There were giants on the copy desk ...

An anecdote from the time before I made my escape from Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer.

The Enquirer featured a local columnist named Frank Weikel, a former police reporter who had been given a column on the strength of his supposed sources. It was a column after the manner of Walter Winchell, short items connected by asterisks and spit. For example, it had "Departments of." One of his "Department of Names That Match Their Occupations" items, a urologist named Leake, was killed by the managing editor. 

But to our narrative. 

One day Bill Trutner is in the copy desk slot (an actual slot in a u-shaped desk), busy on deadline, when the managing editor, Jim Schottelkotte, walks up, trailed by Weikel. "Bill, we have a problem," Schottelkotte says. 

Trutner, a mild-mannered bald man who had been a high school English teacher, answers without looking up from his terminal. "What is it, Jim?"

"We have a problem with the Weikel column."

"What's wrong?"

"It's gone. He filed it, but the system seems to have eaten it. We can't find it."

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Well," Schottelkotte says, with a little managing editor banter, "we thought we'd get you to have one of the copy editors write a Weikel column for tomorrow."

"Can't do it, Jim."

"Why not?"

"We don't have anybody dumb enough."

Weikel turns on his heel and stalks away. 

The Old Editor gets cranky in the morning

I see some things in published journalism nearly every damned day. Just look. 

Too few people today have had any experience with horses, and it doesn't occur to them that horses are controlled with reins. To rein in a horse, the rider pulls back the reins to stop forward progress. To give free rein is to let go of the reins, allowing the horse to go where it will--in the dimly remembered metaphor, to surrender control. People who have neglected their homonyms instead write free reign. Reign is the power or rule of a monarch, so free reign is meaningless, apart from flagging the writer's imperfect education. 

Because we are trapped in a presidential campaign year, figures on all sides are daily subjected to intense public criticism, often expressed as catching flak. Those of you who remember, or maybe read about, the Second World War, know that flak is a shortened form of the German fliegerabwehrkanone, or antiaircraft gun. Flak is a metaphor for criticism that is like sharp pieces of metal flying through the air at great velocity. You will often see it rendered as flack, but flack is a pejorative term for a public relations agent--a stooge. You do not want to catch a flack. 

I generally skip articles on home decor, partly out of distaste for gush and partly out of apprehension of  encountering references to tchotchkes on the mantle. That shelf above the fireplace is a mantel. A mantle is a cloak. Just as we're not much on horseback anymore, we're not often given to wearing cloaks. Mantle, when it is not used in various scientific senses, is a another of those metaphors worn smooth by overuse; it means authority. In 2 Kings, when the prophet Elijah is carried into heaven on a fiery chariot, he drops his mantle to his disciple Elisha. Elisha puts on the mantle of Elijah, assuming his authority as a prophet. 

And these come up before I've had my second cup of coffee. 

The Old Editor vents

Some random observations on writing and editing 

As an editor, do what you can

I have spent more than forty years in journalism, which prizes straightforward unpretentious writing (though I have had to cope with the occasional littérateuse). You try to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain, but there are limits to what you can accomplish, limits inherent in the text. Sometimes the most you can manage is to take up the defective and leave it merely mediocre. As Anthony Trollope wrote, "One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it."

Don't start at the beginning

The Iliad starts in the middle of things, in medias res, if you want to sound like a classicist: The hero Achilles is having a hissy fit, and everything is going straight to hell for the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. It's years since Paris abducted Helen, and Homer goes straight to the main thing. Write like Homer. Start with the immediate thing, the crucial thing. You can work in the backgrounds, the subplots, and the secondary characters later in the text.

And make it succinct. Skip the throat clearing. I advised my students at Loyola Maryland to visualize the reader as a middle-aged man in a recliner with a beer in one hand and the television remote control in the other. The amount of time you have to get his attention, get him to commit to reading further, is the amount of time between clicks. 

Curb your fetishes

We all have preferences in vocabulary and usage, and so does everybody else. Unless you are a managing editor or some other tinpot despot, you don't get to legislate yours, and going on about them can make you tiresome. 

Take the Oxford comma. You can use the final comma in a series or omit it. The Chicago Manual of Style likes it, and the Associated Press Stylebook does not (though even AP advises using it where it reduces ambiguity). There are people online who clamor about it as a mark of civilization and its omission as a mark of barbarity. The opposite party claims that it is effete. Do as you please, or as your house style pleases. It is a minor stylistic point. For Fowler's sake, just shut up about it. 

Unlearning is learning

I did a series of videos for The Sun on the theme "Rubbish you were taught" and incorporated some of the material into my little book, Bad Advice. Yes, this is a plug. I take as my text for this item the word of two authorities: Henry David Thoreau, who said, "Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it," and Will Rogers, who said, "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you--it's what you know that ain't so." 

Much of the schoolroom grammar and usage I spent years laboriously acquiring, along with much of the Associated Press style I had to absorb as a journalist (and much of which I taught my charges during my first years at Loyola) turns out to be rules that ain't so. I discovered in talking about these things at professional conferences that not all of my colleagues found this welcome news, but to me it was liberating. It freed me to concentrate on what was meaningful in texts rather than wasting time on obsolete dicta of no consequence to readers apart from the occasional fussbudget. It also freed me to be a nuisance to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, whom I nagged for years until they heaved the dated baggage--such as "over/more than" and "split verb"--overboard.

