“We don’t have erections or miracles here”.

So my news editor told me when writing stories on a nasty court case and a rescue respectively. Erection was a banned word because it was considered distasteful, and ‘became aroused’ was a better alternative. Miracle was a banned word because “it implies the direct intervention of God or gods”.

At least he was clear.

My point here is that editorial policy plays a very strong role in the content produced by the conventional media, but in the world of citizen journalism – blogs, comments on the news in social media, and so on – untrained writers typically apply very few editorial controls. Newspapers, TV and radio think long and hard about whether to use the word miracle in a story, social media conversations are peppered with this and other editorially-borderline words without any forethought.

This sprang to mind this morning when hearing radio coverage of the first miners being rescued and then reading social media comments on it.

Conventional media in the UK steered well clear of the temptation of hailing events in Chile as miraculous. The Guardian ran something about which religious groups claimed credit for a miracle. which was an intriguing twist.

Only The Daily Mirror, of the British nationals, used the word directly (with the headline referencing a miner miracle, no less) while others reported the Chilean president’s use of the m word without positioning it as such themselves. Most papers presumably saw the obvious pun as a cheap shot in the circumstances, and did not want to imply any divine intervention.

Social media circles were less editorially discerning. Just look at the Twitter traffic this morning on the story and how often the word miracle is used. or how often it turns up in a search.

Lesson? Social media users should realise they are authors with a potentially global reach and should write accordingly, with real thought put into their choice of words.