Honor the desk

 Three and a half years ago Kimi Yoshino came to Baltimore from Los Angeles to become the first and founding editor-in-chief of The Baltimore Banner, that is, to build a local news organization from scratch. 

Within the past few months The Banner has won a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize. But I knew three and a half years ago that The Banner was going to be a serious news organization, because Kimi was determined to establish a copy desk. She hired three copy editors and engaged me as a freelance copy editor. 

Nobody does that any longer. Many publications have eliminated copy desks altogether as a costly, time-consuming frill. Some years ago The New York Times dismantled one of the nation's foremost copy desks, buying some editors out and assigning the remnant to various desks around the newsroom. Today I see a report of a memo at The Washington Post offering a buyout to copy editors and announcing that the remaining copy editors will work in a reconfigured operation. 

I know from reconfigured. When The Baltimore Sun eliminated its vestigial copy desk (there were two of us), I became a "content editor." My duties were to make sure that stories were properly formatted for online publication, to find and assign photos, to add links within the text to related stories, to publicize the publication of the stories on Facebook and Twitter, to send out alerts of publication of stories, &c., &c. And if I wanted to do a little copy editing after performing all the other tasks, and could fit it in without wasting too much time, they were OK with that. 

The thing that the cheeseparers who run these outfits don't understand, or perhaps don't just care about, is that dissolving the copy desk and redistributing the editors sacrifices an essential independence. 

The classic copy desk was not a part of the metro desk, the national desk, the business desk, or the features desk. It was a freestanding unit, allowed to cast a cold--and often skeptical--eye on the productions of other desks without being subservient to their editors. We had the duty, as Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, of being the people who can and must ask, "Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"A classic example: One day The Sun's John Scholtz returned from a prolonged tussle with the editors on the business desk to announce, "They have forgiven me for being right." 

Now Kimi is leaving The Banner to become a senior editor at The Post. I wish her well with her new challenges, and I will miss her. She understands what is important. And I am enduringly grateful to her for permitting me in retirement to continue in this obscure craft a little longer. 

One last touch. Three and a half years ago I spoke with Kimi over Zoom about taking on this freelance role. Because it was essentially a job interview, I dressed in a jacket and bow tie. My sources at The Banner told me that the next day she asked some of the Sun veterans on the staff, "Does he always dress like that?"

"Oh yes," they said. "Oh yes."

All right, all right, One More Time

 Yesterday I made a snarky post about people who think that "who" refers only to human beings and that "that" can only refer to animals and inanimate objects. Today I get a wait, wait!: How are we supposed to teach this? 

Let's go together down this well-traveled road. 

First, we have to dispose of a venerable superstition. Many people think that to use "that" referring to a person is dehumanizing, reducing that person to an inanimate object or animal. But Bryan Garner points out that speakers of English have been using "that" to refer to people for thirteen centuries (we're about to see how and when). If using "that" to refer to people is not to your taste, don't use it. But you do not get to impose your personal preference on the rest of the language. 

"Who's" on first. "Who" refers to people (and yes, Associated Press Stylebook, named animals). But its possessive form "whose" can refer to people, to objects ("a tree whose leaves turn red in autumn"), and to abstractions ("an idea whose time has come"). 

Now take "that": In contemporary usage, Garner points out, "that" refers to things in 90 percent of uses, but to persons in the remaining 10 percent. "That" is perfectly acceptable in standard English in contexts that refer to a group of people or to a person whose identity is unknown. 

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" you may have sung in Handel's Messiah. For a more recent example than the KJV, there are Irving Berlin's "The Girl That I Marry," Mark Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Ira Gershwin's "The Man That Got Away." 

The teachers and usage authorities that endorse the superstition, unfortunately, outnumber the editors that attempt to uphold informed usage. 

Listen up, people

 I tell you this with utter assurance: Every time you see peoples' it will be wrong.

Oh, all right, not every time. Just nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand. 

People on nearly every occasion will be a noun singular in form with plural meaning: multiple human beings. 

One of Wilson Follett's crotchets in Modern American Usage may be recalled by older members of the assembly. He comes down hard on the distinction between people and persons, saying that "when we say persons we are thinking, or ought to be, of ones--individuals with identities; whereas when we say people we should mean a large group, an indefinite and anonymous mass." 

That distinction, what we ought to be thinking, was badly eroded sixty years ago and today is virtually gone. Bryan Garner, of course, recalls the distinction, but he is fully aware that it is pedantic and would produce sentences that sound strained to our ears. He says, "Twelve persons on the jury seems stuffy to many readers, and most native speakers of English (since about the mid-1970s) would say twelve people on the jury," which "has come to be viewed as the more natural phrasing." 

