I recently had someone ask about certain words and abbreviations we use, so I thought I’d explain.
We’ve always had Dems for Democrats, which is great – it’s only four letters long, so it doesn’t chew up space in headlines and excerpts. We had nothing similar for Republicans (11 letters long – ugh), so I decided to go with Repubs. Everyone gets it, I’m sure.
Another bad pair of words for length is “legislators” and “legislature.” For those I turned to the late, great Molly Ivins. That scion of progressive journalism use “leges” and “the lege” for those two words. Who am I to argue with Molly Ivins? So we adopted them when needed.
Obviously, sometimes we spell the words out completely, especially in straight news stories. But even there, most people understand what the words mean, so we’re not necessarily bound by a rule saying we have to use the longer words.
There you have it: Dems and Repubs, all serving as leges in the Lege. Maybe we’ll start a trend or something.
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