You Don't Say

For the best of us

2011-12-23T11:16:00.001-05:00

Twenty-nine years

2011-10-17T10:42:00.002-04:00


Today is the twenty-ninth anniversary of my marriage to Kathleen Capcara, whom you see above with me in a 2009 photograph at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson, where she works as director of evangelism and formation. The word of the week over at Baltimoresun.com is vicissitudes, and she has stood by me through many vicissitudes. Or rather, we have stood together. And continue to stand.

Consumer note

2011-07-06T11:27:00.004-04:00

Seriously myopic—I’m talking about vision, not thinking, thank you—since childhood, I’ve been wearing thick eyeglasses for fifty years. I know some of the lines of letters on the eye charts by heart. There have been occasional difficulties with prescription lenses, like the time the ophthalmologist reversed the numbers for the correction of my astigmatism, but nothing previously like my experience this year.

I went to Doctors Visionworks in Towson Town Center this spring for an eye examination and new glasses. I need two sets of bifocals, one with the distance and close focus for ordinary use, one with computer-distance and close focus for editing. (I once tried trifocals, which drove me nuts, continually bobbing my head trying to get the range.)

The optometrist prescribed lenses, which, because of my extreme nearsightedness, take some time to prepare. I called when they were due and was told that the lab had made a mistake and had to do them over. So I waited.

I finally collected the glasses, which seemed to be OK. You may know that it takes a little time to adjust to new lenses, and I began to feel that something was not quite right. I finally determined that the distance focus through the left lens was sharp but the focus through the right lens was slightly blurry.

I went back to Doctors Visionworks, which guarantees that it will make good. I was examined by a different optometrist, who wrote a slightly different prescription, and they sent out for new lenses without any difficulty.

When I called about the new glasses, the person who answered was a little stiff with me. They would be ready on the date on the order (which I had not seen) and not before.

In fact, they were delayed for an additional week because the lab had once more made a mistake and had to do the lenses over again.

Now I have them, and have discovered that one pair was so shoddily fitted that the right lens tends to pop out of the frame. I could take it back—I suppose they would still be willing to make good—but God knows how long their lab would take and what would be wrong after that.

So I’m saving up another few hundred dollars so that I can see an ophthalmologist and go to a competent optician. I don’t intend to have any further commerce with Doctors Visionworks, and now, I think, neither will you.

Unashamed Anglicanism

2011-02-27T13:23:00.004-05:00

Leafing through a folder of old documents, I came across the certificate of my confirmation and realized that I have been an Episcopalian for just over thirty-five years. And you may ask, why?

Fair question. In three and a half decades I have endured so many low-grade, cliché-ridden sermons and winced at so much defective choral and solo singing that if there is anything to the Romish doctrine of Purgatory, my stay there should be seriously shortened.

There is also no particular social advantage anymore to Episcopalianism, which, paradoxically, is a good thing for the church. Now that it is no longer a place to be seen, except in certain pockets, or to make business contacts, it draws a much smaller crowd but people who actually want to be there.

I was drawn to the Episcopal Church for its orderliness and dignity. The liturgical calendar imposes a pattern and rhythm on the passage of time, and the lectionary imposes at least a theoretical limit on the waywardness of preachers, who usually feel compelled to talk about something other than baseball.

I am impressed that Anglicanism indulges intelligence—that you are allowed to believe in evolution and geology and Copernican cosmology and the biblical scholarship of the past two and a half centuries.

I love organ music and Anglican chant, and an Anglican church is pretty much the only place you can hear them regularly. I’m moved by the grace and eloquence of the Book of Common Prayer, which has its own music in prose.

I find the vestments and ceremonials, particularly the use of incense, to add to the weight and dignity of the liturgy. (Oh yes, I know perfectly well that the whole thing can get stale and arid, but I have seen it when it wasn’t.)

I am confronted by my own limitations and failings and forced to see them clearly, while being comforted that I am not entirely defined by them and can hope to rise above them.

And—here is where some of you may part company with me—I like what the Episcopal Church stands for.

In my parish, Memorial Episcopal in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill, the late Barney Farnham came in as rector forty-two years ago and announced that Memorial would be an open congregation. That meant that black people were welcome to attend.

I became an Episcopalian at the time that the denomination discovered that women are fully human and decided to ordain them. It subsequently discovered that they could be bishops too.

I am now an Episcopalian at a time when gay people need not conceal who they are, but can also become priests and bishops. And I have attended blessings, in church, of their unions.

Some of this, perhaps much of this, draws frowns from the schismatics who have broken away from the Episcopal Church, and I have no doubt that it is formally condemned by religious authorities such as the Reverend Doctor R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

I am content for them to pronounce their judgments on what I believe and practice, waiting as I am for the ultimate Judgment and remembering that the Founder never expressed much enthusiasm for religious authorities.

... and it keeps on ticking

2010-11-12T00:41:00.001-05:00

Just a reminder that You Don't Say continues in its second life at baltimoresun.com.

Also on baltimoresun.com, you can see the resumption of my video jokes, posted on alternate Mondays.

And a new feature, In a Word, presents a new vocabulary word every Monday. Here is a gallery of entries.

Remember, remember, second September

2010-09-02T10:11:00.000-04:00

I posted earlier today on the Sun blog explaining why this date is memorable for more than the Japanese surrender in 1945:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2010/09/a_day_for_the_books.html

August update

2010-08-02T14:07:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, the Parkside is no more. Kathleen and I happened to eat there the night before it shut down and enjoyed a dish of J.P.'s creation, spicy artichoke poppers. Sad.

Perhaps less sadly, baltimoresun.com is featuring a "Joke of the Week" every Monday, and I am telling it on alternate weeks. Here is a link to the video for this week's offering, "The Cannibal Reporters":

http://www.baltimoresun.com/videobeta/?watchId=0a97fa71-78e4-4fae-ac33-cd6907f25d1a

And if you have not yet been reading this blog in its return to baltimoresun.com, please come on over:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/

Shameless filial promotion

2010-06-23T10:28:00.000-04:00

It would not be appropriate for me to shill for a business on my blog at Baltimoresun.com, though you are certainly encouraged to go there for the ruminations on language, journalism, and other weighty and not-so-weighty topics (among the latter, the Joke of the Week). But I have to mention that my son, J.P., has joined the staff at the Parkside on Harford Road as a cook, and your custom there would not be misplaced. Go for the bar; stay for the grub.

2010-06-21T11:09:00.001-04:00

As Baltimoresun.com inaugurates a Joke of the Week feature, I throw out the first joke:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/videobeta/?watchId=2e4a08d3-41ce-4a02-99c3-2b893a3708f1

Keep up with ostensibly serious posts of You Don't Say now that it has returned to Baltimoresun.com:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/

Setting up shop at a new location

2010-05-11T09:17:00.000-04:00

What can I say? They wanted me back.

When I agreed after the [cough] Interval [cough] to return to The Baltimore Sun, the editors were keen for the return of You Don’t Say to its original home.

As of today, further posts will be found at a new/old address:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/

Many of you followed me a year ago when I moved from Baltimoresun.com to Blogspot, and I hope that you will be willing to follow me again. I apologize for any inconvenience you encounter in this switch.

You will be able to get access to this blog by RSS feed, and — a bonus — the 704 posts on the old site will once more be accessible.

The 404 posts on this site will be preserved for your continued access. It may be necessary to make a token post here from time to time to keep the site open, but the regular harangues about language, about journalism, about neckwear and strong drink and other minor obsessions will be appearing at Baltimoresun.com.

I invite you to follow me there. I want you back, too.

You can't call the trucks back

2010-05-10T08:07:00.003-04:00

In what he described as a pre-emptive gesture, Steve Gould of The Sun’s sports desk sent out word on Facebook and Twitter earlier today: “Yes, I realize the first line of the headline on the golf story says, ‘Woods pulls out’ and no, the humor is not lost on me.”

Not that Mr. Gould should beat himself up too much for The Sun’s failure to scotch that one— I did a quick Web search and counted two dozen “Woods pulls out” headlines at various news sites before giving up. Apparently it was irresistible.

One indispensable qualification for a professional copy editor is possession of a filthy mind. English is rich in the possibilities of double entendres, with nouns that are also verbs, verbs that are also nouns, and countless idiomatic expressions that can take on salacious overtones.

The Anchorage Times once ran a headline, “Messiah climaxes in chorus of hallelujahs.” Putting “Messiah” within quotation marks would have helped some, but not enough.

The Miami Herald published a headline about a business takeover, “Textron Inc. makes offer to screw company stockholders.” It was a company that makes screws.

The Chicago Daily News advised, “Petroleum jelly keeps idle tools rust-free.” Noted.

