"It's as if an occult hand had reached into newspaper offices across the country and assembled a whole menagerie . . . "

--Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sept. 28, 1994

This is a story about the vast media conspiracy that paranoid people always feared.

For more than two generations in newsrooms around the world, a meaningless, funny and telltale turn of phrase has spread like a cough in a classroom.

It is as intangible as smoke. It involves eight words that defy definition--"It was as if an occult hand had . . . "

Although they sound like they might mean something, they don't. The phrase has been slyly and widely put to use for most of the past 40 years, intentionally, all over the world.

Surprise.

"It's a phrase that has that sense of journalese about it, sort of a campy phrase," said the unashamed Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a Pulitzer winner and at least a six-time "occult hand" user.

A Tribune pursuit has traced the phrase to at least 1965, an era in American journalism when getting a story right and first were only two-thirds of an equation that also included getting it with style--or at least with wit.

Sneaking the "occult hand" into a story not only identified a writer as stylish but also served as admission into its emerging secret association, the Order of the Occult Hand.

"I'll smile and I'll forget about it," Greenberg said, having turned to the "occult hand" twice in a single week ripe with possibility in the spring of 1993, and then again in 1994, 2000, 2001 and 2004 "just to keep my standing in good order."

(Greenberg used it most recently after being contacted for this story; then so did the Democrat-Gazette's deputy editorial page editor.)

The hand still exists, but users of the phrase say it has been crippled by the arthritis of journalism scandals, safe now to wave only once in a while. But when it was conceived, it spread through journalism like a pox and has outlasted generations of editors and readers since.

It arrived at The New York Times in 1974.

It found The Washington Times four times from 1996 to 1998.

It appeared in the Los Angeles Times eight times between 1984 and 1999.

It slipped into The Boston Globe nines time from 1987 to 2000.

An Associated Press writer got it into the Chicago Tribune in 1996.

It arrived at The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y., in 2000, and the Bangkok Post in 2004.

Not all stylish

There have been grand and not-so-grand offenders over the years. Through interviews with reporters who used it and tracking of the phrase as it was passed on, at least some of the Order's growth around the world has been revealed through the gaze of Internet search engines.

When possible, accounts of how it spread were collected.

Many might be true.

According to Rex Bowman, who put it in a political story at The Washington Times and who now works for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, it spread like this in the beginning: "It was a bunch of reporters who got drunk and vowed to get something past their copy editors."

After that, he said, "it just spread by word of mouth," including at his newspaper.

A year to the day after Bowman got it into The Washington Times on Nov. 7, 1996, Sean Scully got it into the same paper, followed about three months later by The Washington Times' Ronald Hansen, who was followed less than two months after that by Jim Keary.

During the same period, M.R. "Monty" Montgomery of The Boston Globe gracefully invoked the "occult hand" in a 1997 story about strife at Boston University. ("If a president of Harvard ever intervenes in something like a promotion or a course outline, it is well disguised, the work of an occult hand.")

The next day, Larry Maddry used it in a story at The Virginian-Pilot.

Linton Weeks of The Washington Post used it that summer, in a story about bowling. ("It was as if an occult hand had guided the black sphere down the narrow lane and into the triangle of pins.") And so on.

"I'm sure I bragged about it to somebody," Bowman said. "I'm thinking what happened is probably what you think happened. I was gone when they did it, but no doubt somebody knew I'd done it. Sean got it in, and told Ron. Ron got it in and told Jim."

Bowman heard about it in central California in the late 1980s. And so it spreads, moving across the journalistic landscape like . . . as if an . . . like . . . an occ....

Anyway, it spreads.

Writers confess

It happens mysteriously and all over the place, so that writers who weren't even identified by the Tribune e-mailed confessions and rebukes, as if moved to surly penitence by the ghost of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The secret just wants to out, they seemed to say, just like the secret once pleaded to be used. Users say the "occult hand" was too perfect and couldn't stay that way when used so much.

"It may be sort of like the male Y chromosome. It might be self-destructing out there slowly over time," said Montgomery, who kept the secret while invoking the "occult hand" at least four times at The Boston Globe from 1989 to 1998.

But he fears that the era of the "occult hand"--or at least what it represents--may be over and, worse, killed by something more permanent than an editorial edict forbidding the phrase's use.

"There's so much bad writing and so much pretentious writing, I'm afraid it would get lost," he said.

It was always supposed to sound bad, he added.

It was slipped into copy to prove that one's editors were unobservant and had no taste. The beauty of it, he pointed out, was that it looked so good in print that no one noticed, not even--especially not--the editors.

Any serious study of the "occult hand's" origins first takes the investigator to Southern California in the mid- to late-1980s, perhaps the Golden Age of the Occult Hand.

Two things happened.

One of them, according to an e-mail from former L.A. Times writer Jill Stewart, was that "the L.A. Times was a deadly serious place, where even raising one's voice in the newsroom to chatter about an exciting story caused people to stop what they were doing and stare. The `occult hand' club caught on because so little fun was allowed."

The other thing was Jay Sharbutt.

Sharbutt was all about fun.

He had once made up humorous camp songs while reporting the Vietnam War. Funny in print and over the top in person, the late Times and Associated Press television writer found a natural home in the Order of the Occult Hand, said Deborah Caulfield Rybak of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune--formerly Deborah Caulfield of the L.A. Times.