You too can unlearn, and there are many linguists and lexicographers who can assist you. 

 

Thoughts on an Invitation to Apply to Johns Hopkins University's Police Force

Campus is crawling with undergraduates, half of them scurrying to the Eisenhower Library, the other half sashaying off to Charles Village bars. Scattered among them are union goons from the Ph.D. program. I have my eye on them, all of them.

My name is McIntyre. I carry a badge. And an espantoon. 

When Hopkins invited me in LinkedIn to apply for their new police force, they knew that they were getting more than an arthritic septuagenarian.

They knew I'd walked a beat for six and a half years in Cincy, patrolling the dark underbelly of Gannett.

They knew I'd done serve-and-correct duty in Baltimore for thirty-four years, even though the mossbacks in management refused to allow me to issue sidearms to copy editors. 

They knew I'd never had a complaint that was sustained: never Tasered a reporter over lie/lay, never told a copy editor to assume the position for calling something "iconic" in a headline. They said I once edited a man in Reno just to watch him cry, but the D.A. dropped all charges. 

So now I walk these mean groves, collaring kids who have not read the syllabus, watching for graduate students using AI to generate impenetrable academic lingo, pretending that deans do something important. 

And I tell you, it's a soft berth after the paragraph game.  

Learning how to talk

I was a graduate student fifty years ago when I first heard a faculty member speak of being "politically correct," a little self-consciously, a little ironically, a little redolent of liberal smugness. And it was not long before "politically correct" became a slur in our endless culture wars. 

Acceptance of changes in language, particularly changes in the way that people are identified, comes slowly. I remember the resistance in newspapers to using Ms. as an honorific for women, and the bewailing when gay became acceptable for homosexual over "the loss of that fine old word." 

And yet the world is as it is, and so are the people in it, particularly those who have long been marginalized or ignored and who have come to insist on their place in the sun, even if some are not comfortable with acknowledging them.

Charting a course to navigate in such a world makes Karen Yin's The Conscious Style Guide (Little, Brown Spark, $32) a book for our times. Ms. Yin, an experienced writer and editor, maintains the website ConsciousStyleGuide.com, from which some of the material in her book is taken, and that website has been a forum for exploring how we should talk to and about other people. 

The key to conscious style is paying attention. Language keeps changing, as do the preferences of individuals and groups. Gender identity is complex and fluid, so sussing out people's personal pronouns becomes advisable. The terms Native, Native American, American Indian, and Indigenous American are all current, so the person's or group's preference should be consulted. Offensive terms for Blacks, Asians, women, gays, and people with disabilities are to be avoided, but some words previously thought to be slurs can become acceptable. (Ms. Yin writes, "As someone named, Karen, I fully support the use of the Karen archetype" of bigot. It is a slur, but "right now, it does more good than harm." 

So this is not a rule book. It is a book asking you to think and make informed judgments. She says you must consider the content of a word or sentence or article, its basic meaning; its context, the surrounding historical and cultural circumstances that influence meaning; its consequence, how it will be understood; its complexity, the possibility that, like Karen, it can be both insulting and useful; its compassion, its recognition of the humanity of a marginalized group. 

The core of the book is the section called "Practice," which considers dozens of categories for conscious language. You will find material on the thorny issues of sex and gender, racial identity and ethnicity, and all the other hot-button issues, shunning dogmatism and exploring nuances and sensitivities. 

One section rises from the casual and inappropriate use of medical terminology to suggest that serious mental illnesses are routine: Instead of OCD, consider exacting or meticulous. Instead of ADHD, consider distracted. instead of have PTSD, consider am distressed. ... Instead of crazy, nuts, hysterical, bonkers, psychotic, consider wild, unpredictable, confusing, scary." 

And she offers alternatives to climate change denier and anti-vaxxer, terms that just get people's backs up. There is a section on how to persuade people to adopt conscious language. 

But let me get to the heart of it. 

To adopt conscious style when we speak and write is to work to accord everyone, everyone, the dignity and respect that white men have considered their due. 

Tell me about your worst undergraduate course

It was half a century ago, at Michigan State University, and I had disregarded Jean Nicholas's advice to pick courses by the best professors rather than by subject. It was a Shakespeare course.* 

The professor, whose name mercifully fades from memory, was young. At the last time that nearly all male faculty wore suits and ties, he wore an open-collar shirt to class. 

His pedagogy included acting out scenes from the Bard in class, and you will perhaps not be surprised that when he took the role of Hamlet he chose a young blond woman in the class to be his Ophelia. 

In talking about the play, he said that he didn't mean to suggest that he followed a strict Freud-Jones interpretation of the play, to which a classmate murmured to me, "No, he means to dance around it for fifty minutes." 

I wrote a couple of papers for this class, the revelation of which would brand me with enduring shame, and the grades on which maintained my membership in the Honors College. 