You may also recall the famed Evening Sun headline on home canning and preserving, “You can put pickles up yourself.”

And not just in headline type, either: “The impact of the scandal has stretched from Aberdeen’s privates to its top officer.”

Or this lead sentence about a waterman: “Aboard the Becky D, Ren Bowman grins with delight as his rod throbs with the energy of a large rockfish.” One thing you can take to the bank, I tell my students every semester, is that you never want to use rod and throb in the same sentence.

I know, when I sit at the desk among the editors and hear the first muffled snort, or outright cackle of glee, that a dirty mind has registered another ripe one. And I am grateful for the sensibility that sniffs out smut in unlikely places.

Editing is not for the pure in heart.

Just call it a tussle

2010-05-08T01:43:00.001-04:00

Now that I am hip-deep in newspaper journalism again, with the level rising, I am reminded of the journalistic fondness for altercation, which turned up four or five times in a short article a little while ago.
The word, Bryan Garner reminds us, used to mean a loud argument that does not quite rise to the pitch of physical violence. Think of the noise in the saloon before the first chair is broken over someone’s head. But American English has extended to include all manner of scuffling and outright fighting, particularly, Mr. Garner notes, in police jargon.

Don’t bother with the barn door; that horse has been gone a long time. Bryan Garner thinks that there is a possibility of limiting altercation to “light roughhousing,” short of the point at which somebody gets killed, but I am not optimistic.

There may, however, be a faint possibility of breaking reporters of the habit. If you can persuade them that altercation sounds pompous, or even prissy, you might just be able to lead them gently to other possibilities, no matter what the cop’s report said.

Two people got into an argument, which heated into a dispute, which grew into a quarrel, which swelled into a fight. And maybe not just a fight, but a scuffle, a set-to, a fracas, a scrap. Who know? Maybe developing into a brawl, a free-for-all, a melee. The language is not short of resources to describe disagreements. Take it out and give it a little exercise.

Turn your head forward

2010-05-07T09:29:00.002-04:00

“The word of the day is jeremiad*,” writes Kevin Earl Dayhoff, a resident of Westminster, Maryland, and a fellow Tribunista who writes for Patuxent Publishing newspapers.

His brief statement on Facebook doesn’t indicate why that is his word of the day, but in looking at it I realized that it has been my word of the day for the past year.

With reason. It has been hard to see so many colleagues lose their jobs, to watch the decline in quality in so many publications, to be on the losing side in the War on Editing. But justifiable as jeremiads have been, they must have grown tedious to you, and they no longer serve the best purpose for me.

Today is my fourth day back at work at The Sun — still grappling with NewsGate, the creation of fiendish Danes — and it is time to determine what possibilities remain open. That is: What can I do myself to uphold and even elevate standards of accuracy and clarity in The Sun’s electronic and print publications? How can I uphold and assist my colleagues as they strive to improve accuracy and clarity? We are not editing with the forces we want, but with the forces we have. How can we deploy them more effectively?

We must cope with the realities. Editors throughout print and electronic media are editing less, and with fewer people. Editing operations are being consolidated at central locations or outsourced. More editing is being done by freelancers than by permanent employees. So the choice for an editor is to look for some other line of work or to discover how to function better within these circumstances.

I would like to think that over time, if we are thoughtful and energetic, we will discover how to edit more efficiently — to zero in on the most critical elements in texts rather than be distracted by minutiae, to master available technologies instead of being steamrollered by them. I would also like to think that over time those of us who still edit will demonstrate our worth to the people who decide where to deploy resources. It is not enough to do good work; it is essential to show that we do good work and that it has value.

I have been given a second chance. I intend to make the most of it.

*Like boycott, an eponym, deriving from the name of the prophet Jeremiah, whose bitter laments went largely unheeded.

That thing I can't say about baseball

2010-05-06T10:05:00.000-04:00

It has come to this: I am reading the sports section again.

A year ago, after my [cough] involuntary separation from The Sun, I expressed relief at the freedom from any obligation to read about sports. I never played them, never liked them, know virtually nothing about them.* Having me actually edit sports copy would have been analogous to handing a nail gun to a toddler.

But now I am back, with a professional and ethical obligation to know what is being published, and I will try once again to keep up.

If you have a taste for mildly amusing irony, consider that the same publishing executives who dismiss traditional copy desk procedures as vestiges of an outmoded nineteenth-century industrial process also treat their remaining copy editors as if they were interchangeable cogs.

But it is not so.

Accuracy and clarity in editing depend on the expertise of the editor. A copy editor deeply versed in the obscurities of baseball and football may not be the right person to edit copy about science and medicine. The copy editor who is a sharp-eyed observer of politics may be at sea in editing articles about the arts.

Though copy editors at newspapers and magazines are by necessity generalists, even so they tend to specialize along the bent of their personal tastes and backgrounds. It is to the reader’s benefit for an article to be edited by someone familiar with the subject matter.

You will perhaps pardon me for feeling impelled to say something that ought to be obvious to anyone.

It is not, however, obvious to the people who have cut staffs back to catch-as-catch-can “universal” desks, or consolidated the editing of your local stories to editors in another state, or abandoned copy editing altogether. This leaves writers working without a net, and unless you relish witnessing their spills, you are less and less likely to be enthralled with the consequences.

These desperate expedients have been forced on the industry by unfavorable economic conditions—not every executive has some principled but uninformed opposition to editing. But that does not mean that such expedients should be made permanent. You might have to boil your shoes for soup during a famine, but you won’t want to keep the recipe when times get better.

Luckily for me, I am still able to lean on the exceptionally able Andy Knobel and Steve Gould and the other sports editors at The Sun. They know their onions, as the Brits say of expertise, and I know as well as they do the importance of accurate and timely reporting on sports for a multitude of Sun readers. The point in employing and retaining a corps of experienced editors like them is that we collectively compensate for one another’s weak spots, to our benefit — and yours.

*As explained in the post “That thing I say about baseball.”

More stuff

2010-05-05T10:39:00.000-04:00

Will “lifting luggage” become a catchphrase to match “hiking the Appalachian Trail”?

Go to Language Log for the linguistics; stay for the snickering over hypocrisy.

Roger Ebert tweets:

“Reason.com discusses my Newsweek attack on 3D. Some comments debate my status as an old fart. I'm an old fart who's right”

I feel a kinship.

We told you you needed editors

At nbclosangeles.com, a report that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s name has been misspelled in her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as “Julia Luis Dreyfus.”

You may also recall that the director of Chile’s mint was recently fired, in part because the mint issued 50-peso coins spelling the nation’s name as “Chiie.”

A message from Patrick Lackey on a Washington Post story “about the Virginia attorney general seeking documents by a former U of Va. prof named Michael Mann, who did research on global warming. The story quotes the attorney general: ‘There is no scientific consensus on global warming or Mann's influence on global warning.’ I think the attorney general meant ‘man's influence on global warning,’ not Mann's. So how is a newspaper like an off-short oil rig? What can go wrong will.”

Just how big a geek are you?

We learn from Copyediting that Mary Beth Protomastro has set up a website that will allow you to search more than forty online stylebooks at once. This should help you to learn how to live with inconsistency.

Our impoverished profanity

When Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan repeatedly used a word rendered in newspapers as “sh—y” while questioning executives of Goldman Sachs, a thrill went through journalistic circles because he had used a Bad Word in public. That was followed by much brow-furrowing over how to report the expression, given the delicate sensibilities of the American public. The crossword-puzzle solution, a combination of letters and hyphens to get thisclose to the word without actually rendering it, was the usual resort.

I will, of course, in my new capacity as a tinpot authority in The Sun’s newsroom, enforce the puerilities demanded by newspaper style, but as you reflect on naughty expressions, I invite you to consider a short passage from H.L. Mencken’s The American Language (shield your eyes, sensitive readers):

“Of the non-profane pejoratives in common American use, son of a bitch is the hardest-worked, and by far. ... But son of a bitch seems as pale and ineffectual to a Slav or Latin as fudge does to us. The dumbest policeman in Palermo thinks up a dozen better ones between breakfast and the noon whistle. ... In Standard Italian there are no less than forty congeners of son of a bitch, and each and every one of them is more opprobrious, more brilliant, more effective. In the Neapolitan dialect there are thousands.”

Let the nagging resume

2010-05-05T06:54:00.003-04:00

It was all quips and cranks and wanton wiles, nods and becks and wreathed smiles when I returned to The Baltimore Sun’s newsroom yesterday.

We’ll see how long that honeymoon lasts. For example, this sentence from yesterday’s Sun:

The force of the crash ejected Dankos, 17, from the bed of the truck that struck a set of stone pillars and overturned.

