"Victory" vs. "Win"?

Where does the board stand on the use of these two terms that describe the accumulation of a sporting collective of more points than the opposing sporting collective?

I'll start by stating the column headers in agate aren't "V D" for a reason.

I had a deputy SE (who knows who he is) insist a "win" was not a noun. He was wishy-washy in whether a "loss" was a noun either, but I never pressed the point in the two months I worked at his shop.

 

I don't like "win" except as a verb.
But hard to escape it for a noun anymore.

However, if Podunk gets a win over South Cackalacky,
then South Cackalacky gets a lose, ya know?

Don't care how you frame it as long as you're consistent, but if you don't have
parallel construction, then you're not consistent, and therefore you and your site suck.

p.s. "Impact" is a noun, and never a verb. Never ever ever, unless you and your site suck!

 

The interchangeability of words between nouns and verbs is both the blessing and the curse of English. I just don't have a stick up my arse over it.

 

And that, of course, is how we got to "Fuck you, ya fucking fuck!"

 

This is a debate? Win can absolutely be used as a noun. Don't believe me? Then how about Merriam-Webster?

Definition of WIN

 

Victors victory.

 

Let it go, John McIntyre says. Let stuff like this go.
I have a hard time doing so because of the decades of rigid style rules.
But anyway ...

I spent forty years as a copy editor enforcing standards, and still do as a retirement side-hustle. Some of the standards I used to enforce I no longer do, having recognized that the language has changed and that some of them ("farther/further," "over/more than," "since/because") were bogus. If you want to be a serious editor, you must continually examine what you are doing and make an effort to keep informed.

And there is this. There is not enough time for editing, even in the places that still place a value on it. All editing involves triage, and if you are still spending your time changing "further" to "farther" or "over" to "more than" out of a misplaced sense of precision, you may well be overlooking some error of fact, some jumble of organization, or some piece of slack writing that begs to be tightened.

You Don't Say: Maybe it's time to let go of it

 

I can't shake it, but at least I'm out, too. All those years of "Under way is two words!" beaten into our brains, and then one day, straight of the blue, AP says, "Hey, what the hell, 'underway' is one word from now on."

I could maybe even accept that one, but the "Oh, and 'over' is just fine for 'more than,' too" made me lose all respect for the industry. Consistency and accuracy was always the mission with print products, but once things got rough, the suits (!!!) caved fast and hard on anything that helped them dump the editors. After all those decades of "We have rules and standards here!"

But when John McIntyre himself says, "Oh, fuck it all," the game is over. It's all about writers being rock stars now, anyway.

 

I call bullshit, for the simple reason that the preference is to have it all -- catch factual inaccuracies, clean up copy AND follow your publication's current style.

Considering any of those as a nuisance or low priority, you can rationalize it any way you want, but you won't be doing the full job as a copy editor.

 

I start screaming internally this time of year when the store starts collecting donations for the food bank, because at least once a day someone will read a script saying proceeds will help families "in our local area."