Bookworm's progress

Earlier this month I wrote about my interest in history in the third grade, an interest that has continued, as you'll see from this list of books I read in 2024 and recommend to you. 

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (How we started to get where we are now) 

Geoffrey Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar 

Ron Chernow: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Seamus Heaney, Poems, 1965-1975

Karen Yin, The Conscious Style Guide

Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Tana French, The Searcher, The Hunter (Two cracking good yarns)

Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean to But They Do (Delightful novel on the complexities of parents and children)

Matthew Crenson, Baltimore: A Political History (How we started and how we got where we are now, locally) 

Anne Curzan, Says Who? 

Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

Ben Yagoda, About the Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

And so far in 2025:

Jon Meachem, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

Most recently, 500 pages of David and Jeanne Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American

Currently, 500 pages of Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of The New York Post, 1976-2024

And pending: 500 pages of J.H. Plumb on Sir Robert Walpole

Dash it all

 There's some kind of mild uproar online over the use of the em dash, which is supposedly prevalent in AI texts, and it has produced inevitable crank commentary on punctuation. I can't speak to to AI prose, because my time is occupied dealing with substandard human intelligence prose, but I do know about dashes. 

The mnemonic is that hyphens join and dashes separate. That is, hyphens join compounds while dashes separate syntactic elements, representing a break in continuity. Good judgment suggests that the em dash,* like the exclamation point, should be used with restraint, to avoid cheapening the effect. 

The tell about overuse of dashes is in U.S. journalism. Reporters are dash-happy, and the reason, oddly, is the mechanics of the Associated Press. 

Attend. Journalists do not use dashes to express a break in continuity; they use them to set off parenthetical information. They cannot use parentheses for this purpose, because they use parentheses instead of square brackets to indicate interpolated explanatory material. They do not use square brackets because AP can't transmit them to all its members (which is also why AP does not transmit diacritical marks).  

See? I just made a parenthetical addition to the previous sentence, not a break in what I was saying. 

* Unless you are involved in book publishing, you probably have little occasion to deal with the en dash, which joins some, but not all, compounds.  

Sweet Old Bob

About this time forty-five years ago I was apprenticing myself to the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer, in hopes of a permanent berth. One of the people weighing in on my prospects was the news editor, Bob Johnson. 

Sweet Old Bob (sometimes referred to by initials) was an old-school editor, irreverent, sometimes gruff but always fair, never deceived. His habitual response to a pitch for a story to be considered for Page One was "I don't buy on spec." 

He was given to pronouncements in pungent country expressions, as when he described one reporter's prose as "like a cow pissing on a flat rock." When he thought you were not pursuing a profitable course, he would say, "You're looking up a dead hog's ass," the sense being if looking up a hog's ass was not a productive endeavor, looking up a dead hog's ass was doubly nugatory. Or he would simply invoke the traditional pleasantry "Go shit in your hat." 

One night as deadline drew close and he was still waiting for a local story promised for the front page, he burst out, "Goddamn city desk! If they'd written the Bible, you wouldn't be able to fit it in a boxcar! And it wouldn't be done yet!"

Over time I began to master the craft and earn his respect. When the amiable Bill Trutner retired as copy desk slotman, Bob took me to dinner at the Cricket Tavern next door and explained the political reasons for which he could not name me Trutner's successor, instead making me co-slot with another editor. 

In due course Bob fell out of favor with the Gannettoids running the paper and was demoted, replaced as news editor by a stooge. It was when the stooge informed me that henceforth I would be evaluated half on performance and half on attitude that I began to send out resumes. 

We left The Enquirer the same summer, Bob a few weeks ahead of me. He was a gun enthusiast, and the parting retirement gift for him was a pistol. On his last night he amused himself by sitting at his desk and dry-firing the pistol, drawing nervous looks from the editor and managing editor. 

When I tell you that there were giants in the newsroom in those days, I have the proofs. 

A moment in history

 When I was in the third grade at Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades shared a classroom, and Mrs. Marian Gulley alternated teaching the two grades. 

One day, on a whim, Mrs. Gulley gave me a copy of the fourth grade's American history quiz. I had, of course, listened to her teaching the class, and, bored, I had read the fourth grade's history textbook, a collection of potted biographies of great Americans. 

I scored a 96 on the quiz, the highest grade. 

I proudly took it home, and my mother, from whom I received the gift of sarcasm, remarked, "I'm sure that made you popular with the fourth grade." 

But she kept the test. Forty years later, I found it among her effects. 