But there remains that thousandth instance in which peoples is a noun plural in form and plural in meaning: "a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship though not necessarily by consanguinity or by racial or political ties and that typically have common language, institutions, and beliefs" (thank you, Merriam-Webster). The United Nations is a place where the peoples of the planet are represented, and it is only in that context that you are ever likely to see the plural possessive peoples' used correctly. 

And the people said ... 

In the Kentucky Diaspora

The locust trees burst into bloom in Baltimore today, and I know that on the other side of the Appalachians they are perfuming the countryside. It is the smell of home. 

I left home, Elizaville, the crossroads town in Fleming County where I grew up, in 1973 to go to graduate school in Syracuse, and from there to newspapering in Cincinnati and Baltimore. But, after nearly four decades in Maryland, I am neither a Marylander or a Baltimorean. I am a Kentuckian in self-chosen exile. 

People are mildly taken aback when they learn that. They see that I wear shoes and am not a gallus-snapping pappy, and they usually limit themselves to saying, "You don't sound like someone from Kentucky." And I don't, though my wife observed that my accent broadened slightly in the summers when we visited my mother. "Why, John Early, you sound just like somebody from up North," the mother of a classmate once told me. 

My people were there for a long time. My father's father, who died before I was born, ran a general store in Elizaville. His people were from Hilltop, a suburb of Elizaville. My father took over management, but he was soft-hearted and gave credit to impoverished farmers who were never able to pay him back. Ultimately, his mother and brother, who inherited equal shares of the store, turned him out into the street. It's a complicated heritage. In time he became an engineer with the state highway department, and I have driven on roads he helped make. 

My mother was postmaster in Elizaville for twenty-four years and from her vantage point at the crossroads observed everybody's comings and goings. When someone drove through town, she knew where he was going, what he would do there, and when he would be back. And if she didn't know that, she worked the phones until she did. The Soviet Union did not have surveillance to match that of a small town in Kentucky. 

My mother's father owned a farm that had been in the Early family since the middle of the nineteenth century. I have a property tax receipt indicating what my great-great-grandfather paid for his two hundred acres, his four horses or mules, and his six human beings. As I said, it's complicated. 

I don't know whether they realize the complication when those well-fed gentlemen in their ice-cream suits and their ladies with the architectural millinery rise at the Derby to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" -- a song about the sadness of  Black family in the Kentucky Diaspora after having been sold down the river. 

My parents and grandparents were honest, generous, unassuming people, and they were good progressive Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy Democrats. If they were with us today, they would like what Andy Beshear has done as governor.  (And I raised two Democrats, having done my duty.) My teachers were dedicated people who saw something promising in me and encouraged it. In high school, Lowell and Jean Denton, who operated a local newspaper, the Flemingsburg Gazette, hired me for what proved to be six summers of a practical education in local journalism. These people shaped who I am, or at least the better part of me. 

 The old Kentucky home has been sold, but I keep a canister of dirt from the farm on my desk, which I suppose makes me a landowner. Though it is far, far away, I am still, at seventy-four, part of it. 

The arc of decline

I recently posted that I would sooner endure another bout of Covid than subscribe to The Baltimore Sun, which despises the city in which it publishes, to the gratification of racist white suburbanites. A longtime reader commented, "Sun was in decline long before Smith and Williams." 

That is true. I was there to witness it. The Sun's copy desk was a prime spot for viewing the fate of the paper. We were not in charge; we did not make the big decisions. But we saw what everyone else was doing, and I was present to see it. 

In September 1986 when I came to the copy desk, the paper was still essentially the one the A.S. Abell company had run for generations. Recently acquired by Times Mirror, the paper was essentially still the A.S. Abell staff, with some bright spots but overall a little stodgy. That was about to change.

Times Mirror, run out of Los Angeles, was prosperous, and so were all its newspapers, so it operated with a loose rein. Times Mirror brought in John S. Carroll as editor of The Sun, and he immediately began to enliven the paper. He brought in new talent (some of it from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which got certain local noses out of joint), he fostered enterprise reporting, and he encouraged me to hire the smartest people I could find for the copy desk. The '90s were a glorious decade for the paper. 

But in 2000 the Chicago Tribune acquired the Times Mirror papers, and a generation of decline began. 

