Time goes by

It was on October 23-25, 1997, that the American Copy Editors Society conducted its first national conference, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was there.

These photos, which recently surfaced in a folder deep in a file cabinet, were from the workshop I conducted there at the invitation of Pam Robinson.

"Getting Back to the Word," on issues of English usage, used material I had developed for staff workshops at The Baltimore Sun and from our in-house newsletter on writing and editing, Publish and Be Damned.

My participation in ACES had been encouraged by The Sun's publisher, Mike Waller, himself a former copy editor, and by John Carroll, the editor. When demand came for me to present this workshop, and others on writing and editing, their encouragement continued. I have presented "Getting Back to the Word" at other national ACES conferences and at publications around the United States.

Over the nineteen years since, as I have come to examine the things about English usage that I had been taught, looking at evidence in Bryan Garner's four edition of his usage manual, at the evidence presented by lexicographers and linguists about usage, and at the evidence of my own eyes,  the advice in that workshop has undergone revision.

My bully is dead

Though I allowed my subscription to the Flemingsburg Gazette, the paper I worked for in high school and college, to lapse, I still occasionally check the Independent-Ledger in Maysville. Given that I have been away for more than forty years, I mainly scan the obituaries. 

A few weeks ago, there he was, the bane of my life in the third and fourth grades, my principal bully. I was a skinny bookworm and teacher's pet. He was bigger, more muscular, a halting student at best, and he was seldom at his best. He enjoyed tormenting me. 

Now he is dead, an old guy, like me, apparently mourned by his daughters. 

I don't visualize him as an adult with children. He is fixed in my head as he was then. The subsequent fifty-five years don't signify. (I will not describe him further, because he has children who mourn him.) 

There is the problem. He is fixed in my head. 

He, and the subordinate bullies who sometimes chimed in, established in my mind that I am someone to be bullied, someone who lacks power, someone with no recourse. My parents and teachers knew that I felt bullied, but they were at a loss to do anything beyond allowing the children to work it out on their own. 

My bully, to my astonishment, metamorphosed into adult for whom someone could bear affection. I, in turn, metamorphosed into an adult with a family, a profession, a reputation, a standing. 

But I am also someone who typically shies away from conflict and confrontation, because I was thoroughly programmed early on to see myself as unable to prevail in such circumstances.

Sixty-five years old, and I could still use some work.