You're a copy editor? Uh ...

  It took many conversations, but my wife, Kathleen Capcara, finally perfected a response. 

"Kathleen, what does your husband do?"

"He's a copy editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer [or] The Baltimore Sun."

"Copy editor? What's that?"

"He's kind of an English teacher for the newsroom."

Thus she summed up the kinds of things that concern us, the kind of people drawn to this work, and the perception of us by the rest of the newsroom and the public.*

In the fifth through eighth grades I was schooled by two formidable teachers, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, in the standard schoolroom grammar and mastered it. In consequence, during my teens and, well, later, I was a proper little prig, correcting other people's speech silently--and sometimes aloud. We know such people. They turn up regularly online, preening themselves on identifying some inconsequential lapse, often wrongly. 

As an undergraduate and graduate student, encountering a wider range of what writers of English can do, I came to appreciate that the strictures of the traditional schoolroom grammar were too narrow, and in consequence became somewhat less priggish. I particularly remember my luck, while rummaging around the basement of the Economy Book Store on South Salina Street in Syracuse, in finding a used copy of Theodore M. Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. It was revelatory in exposing just how much rubbish people have been taught about grammar and usage, and how much they hold on to. The book has had a place on my shelves for fifty years and is even still in print, though not as cheap as what the Economy Book Store charged me. 

Writing this blog has been an education, as I have explored sources and authorities, always seeking to broaden my understanding of the Englishes. On the blog and at conferences of editors I've encountered lexicographers and linguists happy to talk and encourage me. For one of my earliest blog posts I was rapped on the knuckles by the formidable Geoffrey Pullum, with whom I have since had many cordial exchanges. And in these posts I've done my best to steer readers away from rubbish they've been taught and toward as less rigid understanding of what we can and should do in English. 

The best copy editors I have worked with were not martinets blinkered by unthinking application of what they understood The Associated Press Stylebook to require, and in overseeing those I hired and talking with others in conferences and workshops I have seen that broader understanding take root. We are not common scolds; we are careful observers of how sentences can be effectively put together, how they can be revised to become more effective. 

If only publications still believed in copy editing rather than eliminating or dismantling their copy desks. In retirement I turn my hand to some freelance editing for The Baltimore Banner, which actually believes in the value of copy editors. I wish there were more publications like it. 

*When in conversation you are inevitably asked what you do and you say that you are a copy editor, you may get this response: "Well, I guess I'd better watch my language." Responses I've pondered:

"You can't afford me."

'I don't do pro bono."

"Too late."

What did the graduate do?

A headline in The Guardian says that the son of a man who was deported is now "graduating high school." 

We've come a long way. 

Originally, Bryan Garner points out in Garner's Modern English Usage, graduating was something the school did to the student, and the idiomatic usage was that a student was graduated from the school. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idiom changed to focus on the student, who graduated from the school. Now, from the late twentieth century to our time, graduate college in colloquial speech is increasingly turning up in published texts, and Garner expects that the usage will gain ground. 

The Associated Press Stylebook, meanwhile, is standing fast, at least for the moment:

"Graduate is correctly used in the active voice: She graduated from the university.

"It is correct, but unnecessary, to use the passive voice: He was graduated from the university.

"Do not, however, drop from: John Adams graduated from Harvard. Not: John Adams graduated Harvard."

Also standing its ground is Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage: "The particularly American English transitive type he graduated Yale in 1984 is often criticized and is best avoided." Sniff. 

The current Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary allows "I graduated college" as standard English, though it cautions in a usage note that some may consider it incorrect. 

So "was graduated from college," "graduated from college," and "graduated college" are all out there in the wild, and your choice among them will likely depend on the degree of stuffiness with which you are comfortable. As always in English, you pays your money and you takes your chances. 

Beyond our control

 I had occasion to get in touch the with Comptroller of Maryland's office with an inquiry about a refund on our state income tax, and I was reminded of the oddity of that word in English. 

A comptroller is someone who controls, or supervises, accounts and expenditures. It came into English from the French contrerolleur and was originally in English conterroller, naturally morphing into controller. 

But wait. Sometime in the 15th century, people who saw Latin as a long-established and prestige language, and English as an ill-bred newcomer in need of shaping up, took hold of this word. They saw that French had the word compte, "count," that derived from Latin, and they made conterroler look more like Latin by spelling it comptroller, though it continued to be pronounced "controller." 

