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.