In my defense, when I had to submit my transcript to my advisor for approval for graduation, he ran a practiced eye down the page and said, "You appear to have gotten yourself a liberal education. How did you do that here?"

*To be fair, the other other Shakespeare courses in the English department at that time were taught by the dullest professor in the department and the most notorious antisemite on campus, but I digress. 

 

That historic verdict

The conviction yesterday of former President Donald Trump in a New York state court on thirty-four felony counts was, everyone agrees, historic, the first such conviction of a former president of the United Sates. But I am not concerned here with the rightness or wrongness of the verdict; instead, I have been asked was it "a historical event" or "an historical event"? 

Kai Ryssdal insisted on Twitter that it should be "an historic," and David Hobby (who took the photograph at the top of this blog) flagged me to weigh in. 

We use the indefinite article "a" before words beginning with "h" when the "h" is aspirated: a hat, a home, a haven. We use the indefinite article "an" before words beginning with "h" when instead of an aspirated "h" there is a vowel sound: an hour, an honor.  

The dispute rises over which indefinite article to use when a word begins with an "h" that is weakly aspirated because the stress comes on the second syllable of the word; thus some speakers say and write an historic or an hotel. (I doubt that you would say "a HO-tel" unless you were content to sound like a rube, but that's on you.) 

Bryan Garner, among other authorities, dismisses that argument, saying that everyone should "avoid pretense" and use "a" before all words beginning with "h," warning that practice to the contrary smells of affectation. 

Good people, this is America and English is your language, to wield it as it suits you, and I for one am sticking with an historic. People have been telling me that I "talk like a book" since the second Eisenhower administration, and I am not prepared to abandon the habits of a lifetime. 

The routine of work

 Preparations: Small pot of tea brewed, 

a chocolate bar unwrapped. 

Coffee comes later.

To the proof pages.

One comma flicked away, 

another plugged in.

Homonyms reversed, 

subject mated to verb, 

phrase reduced to a word, 

Merriam-Webster consulted,

prolixity excised.

Pencil both lances and stanches 

until the stack is done. 

Rising from the desk

for a stetwalk to look 

at trees in the distance. 

Soon the sluice will open, 

texts flowing this way, 

to be plucked, one by one, 

ordered, scraped, and dispatched

until the edition closes. 

Only then the book, 

the chair, the strong light,

the drink that closes the day. 

 

Buyer, beware

 The Kentucky Derby and the Preakness are past, the Belmont Stakes yet to be run. In Maryland we're all agog over the recently approved plans for Pimlico, spending $400 million in taxpayer funds to offer life support to a declining industry that kills horses. So the language of the track is all around us. 

And it is the track that give us a journalistic affection that annoys me almost above all others, reporting to the verb tout. 

We have it from late seventeenth-century Britain, where it means variously to get the secrets of the stable for betting purposes (to spy on) and to give a tip on a racehorse. The noun is for the person who exhibits such behavior. From that the senses extend to canvassing for customers, soliciting patronage, urging with annoying persistence, and soliciting importunately. 

Particularly in U.S. usage, it has come to mean to proclaim loudly or overly publicize. 

It owns its popularly in journalism to copy editors, always searching for a short word to fit into a tight count, and from the headline it descended into body copy. 

No doubt I am oversensitive from reading too many books, but whenever I see that some public official is touting a program, or some developer is touting a project for which, yes, again, taxpayers will bear the costs, the whole smarmy connotation from racing echoes in my mind. Boost, plug, and pitch, similarly, suggest that someone is enthusiastically offering dubious merchandise. 

Promote, publicize, and even proclaim do the job reporters want, without the seediness. They can always put their money on some other horse. 

Asked and answered

More in comments on "Ask me anything": We'll start with the semicolon.

1. What's an easy way to remember the proper times to use a semicolon versus a period?

2. When are sentences in parentheses in sentences appropriate?

You would use a semicolon to join two independent clauses that are closely related, viz., They ask me questions; I always answer them. 

But keep in mind that it is a judgment call to use the semicolon instead of writing two sentences. The semicolon is more common in formal writing and might look stiff in yours. Some people though, like the semicolon. Nicholson Baker not only pumps for the semicolon in "The History of Punctuation" (collected in The Size of Thoughts) but also applauds the Victorian custom of combining the semicolon with the em dash. (Admire if you like, but step back.) 

An alternative to the semicolon is the comma, found in the dreaded comma-splice run-on sentence: They ask me questions, I always answer them. You do not want to do this in formal writing, and you must not say that I gave you permission to do so. But if you are writing fiction, particularly dialogue, you will find yourself resorting to this comma, because people in speech string their clauses together loosely rather than composing them, and this construction will sound more natural. 

As to the second question, about parentheses, it is best to think of them as operating like an aside in drama. The parenthetical remark is a nugget of information that is not essential to the main line of thought but is tucked in to add a bit of context. 

But writing a parenthetical clause within a sentence can be dicey, distracting the reader, viz., Nicholson Baker not only pumps for the semicolon in "The History of Punctuation" (The essay is a review of a book on punctuation collected in his The Size of Thoughts) but also applauds the Victorian custom of combining the semicolon with the em dash. See?