There has been a fair amount of this jiggery-pokery with English. For example, we pronounce debt as "dett," as the word was spelled in Old French, but that b was inserted to acknowledge the Latin root debitum. 

In the comptroller entry in Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner points out that pronouncing the p in comptroller "has traditionally been viewed as semiliterate," but is inevitably widespread. That's how they say it in Maryland state government and journalism. 

Greek to them

 If you have not been on Twitter lately, and I know that many of you have left it in disgust, you will not have seen that the silly season is starting early. 

A handful of people have been fulminating over Emily Wilson's translations of Homer, particularly her Odyssey. They have not held back, freely using terms like "outrageous" and "evil." And they have provoked a backlash from classicists challenging their knowledge of Greek and their understanding of how translations work. 

Having no Greek myself, I am unable to weigh the merits of their arguments. But my reading of the emotional undertone of the posts suggests why these people have taken out against Emily Wilson. (1) She is a woman. (2) Her translation displays relatively straightforward English rather than the archaizing artificiality of some other translations. (3) Her work has gotten popular notice.

It would be well to remember that Homer has been through quite a lot, particularly over the Iliad. Keats enthused over Chapman's version. E.V. Rieu rendered it into prose. Alexander Pope turned it into rhyming couplets. The Lattimore and Fitzgerald 20th-century versions have their partisans. Dozens and dozens of translators over the past four centuries have Englished Homer, and the Iliad and Odyssey have survived them all. The Wilson translations will or will not stand depending on how deeply they satisfy before they too are superseded. 

In the meantime, bros, just leave Emily Wilson alone.  

My call is not important to you

 My doctor wants an MRI scan of my hip, and his office called and set up an appointment at a nearby location next week. 

In due time I received a text from a radiology company, asking me to register for the appointment. I tap through the categories at some length, entering miscellaneous pieces of information, coming at last to the discovery that the location for which I am scheduled is not listed. 

Sighing, I call the radiology company. "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." And then, helpfully, "You can register for your appointment at our website." 

Ultimately, a human being answers, and we go back and forth until it begins to emerge that maybe the doctor's office sent the order to this radiology company by mistake. I thank the human and move on.  

I then call the place where the doctor's office scheduled the appointment, and a human being answered and said yes, we have your order and the time of your appointment. Just show up. 

This is how it goes in U.S. medicine, a lumbering bureaucracy that offers you two choices: an electronic rigmarole that may or may not be of any use, or a lengthy wait on the phone because they will not hire enough people to handle the traffic. And while it is true that I am seventy-five years old and retired with few obligations, I am not keen to spend what time remains for me listening to inane hold music. 

This, plainly, is nothing more than a bitch session. Feel free to vent in the comments yourself. 

Letting down the side again

 Ever unable to help myself, I responded to an online post in which someone was carping about the use of loan as a verb. You may have been taught that loan is only a noun, lend the verb, and the Associated Press Stylebook, bless its heart, continues to prefer that distinction. But like many simple, clear distinctions, it's not so. 

Even the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler said in 1926 (a century ago, mind you) that lend had supplanted loan in southern England but that the verb loan remained in use elsewhere in Britain and in the United States. Notice, pray, that he did not deny that loan was a verb in English, and he would have been foolish to say so, because it has been an English verb for better than seven centuries. 

The lend/loan thing got propagated by self-appointed usage authorities after Richard Grant White invented the distinction in 1870. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that he based that distinction on etymology from Anglo-Saxon, which he got wrong owing to his inability to tell a verb from a noun in Old English. But it got into all the manuals. 

The current Fowler's, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, points out that in Britain today loan as a verb is in wide use when money and objects are involved. Bryan Garner says that to loan money is fully accepted usage and to loan a thing is very nearly there. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary agrees that loan is a standard verb, stipulating only that it should be limited to literal sense, not metaphorical ones. 

We have people who like to air their crotchets online (they used to write letters to newspapers), and we have editors who waste valuable time on gossamer distinctions of usage. But we have Garner, Merriam-Webster, four editions of Fowler's, MWDEU, even Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, which in 1971 found nothing much to object to with loan. There is information out there. 

Even I [cough] published a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in 2020.* It includes a generous listing of bogus rules on which neither you nor anyone else should be wasting their time. 

Please don't comment that I, a traitor to my craft, am destroying what little remains left of literacy in English. I've heard it all before. 

*Do not publish a book amid a pandemic if you expect attention to be paid to it.  

Upon further consideration ...

 A few days ago an irate reader vented his spleen online over someone who used further to mean at a greater distance. 