AP is not the boss of you

 Benjamin Dreyer levels his impressive scorn at the Associated Press for its decision to go along with Donald Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America--for its U.S. clients. And he quotes this posting from Bluesky: "I teach AP Style at the university level. Yesterday I informed my students they were free to ignore this change. First time in more than 30 years of teaching I've ever said that."

I don't want you blinking like the prisoners just released in Fidelio when tell you that you are not obligated, even if your publication generally follows the AP Stylebook, to observe every jot and tittle in it. 

All right, gasp and get it over with. 

Your publication is free to decide, out of tradition, readers' preferences, or sheer damn cussedness, to establish variances to AP guidelines. Follow the stylebook's online Q&A feature and you will discover that its editors openly acknowledge that the stylebook entries are advisory. On occasion they will even suggest that you disregard the stylebook in the interest of clarity for the reader. 

Now you can get in trouble by varying too much. In my first years at The Sun, the newspaper, aping The New York Times, used courtesy titles, including in wire service copy. So we had a team of copy editors who spent much of a shift determining if a woman was Miss, Mrs., or Ms., filling in military ranks and ecclesiastical titles, and the like. In the '90s a copy desk working group proposed a set of changes in policy, among them deleting the routine use of courtesy titles except in obituaries. The editor, John S. Carroll, pondered the matter for the blink of an eye and performed the misterectomy. 

Overall, the AP Stylebook generally follows common practices of U.S. journalism. The editors have been diligent about updating it (and heaving a quantity of rubbish over the side). You would be well advised to consider its recommendations, if you can remember that they are indeed recommendations, not diktats. 

Gone paperless

My grandparents subscribed to the Lexington Herald-Leader, which was not much of a newspaper before the Knight-Ridder purchase, but as a child I read the comics. My parents subscribed to the Kentucky edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer, and when I was in the seventh grade, my teacher, Ronnie Fern, had us pick a newspaper article each day and write something about it; from that I date my newspaper habit. 

In the summers of 1968 to 1973, when I worked for the Flemingsburg Gazette, I read the Louisville Courier-Journal every morning at work and got to see what a fine newspaper was like. In college at Michigan State I was preoccupied with things apart from newspapering, and in graduate school at Syracuse I once subscribed briefly to the afternoon Herald-Journal and dropped it over the dumbest editorials I had ever seen. 

But in 1980 a series of chances brought me to the copy desk of The Cincinnati Enquirer, where I found that I liked copy editing and was good at it; it was the discovery of what I was meant to do. And it was the start of a forty-five year habit of mornings with coffee and a daily newspaper; the national news, the foreign news, the local news, the editorials and op-eds, the features, the comics. Yes, there were other sources of news and entertainment, but the morning newspaper was the fixed spot of daily orientation. And yes, Boomer that I am, I was characteristic of my demographic; we all had the newspaper habit. 

No more, I think. My colleague Steve Auerweck, once joked darkly that we should replace the "Obituaries" logo with "Subscriber Countdown." And indeed, for decades God has been harvesting the print readership. Still on this side of the turf, I finally dropped my subscription to The Baltimore Sun two and a half weeks ago because its new owner has fatally compromised what was left of its integrity.

Now, each morning, I make a pot of coffee for my wife and me and settle into a new routine. First The Guardian for world and and national news, then The Baltimore Banner for local and state news, then a series of online sites offering news and commentary. There is no longer a single fixed starting point, though I discover that I do not miss The Sun, which became a source of irritation and regret. 

But I do miss the comics. 

Sunset at last

 Last year I canceled my subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post over their inexcusable coverage of President Biden and the presidential election, and over their specious justifications of their conduct. I now subscribe to The Guardian for national and international news, The Baltimore Banner for local news, and recommend that you do similarly. 

This morning I finally took the next step, canceling my subscription to The Baltimore Sun, to which I have subscribed for nearly thirty-nine years and where I worked as an editor for thirty-four years, nearly half my life. 

A year ago this month David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting bought The Sun, and he and co-owner Armstrong Williams have systematically degraded a once-great newspaper, filling its news pages with low-grade pap from Sinclair and Fox 45. It is the Vichy Sun. I can skip Armstrong Williams's laughable opinion pieces and the op-ed screeds from Republican backbenchers in the General Assembly and nostalgic veterans of the Reagan administration, but the news matters. 

Many members of the staff have left in disgust, at least one who quit over interference with her reportage without having another position lined up. I suspect others hope to achieve escape velocity.  

