David Sullivan, who writes the That’s the Press, Baby blog, recently offered some good advice for copy editors:
We ran a story last week on a winner of the Medal of Honor. Like every good copy editor, I have been told for decades that it is a factual error to call it the Congressional Medal of Honor, even though nearly everyone in America calls it that. As the Wikipedia entry notes, “the Medal of Honor is presented by the president on behalf of the Congress. Although commonplace, the term ‘Congressional Medal of Honor’ is not correct.’”
So I was making sure that we didn’t ever say “Congressional Medal of Honor” and in doing so fell afoul of the other phrasing that often accompanies it, one that also veterans are always quick to point out and which I also knew, but was not looking for and thus overlooked. We referred to the soldier as a “Medal of Honor winner.” Medal of Honor etiquette calls for the verb to be “awarded” or “given” or such, not “won,” as opposed to service medals. So we got some calls about that.
3 Comments
Unfortunately he repeated the error in the first sentence of the correction…
Ah, true. Nice catch. BTW the above is a blog post, not a correction. But I suppose the blog post now requires a correction…
It seems best to call them “Medal of Honor recipients”, not “winners”. Of course, you then have to remember to use the spelling “Honor” (and not change it to “Honour”) because it’s a proper name, and spelling variations have to be retained inside proper names.