For the civilians in the room, this will require a little explanation. 

Further, meaning "at or to a greater distance," has been in English since the Plantagenets. It has a number of additional meanings, such as "to or at a more advanced point" and "to a greater degree or extent." English being a casual and generous sort of language, after a couple of centuries, further gave rise to the related farther: "to a greater distance in space." Or also: "at a greater distance in space or at a more remote place," "to or at a more advanced point or beyond a given limit," "to a greater degree or extent."

So there's overlap, because further and farther can mean and have meant pretty much the same thing, including "to a greater distance." The British, sometimes a little casual with the language they invented, often use the two interchangeably in this sense.. 

But over the years a differentiation has developed, particularly among those devoted to what Bryan Garner calls "more punctilious usage." That is, farther is reserved to indication physical distance, while further retains a figurative sense, i.e., "more of." The pattern of general usage is that many people use further for both physical and figurative senses, while farther tends not to be used in the figurative sense. 

That farther/further distinction about physical distance has been enshrined in the Associated Press Stylebook and is widely observed by people who pay attention to the Associated Press Stylebook. 

I changed a further to a farther in a story yesterday because I have been following that distinction for years. Should I have? 

I hear the muttering in the back row, but give me a moment. 

Had I not made that change yesterday, no reader of the story would have failed to understand that further meant "to a greater distance." Was this the best use of my time? Is it possible that in making this trivial edit I might have overlooked a serious deficiency in the text? (Editors worry about that.) In editing we strive for precision in language, for maintaining crucial distinctions in meaning. And given the volume of prose washing over us, and the limited time and attention we are able to pay to it, as punctilious as we want to me, we have to examine whether the distinctions we have been observing are truly meaningful, worth our time. 

That person who took the trouble to go online to belabor the writer and publication that allowed a further for a farther seems to think that the distinction is a hill to die on. 

I don't see it as a hill. Or a hillock, or a rise, or, for that matter, a speed bump. 

Strike it out. Just strike it out.

 If you make no other gesture this day toward clarity and economy in prose, deleting ongoing will store up treasure for you in Heaven. 

It has been a while--think of the late John Bremner forty-plus years ago--since anyone has denounced ongoing as a faddish and disagreeable substitute for continuing. It has sunk its roots deep into the journalistic vocabulary, where it continues to flower. 

The irksome thing about the word is that it is in almost every instance unnecessary, a mere gesture from the writer that "I am au courant."

Look at the instances where you find it, places where you can be sure that your reader is already aware that things are going on: the public's ongoing concern over rising gasoline prices, the ongoing disputes over legislative redistricting, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.  

Ask yourself, is your reader so preternaturally dim as to be unaware that there is conflict today in the Middle East? And having framed that question for yourself, you know the inevitable answer: strike it out. 

Whose history were you taught?

 Perhaps your introduction to American history through high school was like mine: the discovery by white people from Europe of a vast land to be their own continental manifest destiny (once the current inhabitants were edged out); yes, there was slavery for a while, but it was ended a long time ago by a civil war in which both sides were gallant; nothing much past the First World War; in short, a glorious progression of triumphs with any embarrassing details smudged out, a pious propaganda. 

In four and a half years of retirement I have indulged myself in reading books about American history with a little more gristle, which I can recommend to you. 

Jill Lepore, We the People: Most of what we read about the U.S. Constitution concerns the white men who wrote it and the white men who subsequently amended or ruled on it. Lepore's history of the Constitution focuses on the people--Blacks, Indians, women, more--who were not originally included in the People. She recounts a multitude of attempts, most of them unsuccessful, to amend the national document. And she explores the curious circumstance that successful amendments tend to come in spurts after some social upheaval. 

Nicole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: You need not subscribe to every argument in these essays to realize that the neglect of attention to the role of Black people in their four centuries here badly requires correction. In tandem, Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns recounts the movement of Black people from the South to the North in the decades following the Civil War, with significant impact on both regions. 

Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland: In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan held enormous sway in U.S. politics, particularly in the Middle West and West, where, led by a charlatan named D.C. Stephenson, it controlled state legislatures and public offices in its campaign against Blacks, Jews, Roman Catholics, and immigrants. The scandal that brought down Stephenson, a woman's deathbed testimony of his cruelties, also brought down the Klan. 

