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.