It was not entirely the Tribune's fault. Newspapering was undergoing an upheaval and readership and advertising began to drop, slowly, then sharply. Having no vision, Tribune management reacted as other newspapers did, gradually reducing the staff by buyouts and cutting back on content in a doomed effort to maintain the stock price for the shareholders. (Tribune also wasted time and resources in an internecine battle with the Los Angeles Times, a larger, more prosperous, and better newspaper than the Tribune.) 

Even with diminished content and reduced staffing and resources, we continued to struggle to do the kind of journalism that Baltimore expected of The Sun. We won a Pulitzer Prize five years ago for exposing Mayor Catherine Pugh's corruption. But the decline was irreversible. 

In 2021 The Sun was acquired from Tribune Publishing by Alden Global Capital, a notorious hedge fund known for acquiring newspapers and scraping off the cash flow. (That was the point at which I took a buyout after 34 years as a Sun editor.) 

But Alden Global turns out not to have been the worst possible owner. Alden cared nothing about journalism. If you published quality journalism and met your revenue target, Alden was happy. If you published trash and met your revenue target, Alden was happy. 

But a year ago The Sun was acquired by David Smith and Armstrong Williams, whose Sinclair-influenced journalism has led subscribers to flee by the tens of thousands. There is not much left of what once was there. 

Harold Williams's 1987 history of The Baltimore Sun includes a passage in which Baltimoreans of the 1880s referred to The Sun as "a once-great newspaper." It is common for readers to express both affection and derision for their local newspaper; that comes with the territory.

But it is true that The Baltimore Sun is a once-great newspaper. I had the privilege of being there as a witness and a participant in its greatness. Now what has been lost cannot be recovered. 

For all the saints

 At 74, I carry quite a roster of the dead along with me, as must be the case with other septuagenarians. So many are gone: family, classmates, teachers, mentors, colleagues, neighbors, fellow parishioners. 

In the daily walks in which I review my list of gratitudes, I try to include at least some of those whom I no longer see. After all, it is because they saw something in me, something to foster and encourage despite my faults and limitations, that I became who I now am.

Though they are no longer in the world, their persistence in memory means that they are not completely gone, not so long as my memory still holds and honors them. 

That, I think, is where we live best, not in our occupations and accomplishments or other transitory things, but in what we do to uphold one another that leaves us still present in someone's grateful memory. 

What prompted this reflection was coming across an online post of the Lux aeterna, set to the "Nimrod" section of Elgar's Enigma Variations. I invite you to listen to it and think about the people for whose lives you remain most grateful. Whatever you may think about this life or a next life, they remain in the light so long as we remember them. 

Processed prose

 Somehow things that occur are not enough in themselves but must be identified as a process. A little dip into the corpora show how common this has become. It is part of the writing process in which a noun is made more impressive by appending an abstract noun that adds nothing to the meaning.

Some examples:

If you are injured or ill, you go through the recovery process.

If you are building a house, there is the construction process.

If you are applying for a job, you endure the interview process. That would be a component of the hiring process. 

If you are turning ore into metal, you are involved in the smelting process. 

If you are making an album of your singing, you go through the recording process.

If you are proposing legislation, it will go through the review process, and perhaps the public hearing process as well. 

If you are looking to add a child (or pet) to your family, you may pursue the adoption process.

If someone dear to you dies, you experience the progressive stages of the grieving process. 

Should you be engaged in the editing process, let me suggest to you that words like recovery, construction, interview, smelting, recording, review, public hearing, adoption, and grieving may be perfectly adequate to indicate what is going on, and you might then profitably engage in the pruning process. 

The Copy Editor's Code

 Our domain is factual accuracy, spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and house style, making all of them clean and correct. 

We hold that all human beings, ourselves included, are born with an innate propensity to error. 

We are skeptics, approaching each text with the suspicion that something in it is faulty, and that we will find it. 

We stand in the place of the readers, asking the readers' questions and experiencing the readers' puzzlement, seeking to make the text clear and meaningful for them. 

If you don't know, look it up; if you're not sure, look it up; if you're sure, look it up anyway.

We cut the wordy and the infelicitous, healing, like surgeons, with the knife. 

We assist the writer in achieving their purpose.

Sometimes the most we can accomplish is to take the defective and leave it merely mediocre.

We protect the publisher from embarrassment and damage. 

We know to take our hands off the keyboard when something is good.

We leave the work better than when we took it up. 

We can talk among ourselves about writers' frailties and foibles, but not publicly. 

We work anonymously, free from vulgar desire for public recognition. 

Thirteen ways of looking at an editor

 I

Comma jockey, fault-finder, rule-follower, drone

II

"Copy editors are a necessary evil."