Daniel Okrent, The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America: A century ago the country was in a ferment about the flood of immigrants overwhelming our native [white, Protestant] culture. Since then many Italians and Eastern Europeans have achieved white status, at least on an honorary basis, as the Irish did decades before. But we are still up in alarm about how Those People, whose identities shift with the generations, threaten us. 

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus: The ideas that Barry Goldwater espoused in his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 later flowered and prospered in ways he could not have foreseen. He was a true conservative, suspicious of the fundraising and mass marketing techniques that supporters urged on him, but those supporters learned in 1964 what they could make work, and we live with the consequences. 

And for fun, a few more:

Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America: Indispensable for an understanding of how our unlikely revolution against Britain succeeded. 

Joel Richard Paul: Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism: Webster's oratory awoke the nation to the idea that the Constitution was not simply a compact of states, a loosely linked collection of varying regional identities, but an expression of an entire people. 

Erik Larson: Demon of Unrest: An account of the turmoil in the months between Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency and the outbreak of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. 

Joseph J. Ellis, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us: Ellis discusses the issues that trouble us today within the context of how the ideas of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams might inform us. 

Jess McHugh, Americanon: The popular books that shaped American identity. You know, The Old Farmer's Almanac, McGuffey readers, Dale Carnegie ... 

Kevin Kruse and Julian E. Zeliger, Myth America: You'll recall Will Rogers saying something to the effect that "it ain't the thing you don't know that hurts you, it's the thing you know that ain't so." Kruze and Zeliger assembled a team of historians to describe things that we were all taught that are not quite so. 

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: The Temperance people, the Mob, and the millionaires who pressed for Repeal hoping that duties from the sale of liquor would lead to the end of the income tax. 

Feel free to suggest. 

Ups and downs of our national anniversaries

50th: This, in 1826, is the one everyone remembers because Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died coincidentally on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Their simultaneous deaths on the anniversary of nationhood were widely seen as a Providential endorsement of the Republic. 

The president at the time was John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, who had failed to win a majority over Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College in the election of 1824. When the decision was passed to the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, a failed candidate and speaker of the House, threw his support to Adams. Adams, duly elected and sworn in, named Clay secretary of state, infuriating  Jackson and his supporters, and their repeated cry of "corrupt bargain" threw a shadow over Adams's single term. 

100th: Ulysses Grant was nearing the end of his second term as president in 1876. The national anniversary was also a presidential election year, in which the Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote, but a decision on disputed returns was turned over to an electoral commission, which determined that the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, was elected, with the apparent understanding that Republicans would end their support of Reconstruction and return control of the South to racist whites. 

150th: With the demise of the amiable doofus Warren Gamaliel Harding, Calvin Coolidge was president in 1926. President Coolidge spoke at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. The exposition was not a success, due in part to bad weather that year. Sales of the million commemorative half-dollar coins with portraits of George Washington and Coolidge that Congress had authorized were modest, and many were returned and melted down.  

200th: The president during the Bicentennial was Gerald R. Ford, who had become president with the resignation under fire of Richard Nixon. Ford's pardon of the disgraced Nixon was widely criticized and likely became a major factor in his failure to win a term as president in his own right in the fall election. 

250th: Donald J. Trump 

You want to know from leadership?

To the reader: I wrote this for The Sun in 2012, headed "Take me to your leadership." The plaque mentioned in the opening paragraph was discarded when the paper moved out of its Calvert Street offices, and I left in 2021, but the rest of the article remains valid. 

 At one end of a shelf in my office at the paragraph factory a plaque collects dust, through which it can be seen that John E. McIntyre successfully participated in The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers. Twelve years ago, when there was still such a thing as Times Mirror.

Having been selected, I was given a choice of seances in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Huntington Beach, California. Not being entirely dim, I packed for the West Coast.

The Leadership Institute for Managers turned out to be a kind of summer camp for grown-ups. We did a group bonding exercise in which we were all blindfolded put through some square-dance-like rigmarole. We did team-building by figuring out how to cross the “crocodile-infested waters” in a room on pieces of plastic that didn’t quite reach. And we did a Project. We had all been run through the Myers-Briggs mumbo-jumbo, and I would dismiss it, as I have before, as astrology for Mensa, save for this: Every member of our group was a J. We nearly killed each other. And at the end, our Project was not particularly good, but because we had actually managed to complete it without the shedding of blood, Teacher gave us each a gold star.

No doubt if you have ever been a manager in an outfit that had money to throw around, you, too, have learned Leadership by similar means.

