Are your ears yet ringing from all the news “INGing?”

Huh?

Some TV anchors have adopted a delivery style in which they omit various forms of the verbs “to be,” “to have” and “will,” and state nearly everything in the present tense. Thus, a statement such as: “President Bush left the White House this morning bound for Camp David where he’ll meet with advisors…” becomes: “President Bush…leaving the White House…heading for Camp David…Meeting with advisors…”

For obvious reasons, it’s also known as “elliptical English.”

Terrence Smith, reporting for the Online NewsHour, recently took up the issue and challenged some of TV’s top personalities on their staccato bursts of words.

NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw says, “Some of it is generational, and I swarm all over it as best I can. But it’s how a lot of them were raised, how a lot of the younger reporters were raised. And I think it grows out of the cable culture, because they work not just for me anymore. They work across the line on cable.”

Speaking of cable, Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith “INGs” his way through the news with no apologies. “We’re telling more stories in our hour than any national newscast in the history of this business, I think. We’re darn close to it if we’re not, and sometimes verbs just get in the way. I don’t use them all the time when I’m talking, so I don’t use them all the time on TV.”

According to Smith, people don’t use complete sentences in conversation, thus TV anchors shouldn’t be bound by such rules of English usage. “It’s about how I would tell this story if I were telling it to a friend on a street corner,” Smith said.

New York Times writer Geoffrey Nunberg argues with Smith on both counts. Calling the style “ing-lish” Nunberg claims it often makes sentences longer, not shorter. And “That must be a pretty exotic intersection, if Mr. Smith’s buddies are saying things like, ‘My car in the shop. The brakes needing relining.’ ”

Nunberg also argues with those who claim the style is drawn from the conventions of newspaper headlines. “Ing-lish is actually the exact opposite of headlinese,” he said. “For one thing, it doesn’t omit pronouns and articles the way headlines do. If a flasher shows up at a presidential dinner, the next day’s paper reports it as ‘Man Exposes Self at White House.’ On the news stations, that comes out as ‘A man exposing himself at the White House,’ which is a rather different take on the affair.”

Still, Nunberg says, there is a logic to “ing-lish.” He reasons that the new TV delivery style doesn’t just leave out some verbs, it omits them all. “(H)eadlines don’t omit tenses so much as adapt them to the singular point of view of the daily news” he said. But in the cable television world of all news all the time, “that daily reference point is absent.”

“News,” says Nunberg, is becoming a lot more like life, just one damn thING after another.”