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.