Or perhaps you have learned it through reading the vast literature. There’s a book on the leadership secrets of Genghis Khan (father hundreds of children and stack your enemies’ skulls in pyramids?). There are books on the leadership secrets of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, carefully premasticated for those who would find The Prince or The Art of War heavy going.

For my part, I mainly watched what Andy Faith did.

Andy hired me for the copy desk at The Sun in 1986. He was the chief of the copy desk, and I worked alongside him for years. What feeble efforts at leadership I’ve made have been attempts to emulate his example, and I think that his example did me more good than The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers.

First off, you have to know the job, and you work alongside your people. Andy had to attend meetings and perform administrative functions and deal with paperwork, but he was a working editor. He didn’t ask anyone on the desk to do anything that he was unable to do or unwilling to do, and he did it all.

If you have a chance to hire, you hire the smartest and most energetic candidates you can find, you show them how they’re expected to operate, and then you let them work. If they’re smarter than you are, so much the better.

When you’re asked to perform a task, you take it on. Most people start to generate lists of the obstacles and start telling you how difficult the task is going to be and all the reasons it won’t work. Andy always started to think about how he was going to manage it.

You form alliances. Some of them are with those smart and energetic people you hired, who proved their worth and moved on to other positions in the organization. (Andy had moles scattered through the newsroom.) You never make the mistake to think that you can act unilaterally or in isolation from the other desks and departments.

You take responsibility. And you take collective responsibility for your people. If one of your people gets called in on the carpet, you don’t run around to the other side of the desk to join in berating him. You stand alongside, like a lawyer with his client.

When there is pressure from above, you absorb as much of it as you can yourself, so that your people can do their work unmolested.

You cut people some slack when they’re having a hard time, but you expect them to find a way to do the work, and their share of it. You know what each subordinate’s strengths and weaknesses are and how to capitalize on the former while minimizing the latter.

You tell people the truth. Sometimes you can’t tell them all the truth, and sometimes you have to be evasive, but you don’t tell them lies. They merit your respect, and if you don’t offer it, you won’t get it.

You don’t give up, no matter how many times your plans have been thwarted, no matter how many simple-minded, wrong-headed, and dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks instructions come down from someplace higher up.

And you never forget that you are doing this because you love the work, because the work is important, and because it means something to do it right.

These are some of the things I learned by watching Andy Faith all those years. I haven’t had to perform any functions blindfolded in the past dozen years, I don’t expect to have to cross a crocodile-infested river, I try to keep a safe distance from most of the other Js, and I don’t expect to get around to reading about Genghis Khan’s leadership secrets. Andy Faith retired four years ago, but while he was here, I learned what I need to know.

On the porch

 In yesterday's unseasonable warmth I spent part of the afternoon on the porch, reading The Private Patient (P.D. James's final Adam Dalgliesh novel, which I had unaccountably missed), watching the mockingbird that frequents the viburnum in the yard, greeting neighbors walking their dogs. Later, as the air cooled, I watched the dark clouds slide in as the cold front and the storms approached. 

The 1960s Northeast Baltimore brick rancher we moved into in 1988 has a small front porch that can comfortably accommodate four people. I lounged there from time to time over the years, particularly when taking breaks from cutting the grass, but did not treat it as a place of much importance. 

That changed in 2008 when I was laid off by The Sun and spent a year unemployed. There was time to sit there and read and notice things. I noticed that the redbud I had asked the city to plant at the curb the year before looked dead; I spent the summer watering and fertilizing it, bringing it back to life. I noticed that the light of the late afternoon sun turns the leaves silver on the oak trees in a neighbor's yard. I noticed birdsong. 

Later, when I was back at work, Kathleen and I developed a custom of sitting on the porch on my days off and sharing a bottle of prosecco, sometimes with a snack or with dinner, sometimes just a couple of glasses apiece as we sat quietly and watched the sun go down. 

During the pandemic, the porch became the starting point and ending point of our walks down the middle of the street through the neighborhood, usually to Herring Run, the creek at the bottom of the hill, to see a pair of ducks or a heron, or the neighborhood hawk circling elegantly overhead. Or watching the leaves on a gingko turn jade green in the summer and gold in the fall. 

I am seventy-five now, on the porch after more than forty years of editing and twenty-four years of teaching editing to undergraduates, and I feel entitled to it. (Yes, still a little off-and-on editing and the occasional blog post, and the household chores and yard work have not gone away.)