If I were a bookmaker, I would give you highly favorable odds that anyone you ever heard say that someone was ejected, rather than thrown or flung, from a car or truck was either in law enforcement or journalism. Ejected is pure cop jargon, so common in police reports that it infects reporters’ writing.

A subtler point is that dependent clause. A that clause most commonly singles out one person, object, situation from a number of possibilities. It is called variously a restrictive or limiting or essential clause. Which clauses can also be restrictive,* but when they merely add additional or parenthetical information, they are set off with commas.

There was one truck; we don’t need to distinguish it from the other trucks on the road that did not strike the stone pillars. The dependant clause merely adds information about that particular truck. In more conversational English, the sentence would have run thus:

The force of the crash threw Dankos, 17, from the bed of the truck, which struck a set of stone pillars and overturned.

Sticking in ages as appositives is another journalistic tic, but there are limits even to my carping.

*Yes, they can. The Sainted Fowler suggested using that for restrictive clauses and which for non-restrictive, and many usage books have followed his lead. But that has never been any more than advice. Which clauses can be restrictive or non-restrictive, but that clauses are always properly restrictive.

Redux

2010-05-04T17:09:00.000-04:00

The fedora is on the coat rack, and the red Razor scooter is propped against the desk, sure indications that I am back in my old office at The Baltimore Sun.

This morning I collected a stack of final examinations and editing projects from my students at Loyola, who will be expecting their grades within the next two days, and this afternoon I attempted to plumb the mysteries of NewsGate, the new editing and production system. It may be a day or two before I regain my footing with the blog.

But make no mistake. Not only am I back on Calvert Street, but I will also be reliably back at You Don’t Say.

Thank you for your many kind remarks since this restoration was announced.

Writing about suicide

2010-05-03T07:55:00.001-04:00

More than four dozen people have leapt to their deaths since 1964 from the Cold Spring Canyon Bridge in the mountains outside Santa Barbara, California. Mental health advocates and law enforcement officials want to install a nine-and-a-half-foot safety rail to make suicide attempts more difficult. But nothing in America is simple, and preservationists and others oppose the barrier.

Noozhawk, Santa Barbara’s enterprising electronic journalism site, opens a four-day series on the issue today. William Macfadyen, Noozhawk’s publisher and a colleague from the American Copy Editors Society, has asked me to comment on the journalistic issues and standards involved in reporting on suicides and suicide attempts.

I am not an expert on the matter, but I am willing to write what I know and invite informed parties to comment.

(1) Suicide is a private matter — except

Ordinarily, a news publication treats suicides and suicide attempts as private matters, mental and emotional disorders being as inherently private as any other illness or disorder. Not our business.

But in news obituaries, as distinguished from paid obituaries in which the families include only the information they choose to disclose, the publication gives a cause of death. That is part of the news, even if the families and friends are reluctant.

When I started at The Flemingsburg Gazette forty-two years ago, no one died of cancer. Obituaries said that people died “after a long illness,” because having cancer was a stigma, a source of fear. Later, in the 1980s, deaths from AIDS-related illnesses carried a similar stigma. And mental and emotional disorders continue to be things people prefer not to speak about. Journalism, by reporting with common sense and restraint about stigmatized things, airs them for public discussion and understanding.

(2) Suicide is not to be sensationalized

When a person commits suicide publicly, it can no longer be considered a private matter. But common sense and restraint are still necessary.

It is commonly understood now, for example, that a suicide by a teenager can touch off a cluster of similar attempts among other adolescents undergoing emotional upheavals. In these cases in particular, it is important for articles to be factual and dispassionate to avoid stimulating imitations.

Mr. Macfadyen tells me that some media outlets writing about the Cold Spring Canyon Bridge have used headlines or labels including “Bridge of Despair” and “Leap of Faith.” You can publish just about anything in America, but this is cheap and distasteful. Anything that serves to romanticize or dramatize suicide could have the effect of encouraging the emotionally vulnerable to see it as a glamorous act.

(3) A personal note

My son, J.P., fell into a profound depression in college and attempted suicide. It scared the hell out of my wife and me, and we did our best to get him help. He withdrew from college and came home. We found an incomparable therapist in Dr. Roger Harris (previous therapists not having connected effectively with J.P.), who, combining drug therapy and talk therapy, brought J.P. through.

J.P. returned to St. John’s College and graduated a year ago. He has also graduated from therapy and has been off antidepressants for several months. He is alive, and he has a life ahead of him.

I asked him this morning whether he would object to my writing about him in this post, and he encouraged me to do so. Depression is terribly isolating, he said, and the stigma about mental illness reinforces the isolation. The more people can talk openly and factually about it, he said, the better off everyone will be.

(4) Over to you

I encourage you to read the Noozhawk series, which raises issues with an impact well beyond Santa Barbara, and I invite you to comment here on suicide and journalistic standards and practices.

Slice, dice

2010-05-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

If you had an English class that actually tried to teach grammar and usage, and I’m probably talking to the over-forties out there, you probably heard many solemn warnings about — the horror, the horror — the comma-splice run-on sentence.*

But though I was trained in the Old Religion, there were always aspects that made me uneasy.

I saw that British writers turned out comma-splice sentences by the yard, with no embarrassment. They no longer own the language — 1776, we speak Amurrican, and all that — but still.

I saw that there is a figure of speech in classical rhetoric, asyndeton, that omits conjunctions between related clauses and thereby implicitly endorses comma splices: I came, I saw, I conquered.

I saw that in American fiction comma-splice sentences represent the loosely connected clauses of colloquial speech in a way that more formal punctuation would make, well, more formal.

And now I have seen, on Stan Carey’s Sentence first blog, a nuanced and sensible account of acceptable uses of the comma splice: “Oh, the Splices You’ll See!”

Commenting on the hard-line prohibition on comma splices that can be found in many texts on grammar and usage, he says:

This kind of advice can be helpful to learners, or writers who want a quick yes–no answer. But it also tends to be simplistic and misleading, failing to reflect the subtlety and complexity with which skilled writers consciously use comma splices. Moreover, when authorities dismiss certain techniques out of hand without mentioning the breadth of their usage in various stylistic and historical contexts, they can perpetuate fear of making mistakes and ignorance of how language works.

Now before anyone can start shouting that the linguists and lexicographers, those insidious descriptivists, have eaten my brain, let me point out that Mr. Carey quotes approvingly one of my fellow moderate prescriptivists:

Bryan Garner, in A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, summarises as follows: “Most usage authorities accept comma splices when (1) the clauses are short and closely related, (2) there is no danger of a miscue, and (3) the context is informal.”

Of the uses of the comma splice, Mr. Carey says:

[C]omma splices are often fine, but they create a noticeably casual effect that is widely considered ill-suited to contexts such as essays, reports, and business writing. They are seldom seen in news reporting except for rare appearances in dialogue, where they can serve to convey an informal speaking tone ... [o]r removed altogether, leaving run-on sentences that lend a breathless, stream-of-consciousness effect. ...

Nuance in usage in hard to teach, especially when students come so ill-prepared in formal grammar. I will continue to caution my students about the dangers of a “breathless, stream-of-consciousness effect” in their writing, and about the appearance of sloppiness. But in this matter, as in so many others, I must continue to edge away from flat prohibitions.

*My students at Loyola have no such fears. Though they, like most Americans, shrink from the semicolon as a horse shies from a snake, they pull out the comma-grinder and sprinkle the contents generously over all their texts.

Derby Day

2010-05-01T06:35:00.001-04:00

If I had a horse running today in the Kentucky Derby, I’d name it Hapax Legomenon and spend the race chuckling at the announcer’s pronunciations.

But I can’t commemorate the Derby appropriately because I’ll be at Memorial Episcopal Church gussying myself up as Franklin Roosevelt for tonight’s performance of Annie.

Since you’re on your own for the Derby, some advice:

Make yourself a mint julep. A julep, I must caution you, is not some genteel lady’s drink or one of those candied concoctions that the unsophisticated young mistake for cocktails these days. A julep is a drink for serious topers.

Step one: Go outside and cut a handful of mint leaves.

Step two: In a silver cup or a squat glass with a good solid bottom, mix a little sugar — a teaspoon should be plenty — with just enough water to dissolve it.

Step three: Muddle the mint, crushing it in the sugared water. A miniature Louisville Slugger bat is very good for this. I had one from the ACES conference in Lousiville* in 2002, but it has gone astray. You may need to improvise with some other implement.

Step four: Fill the glass with cracked ice. Do not use crushed ice, which will melt too fast, or ice cubes, which will melt too slowly. Cracked ice.

Step five: Cover the ice with good bourbon. Old Forester will do; Maker’s Mark is better. If you’re flush, Woodford Reserve or one of the small batch bourbons will do nicely. On no account should you use any Tennessee whiskey. Garnish with a mint leaf or two.

