Spending 15 years as spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, I found that most Rangers and other law enforcement officers consider the lens of a TV camera only slightly less dangerous than a yawning gun barrel.
Internally, on the DPS org chart I had a lofty job title: “Chief of Media Relations.” Technically, since I headed the department’s public information office, in DPS speak I was a “chief.” But I generally eschewed the title as sounding pompous.
Anytime a journalist who’d just interviewed me asked how I’d like to be identified, my standard reply was, “Just call me a spokesman for the DPS.” Sometimes they opted to refer to me as a “public information officer” and I was good with that as well.
When I first noticed the word “SPOX” in a CNN bottom-of-the-screen crawler (i.e. “…Biden SPOX said at today’s White House briefing that…”) my immediate reaction was, “What’s a SPOX?” About as quickly, as a fan of real words,I realized to my dismay that someone must haveconcluded that “spokesman,” “spokeswoman” or “spokesperson” wasted too many perfectly good letters. Beyond that, “SPOX” is appropriately gender neutral. Even better, the neologism is easier to text.
Clearly, if I were still a hired gun mouthpiece, to most of those in the news media I’d just be a SPOX. Or maybe SPOX Cox.
Of course, SPOX is not the only new term of art in the news media world. To that point, what the general public knows as a press conference is in the jargon of journalism a “presser.” (Not to be confused with a steam laundry employee). Thanks to the Secret Service, journalists also began to refer to the President of the United States as POTUS and the First Lady as FLOTUS. Should the U.S. elect a woman as president, while it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, I guess the first-ever First Gentleman would come to be called FGOTUS.
Back to SPOX, it first appeared as a noun in the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2019 edition and its use has only grown since then. But 2019 is just the year the term made it to the dictionary. According to the OED’s website, the first known usage of SPOX appeared in the Clovis, New Mexico News-Journal in 1989.
Clovis, incidentally, is less than a two-hour drive from Roswell, NM. That’s where the so-called Roswell Incident took place in 1947, the event that gave us the term “flying saucer.” Ironically enough, it was an Army public affairs officer—oops, SPOX—who put out a news release reporting that a mysterious metal object had crashed in the nearby desert.
Despite its late 1980s coining, SPOX did not blast off until the advent of Twitter in 2006. Indeed, being able to post only 140 characters at a time on the worldwide platform now known as X led to many spelling shortcuts. You know, from LOL to BTW. OMG!
Merriam-Webster waited until September 2023 to define the neo noun beginning in “s” and ending in “x.” Speaking of “x,” in discussing the four-letter word, the dictionary notes that “SPOX” is another example of an “x” being used as a one-letter placeholder for “ks” or the “ks” sound. For example, beginning in the 20th century and continuing into this century, “thanks” often appears as “thnx.” “X” also could be made to stand for “c,” as in “documents” becoming “dox.”
Simple as it may be, “X” is not a universal shortening agent. Take the word “spies.” A slang word for “spy” is “spook,” with the plural form accomplished with an old-fashioned “s.” But transforming “spies” or “spooks” to SPOOX would be even weirder than using SPOX for “spokesperson.” Beyond that, some might mistakenly see SPOOX as the plural of SPOX.
Happily for those of us who prefer to work with old-fashioned real words, OED notes that “SPOX” occurs only 0.03 times per million written words in modern English. Of course, that calculation was made before I used SPOX 18 times in this essay.
On the upside, SPOX is a fun-to-pun term.For instance, if the four-letter noun for “spokesman” had been popular in my day, when asked by a reporter how I’d like to be identified, with apologies to the late Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy, I’d have enjoyed saying, “Just call me Mr. SPOX.”
While we all know that a leopard can’t really change its SPOX, for better or worse those four letters and their like have altered the lexicon of public relations and the media world.