And I am inside with books while the current cold snap endures. For now. In a few weeks the air will warm again as the leaves come out, and Kathleen and I will once again be able to sit together in the afternoon with a glass of prosecco each, murmuring to each other and greeting passing neighbors as the day slowly fades to dark. 

But, as I said, the porch will seat four. If you should want to arrange to drop by, I could offer you a coffee, or a cup of tea, or a Manhattan or martini, so we could while away an afternoon, chatting companionably about the things of the day, feeling the warmth of the sun. 

Yes, it's a quibble, but dammit

 Let me be clear. I do not want to disparage Karen Hao, to whose Empire of AI I have turned for information on the despicable tech bros who appear to be dismantling civilization for their profit. But I do want to question the abilities of the people at Penguin Press to whom she entrusted the editing of her book. 

I settle for the moment on a single sentence. One of the things I discover day after day, not only in casual online texts but in presumably edited work by professional writers, is a failure to make subjects and verbs agree in any sentence that is sustained longer than half a dozen words. Here's that one sentence:

"Bold declarations that it was within reach enough to invest in it presently was viewed largely as pseudoscience and quackery."

Declarations ... were.

Most of the time what I see is a prepositional phrase with a plural object interposed between a singular subject and a verb, as if the writer had a goldfish's span of attention between subject and verb, but this example will do as well. I fix these on a regular basis in editing, but they litter my reading. 

So let me just inquire: IS ANYONE OUT THERE STILL PAYING ATTENTION?

O Day of Grammar, draw nigh

 On a weekday afternoon in a quiet bar, a glass of Smithwick's is one of the benisons of retirement. I was pondering a second pint when a wild-eyed character burst in, ordered a shot of whiskey, threw it back, and pounded on  the bar with his glass for another.

"Rough day"" I asked.

"Rough day? Rough day?" he answered, knocking back another shot. "You know what day it is?"

"It was March fourth this morning."

"March fourth! National Grammar Day! And out there it's just another Wednesday."

"You observe?"

"Observe?" He beckoned the bartender to leave the bottle. "You have any idea how it used to be, how we marked National Grammar Day? The minute gun fired from the Citadel. The Te Deum at the Cathedral. The Semicolon Ball at the Belvedere."

"I remember. I was present at the creation."

"And now. Now. It's not just low-grade prose proliferating all over social media. You remember when The New York Expletive Times dismantled its copy desk? Now all the damn corporate news organizations, along with the private-equity boyos, have not only eliminated copy desks--they've been eliminating writers altogether so they can publish cheap AI slop."

"I know."

"And the universities! Shutting down the humanities courses to turn themselves into trade schools for STEM and business administration. Nobody being taught to think, much less to write." He poured himself another slug.

"Yeah, I know."

"Yeah, you know, I'm sure, sitting here nodding and nursing that beer. Don't you understand how far we have fallen?"

"I think that playing a voice crying in the wilderness can be fun, but you may be exaggerating."

"Exaggerating? Can't you see what is in front of you?"

"What I can see is Grammar Girl still writing and talking about the language and making sense. I can see Ellen Jovin setting up her Grammar Table all over the country and engaging people with their questions. She even has a documentary film about her travels. And it's only four years since Bryan Garner brought out another damned, thick, square book."

"Yeah, but--"

"And even in Baltimore there's that cranky fellow, McIntyre, who ran The Sun's copy desk until they dismembered it, still throwing rocks at pompous and slipshod writing."

"That smartass--"

"Well, we take our allies where we find them. Now pour yourself another while I order a second Smithwick's, and we will raise a glass to the glory of grammar, as it was and ever shall be."

"Oh, all right."

"Here's to: May your subjects and your verbs live always in agreement."

"Damn straight."

One of the best

 Last week I lost a friend of forty years. 

Steve Auerweck died Friday at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, where he was being treated for pneumonia. He had been in seriously deteriorating health for more than a year.

It was in the fall of 1986 that I began work at The Baltimore Sun and met Steve. He too had been a copy editor before The Sun, recognizing his expertise with computers as well as with language, made him systems editor. 

Typically as a former copy editor, he was literate, widely read, and smart. He was also wickedly funny, with the kind of mordant sense of humor common in the craft. One example: He suggested one day that the OBITUARIES logo on the paper's obits page might more truthfully be changed to SUBSCRIBER COUNTDOWN. 

We were both laid off, with sixty others, in The Sun's Great Purge of 2009. Because Steve had shrewdly invested in Apple at the very beginning and lived thriftily, he had no need to seek work. So he stayed home and proceeded to read voraciously, cook Chinese food, and look after his beloved cats. He recently acquired Deutsche Grammophon's 222-CD boxed set of the works of Bach and was working his way through it.

