve criticism when we make a mistake. Some readers, however, have a tendency to bicker over minutiae, calling in to inform us that our slight misspelling of the new university president's name means "Go stick your head in a pig" in certain dialects of Swahili or some such thing. If this area had a large Swahili-speaking population, such an instance could deeply offend a lot of people, or at least dramatically change the social lives of many local pigs. As it stands no one here speaks Swahili, so it's not a big deal.

Lately, at least two anonymous callers who have taken exception to our usage of the word "trusty" have plagued this newsroom.

The word appeared frequently in the recent stories related to the escape of Russell E. Bucklew, a.k.a. Trash Can Boy, from the Cape Girardeau County Jail. A fellow inmate, trusted with duties around the jail, aided in the escape.

The irate callers complained that the correct term for such an inmate is "trustee" not "trusty." The latter word, they maintained, is an adverb meaning "dependable and faithful" and may not correctly be used as a noun.

One caller has been particularly adamant, calling at least a half-dozen times. Each call is more vociferous and shrill than the last.

At best she has accused us of being flat-out wrong. At worst she has accused us of vilely committing a colloquialism.

This caller, who claimed to be a spelling and grammar expert -- not to mention a "trusty" person, gets more annoyed each time we write about the trusty program. She swears she looked the word up in a dictionary and demands that we cease our stubborn refusal to admit our error, apologize for violating the Queen's English and start using the correct term, "trustee."

All I have to say is that people who invoke the lexicon should know precisely what they're talking about before they open their mouths.

A random sampling of various dictionaries reveals the following results:

-- The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, includes a noun entry for trusty, which means "a convict held to be worthy of trust and granted special privileges."

-- Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, calls a trusty "a trusty or trusted person; specifically: a convict considered trustworthy and allowed special privileges."

-- Webster's New World Dictionary defines a trusty as "a convict granted privileges as a trustworthy person."

Incidentally, the etymological history of this usage of trusty dates back over 400 years to 1573, so this is not a recent grammatical corruption or local aberration.

Now, with that all said, would you doubters PLEASE STOP BOTHERING US.

I, for one, am shocked that anyone would think we would intentionally be ingramatically correct.

Marc Powers is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.