Over There at The Guardian

Grauniad is the nickname given to The Guardian by the satirical magazine Private Eye in the mid-1970s, which The Guardian earned for its frequent and famous misprints. A newspaper ‘celebrated for its lousy typesetting, can henceforth never escape being the Grauniad’, wrote The Sunday Telegraph in 1979 (quoted in Daznell and Victor, 2013: 1041). ‘Britain’s most earnest, most typo-prone newspaper is forever the Grauniad’, echoed from across the Atlantic in the Canadian paper Globe and Mail. ¹ The acronym only appears seven times in The Guardian 2005 corpus, and it is used in an affectionate parodied way. Interestingly, it appears just once in the other newspapers for the same year. Looking at the broader anecdotal evidence, 40% of Google entries retrieved for the query Grauniad are Guardian web-pages and 52% of all the mentions of Grauniad in print newspapers since 1979 (available in Nexis archives) are from The Guardian itself. The Guardian has fully owned the nickname, quite literally, in fact: if you type www.grauniad.co.uk in a browser you are automatically redirected to www.guardian.com/international, as the newspaper bought the domain. The name Grauniad readily moved from the realm of mockery to that of self-deprecation, whereby The Guardian projects the image of someone who can take a joke, a characteristic, as we will see in the next chapter, which is central to the newspaper’s self-representation.