A few years ago, after the death of his wife, he joined our little day-drinking group that meets at 3:00 p.m. (the new five o'clock) several days a week at Zen West in Belvedere Square for beverages (some of them non-alcoholic) and conversation: books, politics, local lore, cooking, and the events of our lives. One member posted that "he was such a gentle man & loved being included in the group."

Steve was given to making lovely, garlicky pickles, and he gave a jar of them to a member of our coterie for Christmas. She plans to bring them to the bar to share, along with our memories of him. 

We are not provided with enough smart, funny, humane people whose company over a friendly glass is welcomed and prized. And today we have one fewer. 

How you say it

 When you are supplying attribution to a direct quote, it's best to follow two simple patterns.

The first: If the attribution is a name only, put said after the name. "Said suffices," John McIntyre said. 

The second: If the name is paired with an explanatory phrase, put said before the name. "Don't go all Tom Swifty on me," said John McIntyre, the author of The Old Editor Says.

The reason for this is that a flat-footed said coming at the end of the phrase looks anticlimactic. 

And, as always, keep mind that in nearly all cases, said does suffice. Resist the temptation to aver, affirm, asseverate, avow, declare, disclose, divulge, drawl, exclaim, expatiate, gasp, impart, intone, maintain, mumble, murmur, mutter, note, observe, opine, profess, quip,* recount, relate, remark, retort, reveal,** snap, sniff, snivel, snort, splutter, state, titter, wheeze, whine, or whisper. 

*I was on a desk that performed a quip search on every story a particular reporter filed, it being her impression that quipped could be substituted for said in all instances, and so she did. 

**I worked with another writer who regularly wrote revealed for the most obvious and mundane statements. 

It happened in February

Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Valentine's Day, Super Bowl, and Presidents Day are not the February days I find most important. 

It was on the 7th of February in 1980 that I interviewed with Jim Schottelkotte, the managing editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer, and Denny Dressman, the assistant managing editor, and was offered a three-week paid tryout on the copy desk, beginning on the 8th. 

The tryout went well, because I knew grammar and usage, because I had a basic knowledge of journalism from working for Lowell and Jean Denton at the Flemingsburg Gazette for six summers in high school and college, and because I found I loved the company of smart, funny, ironic copy editors.

The following month I accepted a full-time position at The Enquirer, beginning my four decades as a professional editor and discovering what I was meant to do. 

It was on another day in February, the 15th in 2022, that I had an online interview with Kimi Yoshino, the editor-in-chief of the just-aborning Baltimore Banner. I was eight months retired after thirty-four years as an editor at The Baltimore Sun, but still subject to the itch to edit and intrigued by the possibility of what The Banner might bring to Baltimore. 

Four years later, The Banner is thriving, and I am carrying on. 

And February this year provides a little more of note. In eight days I will turn seventy-five, and in twenty-one days a surgeon is scheduled to remove my cancerous prostate. 

Short month, big days.

You have your crotchets, and I have mine

 We all have opinions, and many of them are about words or constructions that we dislike intensely.* But I, as a professional editor, must keep my idiosyncratic preferences under restraint. Thus it becomes necessary to rationalize my crotchets to give them some color of authority. 

Take, for example, ongoing. To you it's likely innocuous; to me it is irritating because the context is almost always clear and the word is redundant. "Tempers flare in the ongoing political debate." "Businesses lose customers because of the ongoing construction." You know that debate and construction are in progress. The writer inserts the unnecessary ongoing to tell the reader, "This is really, really current." For the same reason, currently can frequently be deleted without harm.

Or tout. To my ear, the word carries unsavory echoes of racetrack slang, someone brazenly promoting. It can suggest boasting or bragging. I see it regularly when public officials and business interests ballyhoo some project that is going to cost taxpayers a bundle. The same overtone, that someone may be attempting to put something over on you, adheres to the synonyms boost and plug. I usually substitute praise or promote. Tout gained a lingering vogue among journalists because it is short and handy in a headline. 

And while we are considering relics of 1940s tabloid journalism, let's not forget blast, which does not usually involve dynamite, nitroglycerin, or Semtex, but merely means "criticize." OK, sometimes "denounce." The verb nix still occasionally crops up, though Walter Winchell has lain beneath the sod these five decades and more. (Once--I tell you this from direct experience--I encountered a story submitted for publication that said someone had been "fingered in the heist.") But to be fair, it has been a while since I have seen lambaste.) 