Step six: Sip.

Step seven: Shut your mouth and stand respectfully while the band plays “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Step eight: Mix another. From this point it’s just a bunch of horses running around.

*That’s LOO-uh-vul.

Q and A

2010-04-30T08:28:00.000-04:00

Amid the cascade of congratulations about my return to The Baltimore Sun next week as Night Content Production Manager, there have been a number of questions, and I think it would be useful to clear those, as well as some unrelated ones that have cropped up.

Q. Does that mean that the Sun will, as of May 4th, become as interesting and mind-tickling as your blog?

A. You exaggerate my transformative powers.

A colleague at the paper wrote Tuesday to say that the newsroom was full of smiles and that people were saying my appointment was the best news they had heard in a long time.

I said that they will be sick of me again soon enough, and she answered, “If you’re doing your job, they will.”

Q. Does this mean I have to figger out a way to rejiggle the who-shah-callit on my-watchama-callit to get this blog, again?

A. To answer the most frequent question of the week:

This blog will continue.

I’ve been invited to bring it back to Baltimoresun.com, and the changeover will occur as soon as the appropriate arrangements can be made, probably late next week. You’ll be given information about locating it.

Q. Have you thought much about how this blog may change now that you are heading back into the newsroom?

A. I suspect that the pace may not match the 393 posts since May 1 of last year, but I will be writing regularly.

And, AP style be damned, I’m keeping the Oxford comma.

Q. Can you tell me where the title "content manager" comes from?

A. The title editor appears to be falling out of fashion, and is probably unnecessary, what with nearly all the editors being sacked.

I suspect that as reporters and writers have become responsible for doing more than reporting and writing — taking photos, shooting video, etc. — there is a certain logic in describing them as providing content for publication in various forms, and thus making those who oversee the work content managers.

I don’t object to the title, so long as (a) I get to do useful work and (b) someone pays me for it.

Q. Do you have any misgivings about returning, given the ugly manner in which you and so many of your colleagues were shoved out the door a year ago?

A. Anyone involved with a newspaper, or any publishing concern, lives in apprehension. The Philadelphia Inquirer was sold at auction this week, and the colleagues I know and respect there are waiting to learn what is in store with them. I fear that a number of them will be turned out.

The predictions of the death of newspapers may come true — Sumner Redstone was quoted this week as saying that newspapers will be gone in two years, to which a wag replied that newspapers will outlast Sumner Redstone — but they, like any other business, have to live within their revenue. The prospects are shaky at best.

I accepted the offer from The Sun in full knowledge of the uncertainty of the business, saying to Kathleen, “I’ll ride this horse until they shoot it out from under me.”

As to the “ugly manner,” I responded to an inquiry from Jodi Schneider, formerly of Congressional Quarterly, who offers advice to unemployed writers and editors (content producers and managers, sorry) in her blog DC Works. She has published my reflections in today’s post (beginning about halfway down).

Q. How does this fit into your masterful performance as FDR?

A. Too kind. The Memorial Players’ production of Annie was met with thunderous applause last week, and I will be back onstage tonight for the first of the three final performances. You still have a chance to see it: Memorial Episcopal Church, corner of Bolton Street and Lafayette Avenue in Bolton Hill. Tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30, Sunday afternoon at 3:00.

Q. What do you advise about “beg the question”?

A. As it happens, Professor Mark Liberman addressed this very question on Language Log, explaining how the shifting understanding of Greek and Latin terms led to the current confusion. You will want to look at his whole explication, but here is a short version.

To beg the question was originally a term in logic identifying circular reasoning in which the original conclusion is assumed. “God is all-powerful because he is God” is such a circular argument; it assumes the very thing it seeks to prove. But the expression has come to mean “to raise or prompt the question” in common discourse.

Beg the question, Professor Liberman concludes (and I agree), is best avoided altogether. The people who know something about logic — not many in this broad republic of narrow education — will look down their noses at you if you use it in the colloquial sense, and nearly all others will develop unflattering furrows in their brows if you use it in the technical sense.

New frontiers in peevology

2010-04-29T10:22:00.001-04:00

The New York Times reported yesterday on the emergence of a vigilante movement on Twitter:

A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.

If you thought that I, Cranky Old Guy, Once and Future Editor, would endorse this phenomenon, you were mistaken. One of the charms of Twitter, to the extent that it does charm, is the freewheeling informality and colloquial inventiveness. Leave it alone.

More than that, however, I worry about the people who are making these needless corrections, no doubt taking valuable time away from marking up restaurant menus and supermarket signage, or correcting people’s grammar and pronunciation in conversation. (How’s that going for you, anyhow? Are you starting to get invitations to the parties at the Popular Kids’ houses?)

There ought to be higher aspirations than becoming a common scold.

And still more, there is the recurring tendency among peevers to denounce things that are either not wrong or of minuscule significance. Professor Mark Liberman observes at Language Log that “complaints about spelling, grammar, and capitalization are merged ... with a wide range of other individual, cultural, and political criticisms,” which he finds consonant with his post in 2007 about the degree to which published complaints about grammar and usage demonstrate a combination of “social annoyance” and “public griping.” He suggests that someone could get scholarly cred* by demonstrating how frequently these corrections are themselves in error.

If you must whinge, why not direct your attention to publications that are still supposedly edited, such as The Washington Post, which published this passage forwarded by one of my many spies:

His switch comes as former state House Speaker Marco Rubio (R) — once considered the longest of shots to defeat the popular governor — has rode [emphasis added] a wave of adoration from conservatives nationally to not only catch but pass Crist in polling.

*This nonce word annoy you? Hard cheddar.

Leave English out of it

2010-04-28T09:56:00.000-04:00

Tim James, a candidate for governor in Alabama, wants all state forms to be available in English only. He says in a campaign ad: “This is Alabama. We speak English.* If you want to live here, learn it.”

I suppose that the pull of the yahoo nativist vote is strong, as it has been in this country from the time of the aptly named Know Nothings to the present. A century ago, for example, Baltimore had a number of public schools that conducted classes in German, but the practice was abandoned in apprehension that this would give aid and comfort to the Kaiser.

And every time this tide rises, the Make-English-Our-Official-Language crowd also bestirs itself.** No doubt some think that it would be a particularly good idea in Arizona, the May I See Your Papers Please State.

It may not be possible to head off this nonsense, but there are some calm statements that you can repeat to yourself amid the noise.

English is a world language, more widespread than Latin ever was. It is not in danger and does not require protection.

English is not in decline, no matter how much young people’s slang irritates you or how much you despise impact used as a verb. (English has been nouning verbs and verbing nouns since Chaucer was in grammar school and does not appear likely to abandon the practice.)

There is no one “official” or standard English, there is no body or authority to enforce standards of English usage, and no English-speaking country has ever wanted one.

English is as purely democratic as anything you will ever see. You can speak and write as you choose, and so can everyone else.

Loosen up. Stop fretting.

*Well, yeah, after a fashion.

**In 2006, when Taneytown, Maryland, a rural municipality of about 5,000 people, first proposed to make English its official language, I offered my services:

I am prepared to move to Taneytown to serve as municipal English magistrate, and I am drafting provisions to put teeth into the ordinance.

Using it’s for its.

First offense: a godly admonition.

Second offense: a stern warning.

Third offense: a tattoo of the letter I on the forehead, for Illiterate.

Sounding the t in often.

Fine of $5.00 per occurrence.

Pronouncing nuclear as nucular.

Fine of $10 per occurrence.

Pronouncing mischievous as mischeevious

Shunning.

Failure to make a subject and verb agree, as in the sentence on Taneytown’s Web site saying that “the City and surrounding area is rich in historic landmarks.”

One hour at noon in the stocks in front of the town hall.

Allowing annoying typos into print, as in the mayor’s State of the City report on the Web site: “He has come to use with some new ideas and some of those have already been put into action” (emphasis added). This is a serious offense because of the presumption that no copy editor has been employed to vet the text.

Dismissal of appointed officials, impeachment of elected officials.

Saying between you and I.

Forfeiture of driver’s license for 30 days.

Using whom when the pronoun is the subject of a subordinate clause.

Spend the night in the box.

Saying or writing the obnoxious pleonasm safe haven.

One week at a re-education camp shoveling pig manure.

Happy days are here again

2010-04-27T10:31:00.002-04:00

Having been let go at The Baltimore Sun last April, as I have repeatedly, and no doubt tiresomely, reminded you, I spent eleven months looking for another job.

It would be indelicate to identify the potential employers who passed up the opportunity to engage my services, but today I am pleased to name the one that has ended the long search.

I have accepted the offer of a position with –

wait for it –

The Baltimore Sun.

