A What, Now?

     A local radio newsperson just told me over the air that the storms that knocked out my electricity the day before yesterday -- and that of hundreds of thousands of other people along their track -- also spawned "Eee Eff Oh" tornadoes.

     Tell me you're reading copy in a "book" font like Times New Roman without telling me you're reading Times New Roman.  Old-time paper wirecopy from an Extel dot-matrix printer or an older Teletype Model 15* had a dot in the center of the zero or a slash through it, preventing confusion between "0" and "o" in the all-capital-letter output.  So, too, did some computer fonts.  Local newspeople, if they were leaving a story for someone else to read, were careful about making the distinction when they typed it up.  "Orator" was a popular typewriter font (especially in television), simple and clear.

     But it's 2025.  Nobody (well, hardly anyone) prints this stuff out and the "wire machine" is not consuming several reams of fanfold paper a day: there's no reason not to spell it out.  Those E F zero tornadoes can be just that.

     A person reading news copy has enough to do.  (Try it sometimes.  Don't go too fast!  And remember, you've got to make the sentences make linear sense using only intonation and pacing.)  These days, they're scrolling through their script with a hand or foot controller, reading it a line or more ahead if they've been in the business longer than a few weeks; in TV, they're taking it from the camera-front prompter while a producer talks in their ear and in radio, they're running their own levels, watching the clock so they don't get steamrollered by the next ad or program and making sure all the sound bites are ready.  Scoping out a "0" from an "o" (even if you typed it yourself) doesn't need to be among the tasks.
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* Mechanical teletypes made the most wonderful rumbling clatter, a sound that meant "news" to several generations; stations used to hang a microphone in the wire-machine closet and run the sound at low level under newscasts, or to at least under the opening.  Those mics were still there when the cheaper, simpler dot-matrix printers replaced the Model 15 -- and made a sound like tiny robot farts as they printed.  Somehow that noise never caught on.