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.