A stunned newsroom learns today that, by invitation of the departed Monty Cook, I will be back on May 4 as Night Content Production Manager, overseeing newsroom operations in the evening: the front page, coordination between the newsroom and production, print and Web, and generally holding the bag when anything goes awry after sunset. The sabbatical is over.

It remains only to say that my delight in returning to work alongside my once and future colleagues is unbounded and that my gratitude for your expressions of support this past year is profound.

Attention must be paid?

2010-04-26T10:40:00.002-04:00

Perhaps you, like me, have been reading all the head-wagging in editorial and op-ed circles about the turrible, turrible polarization afflicting our great republic. And perhaps you, like me, have grown weary of all this somber frowning. I have a remedy: Stop paying attention.

Our fair republic has always been polarized. The Founders, bless their hearts, hoped that educated white gentlemen of property could sit down and run things without the horror of factionalism, which their reading of history taught them had ruined the Roman Republic. They should have known better.

The Jefferson-Hamilton split developed early in George Washington’s first term and contributed to the viciously contested election of 1800. The slavery issue — and the disproportionate representation in Congress that the three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the South — fueled the increasingly intemperate debate in the first half of the nineteenth century that ended in civil war. The following century saw numerous divisive issues between rural/agricultural and urban/industrial interests, each side demonizing the other. Do I need to remind you of the cultural divisions from the Sixties that appear to continue troubling the nation until my generation mercifully passes from the scene? Loud disagreement is the national norm.

The mode that this disagreement takes is hyperbole — the more extreme the exaggeration, the better. John Adams was a monarchist at heart, Thomas Jefferson an atheist who would lead a Jacobin massacre of the well-off. The pattern ever since has been one of what H.L. Mencken delighted in calling “stirring up the animals.”

I saw a mention on Twitter last week about a Rush Limbaugh essay holding that people who support President Obama don’t love the country the way that the tea partiers do, or something to that effect. I was prepared to check out the essay and sit down at the keyboard to point out that I have voted in every election but one (a minor primary) for forty years, that I pay my taxes uncomplainingly, that my wife and I have raised two children to be educated, responsible, tax-paying, voting adults, that I ...

I stopped in mid-tirade, as it occurred to me that I do not have to justify my patriotism to some gasbag.

Mr. Limbaugh, along with Messrs. Beck and Olbermann and Ms. Coulter, among many others, depend on noisy exaggeration to gain and sustain an audience. It’s difficult to tell how much they actually mean and how much is mere shouting for effect, and probably not worth your time to sort it all out. I’m opting out, and so can you.

I don’t mean that you should avoid writers you disagree with. It’s a good thing to read reasonable arguments from the opposite side, because, you know, you could be wrong. I enjoy Garrison Keillor’s column most of the time, but I have come to find Kathleen Parker’s to be thoughtful and well-informed. And there is always the possibility that you may find the clownish antics of the gasbags entertaining.

But if their noise merely irritates you without informing you, turn the page, change the channel, click on a different site. You aren’t obligated to waste your time and give these people an audience.

Get a grip

2010-04-25T08:36:00.001-04:00

I was amused, after the Congress enacted the president’s legislation to reform health care, by the overreaction, the screaming that our liberties have been taken from us, that the Constitution is a dead letter — all over enactment of what looks suspiciously like a moderate Republican measure.

Even more comical has been overreaction to the past couple of posts at this site, “For whom, the bell tolls” and “Tagged as a descriptivist.” If you missed the latest, here it is, from “EK”:

I care not one jot if people write or speak poorly. I sleep soundly at night knowing there ARE rules to follow and y'all can dismiss them at your blue- penciled peril. Contrary to the cant of the "moderate prescriptivists" (really? Is that like using 67% birth control?), the spoken argot does NOT determine the standards for correct written English. If that were the case, this world would sound and read like A Clockwork Orange. The descriptivist apoplectics and apologists out there want it both ways. It's like saying: "Well, this sign doesn't really mean 'Stop'--after all, there aren't any cars in the intersection!..." And those double yellow lines in the road? That's just a guideline--no need to really pay atten--SMASH!

The conventions of written English are mutable. We used to put commas between the subject and verb in the eighteenth century, but no longer; the nineteenth century liked to combine the semicolon with the dash, and we now tend to shy away from the semicolon altogether. These conventions are not somehow equivalent to statute, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But I, it appears, some witling tool of the descriptivist cabal, am part of the reason that the centre cannot hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, and I am not going to take away their whoms until I pry them from their cold, dead hands.

Take a deep cleansing breath, people, and stop passing around those copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Descriptivism.

There is no English Academy. There is no authority to establish and enforce English grammar and usage, and no proposal to set up such an authority has ever, in the entire history of the language, gained traction. English is what its users make it. I have one vote, as does “EK,” as do you.

As anyone who owns a dictionary can see, vocabulary mutates over time, as new words enter the language and old ones drop out and take on new senses. The same thing happens with the conventions of written English; the capitalization and punctuation we use today is not quite the same as the capitalization and punctuation of previous centuries. And, since the language is what its users make it, the same is true of the grammar; we have English after all because a rabble of illiterate peasants from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries eighty-sixed many of the rules of Anglo-Saxon grammar. (Thank them for that.)

That is not the same thing as saying that there are no rules and everything goes. In “Rules are rules” I cited the thoroughgoing descriptivist Geoffrey Pullum on that point. There are indeed rules of English grammar that writers must follow to appear educated and literate. But rules are not the same thing as stylistic conventions, and there is even give in some of the rules. That is why, in the more than a thousand posts since I began this blog in 2005, I have loosened up considerably as I have become better informed — but still a moderate prescriptivist.

Or, to ram home the point by citing H.L. Mencken in The American Language once more:

The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach ‘correct’ English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive.

Tagged as a descriptivist

2010-04-24T07:57:00.002-04:00

If you missed yesterday’s post, “For whom, the bell tolls,” or read it yesterday, you have missed a recent comment by a reader signing in as Eastabrook Kefauver who invites me to bend over for a dozen of the best:

To Whom it May Concern: If whom is useless, then "between you and I" is OK, right? Wny not let's all just be consistently sloppy, all around? I'm constantly amazed that descriptivist editors weep over their profession's demise, while they simultaneously decry the same rules that make their very existence such a necessity. You can't have it both ways: if you want gatekeepers, you have to put them in charge of the keys. They can't drop the keys down the well and go drinking in the sun, hoping their jobs will still be there when they sober up.

This, I suppose, is what comes of my lollygagging with those louche characters at Language Log. But since some of you newcomers may not have encountered my protestations and professions, let me repeat them:

I am a moderate presciptivist. I do not endorse sloppy writing, but I try to recognize how the language is actually being used and how it can be most effectively wielded to reach an audience. I distinguish between actual rules, stylistic guidelines, and superstitions about English grammar and usage.

Let’s invite Mr. Kefauver to have a look at enforcement of rules. I was taught, for example, to use shall with first-person singular and plural pronouns, will with second- and third-person singular and plural pronouns. Is Mr. Kefauver in danger of an apoplexy* if he hears someone say, “I will look that up”?

How about the subjunctive, which arch-prescriptivist H.W. Fowler said eighty years ago is on its last legs in English? Does Mr. Kefauver wag his finger at every “I wish I was” he encounters?

At the grill cooking the weekend steaks or burgers, does Mr. Kefauver protect his shirt and trousers from spatters with a napron? That’s what the word was originally. It’s apron now because the way people speak influences the written language.

I confess that I sometimes wonder whether some of the people who comment have troubled to read what the posts actually say. I know how to use whom and will continue to use it. But there is no dispute that it has largely fallen out of spoken American English and is often used mistakenly (Mistakenly means wrongly, Mr. Kefauver, however odd that might sound coming from a “descriptivist editor”) in writing, even by professionals.

A reliable editor makes judgments about the language, about what is worth holding onto and what might as well be given up, about what is appropriate to a particular audience. Judgments differ, and authorities differ, so perhaps discussion might be a more effective means of arriving at sound judgments than denunciations.

*Sorry, we don’t call a stroke an apoplexy any longer, because language changes over time.

For whom, the bell tolls

2010-04-23T09:19:00.002-04:00

Yesterday’s “Rules are rules” post quoted Professor Geoffrey Pullum on actual, rather than imagined, rules about the comma, but his post also focused on the misuse of whom as the subject of a subordinate clause. Language commentators have been pronouncing the doom of whom for decades; Garner’s Modern American Usage cites Edward Sapir from 1921. The subject is worth a look.