I despair that writers will ever repent of the pleonasms mass exodus and safe haven. 

Uh, you do understand how they are redundant, right?

Author as a noun suggests a degree of prestige, as in Wolcott Gibbs's advice to editors, "Always respect an author's style, if he is an author and has a style." As a verb, to say that someone authored a memo or report or some other routine piece of prose carries a smell of pretension, especially since wrote is a nice, compact, straightforward little word. 

Then there are the usually empty words that writers use to puff up their subjects: influential, powerful, incredible (often for overpriced or vulgarly expensive housing), prestigious. Trust me, the Nobel and the Pulitzer do not need you to signal that people think they are important. And using it for the Top Advertising Salesman in the Tri-State Area This Year will not much elevate the award in the reader's mind. 

You may wish to chime in with this roster, explaining your reasons. Feel free. But be advised that if you litter the comments section with unsupported dicta, I will delete freely. 

*I wrote a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in which I point out that some views you may hold are bogus: Yes, you can use that to refer to human beings, irregardless is indeed a word, singular they is swell ... It's a cheap paperback. Get informed. 

What an editor needs from a writer

 As an undergraduate I aimed to become a writer of fiction. Experience proved that I lack imagination. But for nonfiction prose--articles, letters, memos--I can tell you things you need to know. 

Don't be afraid of revising. You may need time to puzzle out what you mean to say, and then how to say it effectively. You may need to take an entirely different approach than your first one. You may decide that material you included is not helpful and needs to be cut. You may need to suss out additional material. Keep at it. 

Decide what you mean to say. You should identify the One Main Thing in your article/letter/memo. It needs to have a single principal idea or element, through there may be any number of subsidiary ideas or elements. 

Say that One Main Thing in a single sentence. When you can do that, you know what your focus is. Use that sentence.

Say it up front. You may want some introductory sentences, but in the name of God keep them short. Your reader wants to know very early on what this is all about--and deserves to know that. Treat your text as if it were classical epic beginning in medias res, right where things are important now. 

Keep the background where it belongs. As a teenager working for my local paper in Kentucky I once attended a county government meeting. As the members of the fiscal court listened, the county judge spat tobacco juice into a coffee can, and I took notes, an elderly Baptist divine launched an extended narrative that involved multiple people over a considerable span of time. Some minutes into it, I gathered that he was appearing to request a fresh load of gravel on a stretch of road. 

Bring the background up after your main idea is well established, and only then if it is really germane. 

Don't screw up the chronology. Your reader needs to be oriented in place and time at every point in your text, particularly if you get fancy with the narrative and switch from the present to the past and back. 

Organize your subtopics. Each of those subsidiary ideas or elements should be addressed in a paragraph or set of paragraphs, in what appears to the reader to be a logical order, with transitions from one to the next. This is also part of the reader's orientation. 

Choose the diction that is appropriate to your subject and your reader(s). There's a lot of room in English, from the most formal to the most colloquial, and you can plot where on that broad continuum you can most effectively say what you want the reader to understand. (Read it out loud to yourself; that should help you identify language that doesn't work.)

Give it a final read for the little stuff. You know, the spelling (particularly of names), the punctuation, the grammar, the usage. That stuff. 

The consequence: Neglect any of these things, and it will fall to me to fix them, and I'm good at what I do. I charge for it. But you would probably prefer to say what you mean yourself, clearly and effectively, rather than have me attempt to guess what you mean. 

I do say

 Coming up in the new year: In February, when I turn seventy-five, I will mark forty-six years since The Cincinnati Enquirer offered me a position on the copy desk and allowed me to discover what my vocation is. 

Most of what I have learned about editing in more than forty years can be found at the You Don't Say blog at The Baltimore Sun, which is either accessible only by subscription or no longer available.* Some of the videos recorded at The Sun, such as the first-day-of-class warning and the recipe for mint juleps, can be found on Facebook or YouTube. 

And here. I started this version in 2009 when The Sun laid me off, along with sixty other news employees (hiring me back a year later). This version of the blog mixes personal subjects with professional ones, but there is still quite a bit of material about editing, such as the importance of skepticism, a code for copy editors, and what is in effect a minicourse in editing. Feel free to explore the site. 

And as I mention "free," let me point out that if you discover anything of value here, I make it available to you at no cost. 

*I am not [cough] on good terms with the current ownership and management.