III

They make it read as if they had written it.

IV

"Most editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

V

Texas chainsaw editor

VI

"I became an editor for the money and the glamor."

VII

Who let that through?

VIII

"Reading other people's raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."

IX

Take out the dumbest stuff first.

X

An ink-stained wretch's ink-stained wretch

XI

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good."

XII

Write drunk; edit sober.

XIII

"He made it say what I meant better than I did myself."

When you speak, are you wearing brown shoes with a blue suit?

 I have been a working editor for forty-five years, and throughout that time, to gauge from letters to publications and public diatribes, the English language has undergone a calamitous decline. There are no standards, grammar is a smoking ruin, the Young People are barbaric, and Civilization As We Knew It is gone. Just gone. Ask anyone. 

Let me suggest, if you are among those shouting, "The End is near!" at the front door, you have misunderstood fashion. 

You know, and understand, that the music of the 2020s, like it or not, is unlike the music of the 1920s. You have seen how fashions in clothes have shifted over the years, even though you might regret that it has become commonplace for men to wear light brown shoes with dark blue suits. Baltimore used to have a complement of German restaurants, but our tastes these days prefer Italian. Language is no different.

It has ever been so. Here's a passage from Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma: " 'It is not the business of grammar,' wrote the clergyman and educator George Campbell in 1776, 'as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give laws to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.' " Conformity to common use determines grammar.

David Crystal, writing in The Stories of English to urge respect for all the dialects in our Englishes, uses a wardrobe metaphor: "With clothing, a diverse wardrobe enables us to dress to suit the occasion; and so it is with language."

Even the grumbling purists dimly perceive this. Spelling (yes, it's not grammar, but ...) varies. We used to write "to-day" and "to-morrow," and now we don't. We realise/realize that British and U.S. spellings vary, without impairing our ability to comprehend. 

Punctuation, too (also not grammar), changes as it suits us. In the eighteenth century we liked to put a comma between the subject and verb of a sentence: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof. ..." We don't do that any longer. We don't care for it. Oxford comma partisans bleat that its use is essential, anti-Oxfordians bray that it is useless, and readers consume both species without blinking. 

Our very words themselves go in and out of favor. The nineteenth century liked to identify a widow as a "relict," as if she were the residual property of her deceased husband. Try that today. Jonathan Swift's "Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue" deplored the use of the vulgar term "mob," but here in Baltimore we take a perverse pleasure in having been known as "Mobtown." 

In the prefatory note to the 1980 anthology The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks writes that the meaning of a word is not a matter of fact or opinion, but "a human agreement, created within society but incapable of having meaning except to and through individuals."

So English, its spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and even grammar, is what we collectively make it over time, and just as our tastes in music, dress, and food mutate, so does language vary to mean what we are trying to say.  

Get over it

Some merry Andrew at the Associated Press Stylebook chose to stir up the animals, in Mencken's felicitous phrase, on Facebook by posting this earlier today: "We announced one of our most-discussed style changes of all time at the ACES conference about a decade ago: Both 'more than' and 'over' are acceptable in all uses to indicate greater numerical value. Salaries went up more than $20 a week. Salaries went up over $20 a week."

The usual suspects commenced to clamor, so let's be clear about it. The people who insist on this invented distinction, which does not exist in English outside the confines of U.S. journalism, are pegging their authority as experts in English usage on a chimera. 

The distinction was invented by nineteenth-century editors and persisted in the journalism curriculum until the present day. In Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins (1971), Theodore M. Bernstein of The New York Times punctured what he called "a bit of superstitious tinkering," and he had the receipts. He quoted William Cullen Bryant's "Index Expurgatorius" for its disdain for over as more than, with James Gordon Bennet's "Don't List' for The New York Herald, and Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right chiming in. 

The distinction, for civilians who are mystified, is that over may only indicate spatial relationships (higher than), while more than is restricted to greater quantities, because in English a word can mean Only One Thing. And this invented distinction has been drummed into the heads of generations of newspaper reporters and editors who are inherently resistant to correction. 

But the fact is that at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 2014 at which the stylebook editors announced this change, lexicographers from Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary who were present were amazed to learn of a distinction of meaning that had been theretofore invisible to them. 