Professor Pullum’s comment that whom is rarely used today except following prepositions stimulated a number of comments:

GKP says "whom" is "rarely used these days except after prepositions". Really?
I don't know how to use the various corpora that could be consulted to determine the point, but I for one use bare "whom" quite readily in relative (but not interrogative) clauses. E.g.
That woman with long red hair whom we saw at the supermarket this morning, I saw her again this afternoon at the beach.
Who did you ask to see, Mr Jones or Miss Smith?

And

In non-professional writing on the internet the choice between who and whom is made by rolling dice. The distinction is lost except among language aficionados

And

but I for one use bare "whom" quite readily
And no doubt you will continue to do so while the word drops out of general usage. I know how to use it but generally avoid it so as to not sound excessively posh.
"Whom" won't be missed. And for a large part of the population is already not missed.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage looked into the matter not long ago (I have the 1994 edition) and reached some interesting conclusions.

Item: Whom appears to be dropping out of spoken English but survives stubbornly in written English.

Item: Confusion of who and whom has a long pedigree, with each appearing as both subject and object in Shakespeare’s works (today, St. George’s Day, is conventionally observed as his birthday) and extending into the current era.

Item: Merriam-Webster’s concludes: “Our files show that objective whom is in no danger of extinction, at least in writing.”

If you are interested in some practical advice, here is mine:

(1) Stop fretting over the way people talk. You can’t change it.

(2) There is a problem that even educated writers have with figuring out whether a subordinate clause should begin with who or whom. If you have that difficulty, you can, except in the most formal circumstances, just use who. The most frequent error I see is whom as the subject of a clause that functions as the object of a verb or preposition.

(3) If you want to use whom, no one is going to stop you. This is America. There can be a problem with whom sounding stilted, fussy, or pompous, but that is a judgment call that you have every right to make.

Language is like geology. Novelties periodically erupt, some of which remain a feature of the landscape, but most of which subside. More commonly, language is a collection of tectonic plates that separate or grind together very slowly over a long period as some features of the landscape erode and others metamorphose. Individual efforts to make the crooked straight and the rough places smooth are generally futile, and there are always anomalous crevices and outcrops that must be negotiated with caution.

Addendum: Many thanks to the readers who offered advice on formatting block quotations.

Rules are rules

2010-04-22T11:18:00.003-04:00

Over at Language Log, Professor Geoffrey Pullum gives the lie to the canard that descriptivists think that there are no rules in English, presenting a compact summary of the punctuation of relative clauses:

There are two major ways in which a relative clause may function. One is that a relative clause may be a fully integrated modifier of the noun in a noun phrase, often providing some sort of semantic restriction on the reference of that noun. Thus person can be used to denote the entire class of human beings, while person who has been unsuccessful denotes only the smaller subset of those who have failed at something. The underlined part is what The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls an integrated relative clause. They are often called "restrictive" relative clauses, or "defining" relative clauses.

The other major function for relative clauses is to serve as a parenthetical interruption of the main flow of a sentence, contributing supplementary information about someone or something immediately after it is referred to in the main content. Thus You can talk to John if you like just says that if you want you can talk to John, but You can talk to John, who has more experience, if you like adds some supplementary (and definitely secondary) information about John's experience level. This kind of relative clause is the one that CGEL calls a supplementary relative clause.

There are all sorts of differences between the two, but the one that is crucial here is that supplementary relatives must be separated off with commas and integrated ones must not be.

The erroneous use of whom as a subject also comes in for attention.

The comments on the post are well worth your attention, particularly when they veer off into the mistaken belief that “[u]ltimately, all a comma is is a breath or short pause.”

What some people, many of them my students, have difficulty in grasping is that the comma functions in two ways. In some cases, as in the supplementary relative clauses that Professor Pullum describes, or in appositive clusters, the commas are essential. That is a rule. But there are also commas with which writers try to indicate pauses mimicking the rhythms of spoken English. They are discretionary.

Note to readers: I have usually tried in this blog to indicate an extended quotation by boldfacing the text to distinguish it from my own comments. But some readers have found the boldface type difficult to read, and in this case the original text contains boldface type. So I am experimenting here with putting a block quotation in a different font to set it off. What do you think?

Mark Twain showed us ourselves

2010-04-21T09:52:00.000-04:00

Samuel Clemens died a hundred years ago today, and Mark Twain with him. He was a newspaper reporter (“I hated to do it, but there wasn’t any honest work available”) before he became a novelist, and he wrote what both H.L. Mencken and Ernest Hemingway thought was the American novel, Huckleberry Finn.

That novel has everything in it that is central to the American character and experience: the impatience with convention, the impulse to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” the colloquial voice, the ribald humor, the deadpan humor, and the eternal, complex, heartbreakingly vexatious issue of race. We look into it, and we see who we are. If you haven’t yet read it, put it at the top of your list; and if you read it a while back, pick it up again.

Twain is easily the most quotable of American writers (“When angry, count four; when very angry, swear”) because he saw us so clearly, without illusions: “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest” and “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”

Trolling the Web, I came across a site with quotations of Twain’s remarks on writing: “God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.”

Listen to the master, and husband your own weather.

When do you stop?

2010-04-21T07:49:00.001-04:00

No doubt it is psychologically necessary for writers to believe that someone will read their work, but our experience as readers tells us otherwise.

There was a telling newsroom moment some years back when a senior editor, offering drive-by praise to a reporter about a story, said, “I read it all the way through.” If he is not routinely reading stories to the end in his own paper, why would he or the writer expect that readers do?

In newspapers, in magazines, and online, we scan and skim, and it does not take much for us to decide to move on. It would surely benefit us as writers and editors to understand what readers identify as stopping points in our work. I have a few ideas, but I welcome your comments and contributions. So:

Throat-clearing: Some writers, particularly inexperienced ones, think that they need to take the reader by the hand and lead him or her along a winding path of background information before establishing what the starting point of the article is. I suspect that if you do not make clear to the reader within a mere handful of sentences, a couple of paragraphs, what the focus of your article is, you are at high risk that the reader will never proceed long enough to discover it.

This holds true as well for the hackneyed convention of the anecdotal lead. If the writer spends paragraphs describing people whose circumstances are as commonplace and banal as our own, that is supposed to seize our attention?

Obstacles: Writers tend to go native: Police reporters start to write like cops; people writing about government mimic bureaucrats; business reporters echo management cant. All of this jargon can throw up impediments to the reader.

Writers who have spent a long time developing a major article become immersed in the subject, particularly if they have revised an article so frequently that they can no longer hear how it would sound. I once edited a longish article that had, high up, a paragraph of stunning impenetrability. Because the writer was one of our stars, I couldn’t touch it; I had to make my case in a meeting with the writer and a clutch of other editors. The writer glared at me across the conference table as I explained my misgivings and then said that the paragraph should remain as written. And it was so. The next day I asked three or four people what they had thought of the article, and all of them had dropped it on encountering that paragraph.*

Errors: If in reading an article on a subject about which you are informed, you discover an error of fact, I think that that may be enough to make you move on, because such errors diminish the credibility of the writer and the publication.

Some people stop reading out of irritation when they come across errors of grammar and usage, because such errors tell them that the writer is not really a professional. And yes, some of them may be, you know, English majors, or retired schoolteachers with a lot of free time, or peevers, but it’s not in the writer’s interest to sacrifice any readers unnecessarily.

The headline: As Hank Glamann used to tell us at ACES, if they don’t read the big type, they won’t look at the little stuff underneath. Now, especially since writers online, and increasingly in print, are expected to write their own headlines, keep in mind that if the headline is obscure, or tries too hard to be clever, or just looks dull, few readers will even get as far as the gripping opening sentences.

Over to you: Assuming, rashly, that you have gotten this far, no doubt there is more to be said. The comments are open.

*When your editor tells you that he has a problem in your text, dammit, pay attention.

The $18,000 typo

2010-04-19T17:10:00.001-04:00

Penguin Group Australia is pulping 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible cookbook because the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto called for sprinkling the dish with “salt and freshly ground black people.”

How people came to be substituted for pepper was not announced. It is not at all uncommon for the wrong synapse to fire in a writer’s brain, particularly when concentration is momentarily relaxed, substituting the wrong word for the correct word. Some errors are the result of a category called a cupertino, in which the electronic spell-check function does not recognize a typed word and substitutes the one most nearly resembling it in its dictionary file.

Then, of course, comes the embarrassment of the proofreader, who let this mistake slip through his or her hands. Once again, if attention flags even momentarily, the brain is given to pass quickly over words it recognizes. The wrong word correctly spelled is one of the great hazards that editors and proofreaders encounter.