There are still some people on the staff whom I can hold in esteem, and I have maintained my subscription, despite my disgust, out of solidarity with the members of the News Guild who have been fighting gallantly for a decent contract and reputable editorial standards. 

But as with The Times and The Post, it becomes a question whether as a customer one should continue to give money to an operation one can no longer respect or endorse. The term of my current subscription will run out by the end of the month; in February I will no longer be complicit. 

Where your wits end

I see people writing that something has occurred at someone's wit's end. 

No. 

"Wit" is your "talent at banter or persiflage," your sense of humor. "Wits" are your reasoning power, your sanity. When circumstances have brought you to the end of your wits, you are at wits' end, not at wit's end. 

Kindly note. 

Ave atque vale, Paula Froke

 Over time the Associated Press Stylebook acquired quite a number of barnacles on the hull. In recent years its chief editor, Paula Froke, has careened the vessel to clean and calk below the waterline. Now she announces that she is taking a buyout and retiring after four decades with the AP.

It is not just little stuff that the stylebook cleaned up during her editorship (but we will be getting back to that). There have been annual updates on sensitive subjects such as racism and sexuality, and the current edition has an excellent selection of tips on self-editing.

But I am particularly grateful for a number of changes she and the editors approved after extensive prodding from me. Let's not mince around; I have been no better than a common scold. 

AP and Chicago have both recently come to accept, however grudgingly, singular they. 

AP deleted the entry on collide/collision after determining that there is no warrant for the bogus rule that only objects in motion can collide, that an object in motion cannot collide with a stationary object. Step onto to any street in Baltimore and watch it happen. 

AP now acknowledges, despite Strunk and White, that hopefully can mean both "in a hopeful manner" and "it is hoped." Hopefully, we can abandon that canard.

She announced, to a chorus of moans from participants in an editors conference, that AP was dropping the over/more than distinction. Those of you who are not journalists should understand that the belief that over must refer to spatial relationships, never to quantities, is a distinction apparently invented by nineteenth-century American newspaper editors and upheld as an article of faith by American journalists ever since. It exists nowhere else in the English language. (No need to comment with your objection to the change; your protest has been noted.) 

But my gratitude to her reached its zenith the day she announced that AP was deleting the "split verb" entry from the stylebook. Some of you probably understand that the split infinitive bugaboo is entirely a superstition, thoroughly demonstrated by the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler a century ago. Some unknown would-be precisionist decided that the split infinitive superstition should be extended to verbs with auxiliaries: that Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle should have been We Always Have Lived in the Castle. (If the latter construction does not look strange to you, you have likely been reading newspapers, and may not have noticed the split verb in this sentence.) 

Paula Froke has allowed me to believe that a stylebook need not be an obstacle to good and informed writing. I hope she will accept this billet-doux and speed into retirement to do whatever the hell she would like to do. She has done the Lord's work. 

False precision

The 1986 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook from my first year on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun remains on my shelves as an historical artifact.* As I opened it the other day, my eye fell on the gauntlet/gantlet entry. 

A gauntlet is a glove, figuratively thrown down or taken up in a challenge. A gantlet is a flogging ordeal, in which the victim runs between two lines of men with clubs who beat him as he passes. It's possible that unless you are of my vintage you were blissfully unaware of such a distinction. But some of us enforced it for decades. 

It is a waste of time. 

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage pointed out thirty years ago that the two words are merely spelling variants. Bryan A. Garner, who upheld the distinction in 2009, writes in 2022 that "run the gauntlet outdistances run the gantlet by a 16-to-1 margin and has consistently done so since about 1800. The usage 'battle' was lost before it began." (The AP Stylebook retains the distinction, one more barnacle on the hull.) 

The whole life of editing lies in upholding useful distinctions of meaning and usage. But our teachers, editors, and manuals have a regrettable tendency to accumulate spurious distinctions and shibboleths.** Part of our responsibility as writers and editors is to sort out faulty instruction and determine how the language is actually used, for clarity and the reader's sake. 

So I put it to you today that distinctions you used to uphold as writers and editors you have subsequently abandoned as you learned better. Will you share them? Be clear: This is not an invitation to proclaim the hill you will die on. It may be the hill on which you uphold the masculine default or the one on which literally has no figurative sense, BUT I DON'T CARE. 

You used to make some change that you thought at the time was meaningful but which you now realize is a time-waster. So fess up in a comment here, and sin no more. 

* Yes, "an" historical, dammit.  

** I published a little book, Bad Advice, on some of the rubbish we've all been taught.