In fact, any journalists who have access to a dictionary, and consult one, can find that the meanings of over and more than in reference to quantity are interchangeable. American Heritage comments that Bryant provided no rationale for his distinction and that those who followed him did so for reasons that are "dubious at best." Further, "over has been used as a synonym for more than since the 1300s."Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage concurs. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, with British hauteur, says that "there has been a strong tradition in American and some American usage guides of absolute, unconditional, almost maniacal hostility to the use of over with a following numeral to mean 'in excess of,' 'more than.' "

Bryan A. Garner, the dean of informed prescriptivists, says in the fifth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage that "the charge that over is inferior to more than is a baseless crotchet." 

In the interest of full disclosure, I nagged repeatedly the Associated Press Stylebook to drop this entry, and in the fullness of time Paula Froke and her fellow editors were persuaded. 

I am not, of course, dictating to my fellow editors what they should and should not do in the fugitive moments that they are permitted to spend on texts. If they think that their limited time is best spent on maintaining a distinction that is invisible to readers who are not fellow U.S. journalists, who am I to tell them to forbear? 

May I suggest

Three years ago, when The Baltimore Banner was considering taking me on as a freelance copy editor, the editors sent me a series of articles to edit. The articles were in Google Docs, and I made edits as suggestions which the editors could keep or reject. They kept them, and, seeing that they could trust me, they shifted me to the regular editing system. 

Since then, I've corrected lapses in grammar and usage, fixed typos, changed a word to one more precise or appropriate, untangled syntax, tightened wordiness, and redressed factual errors. Of course, when I  identify substantive issues, I address them with the editors or writers. But if there have been complaints about my routine edits, I have not heard any. 

My edits are suggestions. You would be a fool to ignore some of them, but it is your text as the writer, or your text as the publication, and you have the discretion to overrule me. All edits are judgments and thus inherently prescriptive--I tell you should do this. Because judgments can be arbitrary and misguided, the best editorial prescriptivism is tempered with descriptivism. 

My purpose--keep this in mind, please--is to assist you, the writer, in achieving your purpose, not to demonstrate my superiority (though, dammit, if you didn't think that I knew more about some things than you do, why did you hire me?). So when I offer my expertise and experience to suggest how your text might work better, please pay attention. 

All the news that prints to fit, a Grammar Noir episode

 I was back at work, part-time, at the Clarion Bugle, just a few hours a week. Yeah, I quit the paragraph game, but it's bourbon money. I settled into the groove of routine, as fast as a reporter copying and pasting a press release. Then rumors began circulating that the Bugle was getting a new owner. 

Now, rumors in newsrooms remind you of the blockbuster story offered at the afternoon news meeting that turns out to be a brief in print. But this one seemed to have legs. Our new press baron was supposedly Chuck Gump, owner of a chain of funeral homes. (People said he made his fortune taking the pennies off dead men's eyes.) He'd run for mayor, state senator, and governor, never finishing with more than 3% of the votes in a primary. For an undertaker he was a flashy dresser, favoring striped suits and a homburg. 

Hell, I thought, I used to work for Sam Zell; I can endure anything. 

Well, the sale went through and a few days later the news staff was summoned to the big conference room to meet the great man. At the door to the room was a huge basket of lilies that carried the smell of death, and the walls had been decorated with inspirational quotations, several of them bogus, accompanied by odd misspellings (Albert Einstien?). We sat there and looked at each other blankly, like a copy desk wondering whether the city desk is ever going to move any copy. 

Finally Gump strode in, wearing a three-piece suit with stripes as wide as a pica pole and a garish tie, carrying a sheaf of papers with our names, titles, and photos. I figured he wasn't accompanied by an HR flunky, so how bad could it be? 

Then he barked at us from the front of the room: "The Bugle is going to be a different newspaper, and anybody that doesn't like that can get up and leave now." 

The managing editor asked, "Do you mean that there are going to be changes in our editing and ethical standards?"

Gump said, "They will be my standards. No story will run more than 600 words, you'll be paid according to the number of clicks your stories get online, anybody who's dead to me is dead to you, sports and cops, that 's it."

The M.E. spoke up. "Well, our practice has always been--"

"You're fired. Get out."

The group gasped. The executive editor gazed into the distance and said nothing. 

Gump pointed to the obituary writer and said, "You're fired too. If they can pay me to bury their loved ones, they can pay for a death notice." 

Then he pointed to me. "Copy editing takes too much time and costs too much money for too little. Newspaper readers are so dim they couldn't spot a grammatical error if you sent up a flare. Take your green eyeshade and get out." 

I lingered at the bar across the street and watched half the staff file out one by one, each carrying a cardboard box of personal belongings and office supplies. The publisher, too--at least he marched out rather than dismember the paper. 

That was eight months ago. Today I see that the Bugle's remaining assets have been acquired by a private equity firm.

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.