You may snicker, but you too could have committed this error, or overlooked it. So could I. So could anyone. And this inborn propensity to get things wrong, dear ones, is why old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy, stick-in-the-mud, nineteenth-century-industrial-era-production-model editors suspect that the current enthusiasm among cheese-paring corporate types for fewer-touches, sack-editors-and-save-bucks, direct-to-the-reader, nobody-cares-about-accuracy-anyhow publishing may encounter some unanticipated expenses.

Uncle John says, I want YOU

2010-04-19T07:33:00.001-04:00

for the American Copy Editors Society.

Last week, after a five-year absence, I was able to return to a national ACES conference. In Philadelphia I was able to greet old friends, Bill Connolly, Beryl Adcock, and Alex Cruden, whom I have known since the first ACES conference at Chapel Hill in 1997, along with many others; to meet Renee Petrina, Brian White, and Emily Ingram, whom I had only known through blogs and

Twitter; and to introduce my wife, Kathleen Capcara, she of the famed “Except in Hell” remark, to them all.

Personal gratifications aside, the conference offered considerable substance. Kathy Schenck, who is leaving editing for the business world, presented her workshop on skeptical editing for the last time. Susan Keith of Rutgers described the research she is doing on the global “seismic shift” in how editing is being done. Josh Benton gamely defended his statement “Sometimes the path between the writer and the reader will not have an editor” before a room full of skeptics. Bill Walsh, with whom I have modest but friendly differences on some points of usage, displayed in his “Rules That Aren’t” session how his views have been evolving since I last checked in on him. Doug Ward of Kansas, describing essential skills for editors in the new era, reminded us not to get so involved in technology as to neglect our traditional skills: grammar, usage, spelling, style, fact-checking, curiosity,

vocabulary, attention to detail, ability to negotiate, focusing on the writing.

If you thought that the previous paragraph was dense, it merely skimmed a few of the workshops offered. There is no event anywhere, offered by anyone, that offers editors more substance and more useful advice, than the national ACES conference. Moreover, it was deeply heartening to be there.

And people know that. More than three hundred people showed up, many of them, like me, at personal expense. They are the veterans of the War on Editing, determined in the most difficult of times to uphold the worth of the craft, the practice it, to get better at it. They have not surrendered.

Neither should you. ACES has more than seven hundred members. If you are not one of them, why not? Sign up. The society’s Education Fund offers scholarships to students pursuing a career in editing. The find is now self-sustaining, with contributions to date of $150,000, but it could use more, and your contributions are tax-deductible. On a modest level, you can contribute to the education fund by using GoodSearch for your Internet research, specifying the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund as the beneficiary of the cent or two contributed for each search you perform on the site.

I have known, worked with, and respected these people for thirteen years. Many of them have stood loyally by me during the vicissitudes of personal and professional life, and their friendship has been a joy. They merit your support.

Photo credit: Phillip Blanchard

You'd rather be in Philadelphia

2010-04-14T09:09:00.001-04:00

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I’m going to tell it anyway.

At the first national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 1997, someone said that the three hundred of us gathered in Chapel Hill constituted perhaps the largest group of copy editors ever assembled in human history.

When I got back to Baltimore, I repeated that to my wife, at which Kathleen muttered, “Except in Hell.”

Later today I will risk life, limb, and sanity by taking Interstate 95 to Philadelphia for the fourteenth national conference, the first I have been able to attend since 2005.

Though diminished by the recent casualties in the War on Editing, the stalwarts at ACES Philadelphia represent the people who are, against heavy odds, laboring to ensure that what you read in newspapers, magazines, books, and even some Web sites is as accurate and intelligible as they can make it. You cannot imagine how much in their debt you are.

They will be gathering to attend workshops on how they can become more effective practitioners of the craft, they will honor achievements of colleagues, and they will gather in the bar in the evening to lift a cheerful glass and share stories. Nothing could be better, and it is disappointing that I will have to miss the third day because of the technical rehearsal for Annie on Saturday.

I’m unlikely to do much or any blogging while at the conference, but you can take part in it vicariously by following the ACES conference blog. Or, since this is the 381st post at this site since May of last year, you could always rummage around in the archives if you miss me.

Written at random

2010-04-13T15:33:00.000-04:00

Talking with an admirer of the poetry of James Thomson, Samuel Johnson, who found Thomson deplorably wordy, took down a volume of Thomson’s verse and read aloud a lengthy passage. “Is not this fine?” he asked. After the listener expressed admiration, Johnson said, “Well, sir, I have omitted every other line.”

I sometimes think that much journalism could be approached that way, by omitting alternate paragraphs, without much damage to the fabric. (I actually tried that once with a Sun columnist’s work, and no one could detect the difference, though we were obliged to print the full text anyhow.)

For your inspection, an item from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel forwarded by one of my many spies, with commentary following:

Miami firefighter killed in Hollywood motorcycle crash just back from Haiti

HOLLYWOOD

An off-duty Miami firefighter who recently returned from a rescue mission to Haiti died Thursday night after his motorcycle collided with a car, police said.

Leslie Luma, an eight-year veteran with City of Miami Fire-Rescue, celebrated his anniversary with the fire department Thursday. He was married and had three children.

"He was well-loved by a lot of his co-workers and his family," Fire-Rescue spokesman Ignatius Carroll told WPLG-Ch. 10.

The firefighter's motorcycle collided with a 2001 Ford Mustang near the intersection of North State Road 7 and West Park Road just before 9 p.m., said Police Lt. Manny Marino.

The Mustang's driver, Sherry Lynn Marks, 19, suffered minor injuries.

Luma, 37, was a member of the Urban Search and Rescue Team Task Force 2 and recently returned from rescue efforts in Haiti.

Preliminary investigation indicates that the crash occurred when the Mustang traveling southbound on North State Road 7 veered into the northbound lanes and collided with the northbound 2005 American Suzuki motorcycle, Marino said.

The crash is under investigation.

Commentary

I suggest to the students in my editing class that jotting down a rough outline of the elements of an article is one way to get at structural issues. Look at the paragraph structure of this exercise:

(1) Firefighter killed in motorcycle accident.

(2) Anniversary of employment, details of family.

(3) Eulogistic quote.

(4) Detail of accident.

(5) Other motorist.

(6) Firefighter’s trip to Haiti.

(7) More details of accident.

(8) Investigation continues.

So the details of the fatal accident, which are what news this article has to offer, are broken up into four paragraphs, separated paragraphs containing other material. And the order of the paragraphs is apparently generated, like the winning Mega Millions numbers, at random.

It is then topped off with a headline written evidently by someone with a tenuous grasp of conventional English syntax. If it is necessary to pad out the headline by reference to the firefighter’s activities in Haiti (of which no significant details are given), then “Miami firefighter just back from Haiti is killed in Hollywood motorcycle crash” would have been less likely to puzzle the reader.

Refrain*

Once you eliminate most of the editors and copy editors, and overburden the remnant, this article and headline are the kind of dog’s breakfast that the reader can expect to find.

*Since this is becoming a stock observation at this blog, I thought I’d label it for you.

Santayana on the copy desk

2010-04-13T09:05:00.002-04:00

Those who do not learn from the headline mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.

A reader forwards this Denver Post headline:

Colo. bars taking live crayfish from Yampa basin

Bar as a noun meaning a saloon is widely recognized. But it is also a verb much favored in headlinese meaning “prohibit.”

The same ambiguity crops up in a classic headline collected in one of the Columbia Journalism Review’s features of defective headlines:

Minneapolis bars putting leaves in street

The errors of the past repay study.

Once more unto the breach

2010-04-12T08:10:00.002-04:00

I regret having to point out to you this sentence from an article in The New York Times about the recent Republican gathering in Louisiana:

At a cocktail reception on the banks of the Mississippi River, people in yellow Tea Party shirts barely mingled with Republican stalwarts, many of whom wore neckties or broaches decorated with elephants, the proud symbol of the party.

Broach, of course, is not a noun but a verb meaning “to break open.” Its earliest sense in English was to pierce something with a sharp object, but, the English always having been great drinkers, was more commonly used to mean opening a cask or barrel to draw out the liquor. It also means to open up in a figurative sense; to broach a painful subject is to introduce it for discussion.

The word the writer was groping for is the homophone brooch, an ornament pinned to clothing. It is an etymological variant of broach, which as a noun meant “skewer” or “bodkin” in Middle English, thus suggesting the pin that fastens the ornament.

Broach the verb is sometimes confused with breach, which means to break through a barrier – as when the Turks breached the mighty walls of Constantinople in 1453 and brought down what little remained of the Byzantine Empire. Figuratively, it means to break an agreement. As a noun, breach is the gap that has been broken in a wall or the violation of the agreement, as in “breach of contract.”

Breach in turn is confused with breech, which used to mean the buttocks. That is what breeches or britches are meant to cover. It survives in modern English as the name for the back part of a rifle or gun barrel.

Sweetheart, get me Ettlin

2010-04-11T09:16:00.001-04:00

I wrote briefly yesterday (“Editors? We don’t need no stinking editors”) about an inept little news article from the Charlotte Observer that is sadly representative of the shoddy work proliferating in print and online. Thinking about it yesterday, I realized the problem: It had not been Ettlinized.

David Michael Ettlin was The Baltimore Sun’s veteran rewrite man, and by veteran I mean that it sometimes felt as if he had revised A.S. Abell’s copy. The rewrite man’s job – now largely vanished – existed to deal with certain realities of which the public may be unaware and which many journalists are reluctant to acknowledge:

1. Many journalists are not very good writers. The skill of reporting, of ferreting out information, is very different from the skill of composition, and few reporters are equally good at both. The rewrite man took raw copy and Englished it.

2. Journalism is done in haste, which makes for mistakes. The rewrite man was a first line of defense, cleaning up a multitude of errors before shipping stories to the copy desk. (When you read corporatespeak about reducing “layers” of editing, you are to understand that every layer that is eliminated to save money increases the likelihood that what you read with be less and less reliable.)

3. Journalism is a craft, learned by apprenticeship. It was glorious to watch the incomparable Ettlin take a crew of tyros with journalism degrees and patiently instruct them how to construct an obituary, how to write a police story without convicting a suspect in advance of trial, how to get to the point in the first paragraph instead of the tenth.

4. They don’t know the territory. Tyros come in from out of town, along with other reporters migrating for (they think) better jobs. They didn’t grow up here; they don’t know the local geography, history, folkways, and people. So, over time, Ettlin would patiently point out when they made parallel streets intersect or got people’s names wrong (if R Adams Cowley of Shock Trauma saw his name in the paper with a period after the R, the newsroom would hear about it). He would also, in the palmy days, get the keys to the publisher’s Cadillac and drive the newcomers around town for the day for an instructed tour of echt Baltimore.

It would not shock me to hear a reporter say that he or she learned more from Ettlin about the practicalities of reporting and writing than from a major in journalism.

David Michael Ettlin retired from The Sun after four decades on the job and still posts occasionally on a blog, The Real Muck. The qualities he brought to the work – skepticism, irreverence about Important People, humor, an unerring news judgment, and, above all, a determination to make every text factually accurate and clear for the reader – still exist among the attenuated staffs of our newspapers and online publications. How much these qualities are valued, or even recognized, by the people making decisions is a question yet to be answered.

Editors? We don't need no stinking editors

2010-04-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

Now that everything is all immediate and direct between writer and reader, since all those superfluous editors and copy editors were dismissed like barnacles scraped off the hull, journalism has entered an era of smooth sailing, right?

Take a look at what HeadsUp: The Blog has to say about a minor masterpiece of modern journalism out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We are treated to the work of a journalist who cannot write a twelve-paragraph article about a tree falling on a house without making a hash of it.

Adding to the overall sense of incompetence unencumbered by editorial expertise, there is the crash blossom headline:

Home crushed by tree with dog inside

An isolated example, I grant you, but an increasingly typical one.

From over the pond

2010-04-10T08:04:00.000-04:00

The estimable Jan Freeman, writing in The Boston Globe about British-American linguistic cross-pollination, endorses my previous suggestion that there are a number of Britishisms that we could profit from adopting:

Surely, among all these offerings, everyone can find a Britishism to cherish. How about Thursday week, meaning “a week from Thursday,” which would instantly cure our chronic confusion about whether a meeting or dinner is scheduled for “this Thursday” or “next Thursday”? I’ve always been fond of fortnight, too — I suppose it doesn’t catch on here because our vacations (their holidays) are rarely two weeks at a stretch. And surely sell-by date is sleeker and more precise than expiration date.

I’d add snog for “to make out,” top up (a drink) for “refill,” gormless for “clueless” or “stupid,” and dodgy for “unsound,” “questionable,” or “suspicious.” (Your suggestions have not exactly been arriving in a torrent; am I supposed to do all the work here?)

Ms. Freeman also drew attention to Separated by a Common Language, a blog by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist living in Britain, who has written extensively about these transatlantic exchanges. (She is also on Twitter, @lynneguist, a pun I reluctantly endorse). I was particularly happy to discover her post from last December in which she provides some details on the increasing popularity of go missing on these shores, despite the unaccountably vehement and irrational resistance to it. As she explains, along lines that I too have suggested:

Go missing is beautifully meaningful--giving us some nuances not available in other words. It's not the same as vanish or disappear--and that's what makes it so useful. When something is said to go missing, it makes it seem like a less mysterious event than 'disappearing' or 'vanishing' which have a whiff of the supernatural about them. One can use it as a way to avoid blame--including self-blame: My phone went missing rather than I lost my phone. If a person 'goes missing', then there's a sense that although we don't know where they are, they do.

These exchanges often prompt spasms of crankiness. The British tend to bridle at Americanisms, even when they turn out to have a long history in British English as well, and Americans are liable to see the adoption of any British turn of phrase as a laughable affectation. (And I have encountered enough Episcopal clergy with synthetic British accents to understand the latter reaction.)

But I suggest that we can leave the peeving aside. If a word or expression offers a nuance that we did not previously enjoy, or simply adds to our variety of expression, go for it. That last phrase is an Americanism; I offer it to the British in a spirit of linguistic cousinhood.

Friday farrago

2010-04-09T10:55:00.000-04:00

Before I head off to Memorial Episcopal to help erect the set for Annie – you are planning to see the show, aren’t you? – I am assembling some odds and ends to amuse and instruct. (Farrago, “a confused mixture,” comes from a Latin word meaning “mixed fodder.”)

Item: If you were both instructed and amused by yesterday’s post linking to John McWhorter’s analysis of Sarah Palin’s speech patterns, you should have a look at Mark Liberman’s follow-up on Ms. Palin’s distal demonstratives at Language Log.

Item: The estimable and apparently indefatigable Professor Liberman also tackled Louann Brizendine’s The Male Brain and painstakingly examined sources identified in the endnotes. What he discovered, and demonstrates, is that citation after citation refers to a study that not only does not support the author’s assertions, but has at best the most tenuous relationship to her subject.

His conclusion: “… Dr. Brizendine's new book is more of the same sort of ‘psychoneuroindoctrinology’ found in her first book, in which the pages and pages of endnotes and references are a sort of Potemkin Village of scientific pretense laid out in support of banal gender stereotypes.”

Item: The War on Editing claims another set of casualties as Media General “consolidates” (read: “eliminates staff while homogenizing content”) copy editing and page design at the Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Winston-Salem Journal.

The typical robotic justification has been offered:

“Our consolidated editing and design operations allow our newsrooms to focus on strong local news reporting. Stories will be edited once rather than multiple times, and we can take advantage of economies of scale and centralization of top talent,” said Donna Reed, Media General’s Vice President of Content. “Our customers will be unaffected by this internal process change and all news decisions will continue to be made by our local editors,” said Ms. Reed.

I will not be taking any bets on the customers’ satisfaction.

Item: Gene Roberts of the University of Maryland, formerly of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, co-author of The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, coincidentally talked yesterday about the effects for the public of these economies of scale and centralizations. “It is past time for America to become alarmed about its shrinking news coverage, but it is showing few signs of concern,” he said. A fuller account is at Poynter.org.

Item: And finally, an endorsement. I regularly encounter in my editing class at Loyola University Maryland students who immediately grasp what is essential in the craft of editing. One of the most promising in the thirty semesters I have taught was Elizabeth Morrison. She would have been a magnificent editor, had there been any future in editing. But, after military service and marriage, she has settled with her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina, and made a career as a photographer.

Any of you in Charlotte or environs who might be in the market for photography would do well to have a look at her Web site, Elizabeth Morrison Photography. It’s also on Facebook.

Why Sarah Palin talks like that

2010-04-07T12:02:00.000-04:00

If you have marveled, as many have, about Sarah Palin’s distinctive speech patterns, John McWhorter has an explanation: She speaks like a child.

Please, please, good people, before you rush to Plymouth Road with your pitchforks and torches, this is not a Palin-bashing exercise. Dr. McWhorter is a linguist, and he presents at The New Republic a linguistic analysis of Ms. Palin’s speech patterns, along with an explanation of its appeal to the public.

As he explains, it was once the case that public figures practiced oratory. They thought out carefully what they intended to say, they wrote it down, in formal English, and they delivered it. One surviving exemplar of this practice is Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia:

Byrd is old enough to have minted in the days when making a speech meant clearing your throat and reading a prepared statement bedecked with ten-dollar words, and it qualifies today as an eccentricity. The practice will die with him.

Public address, even in Congress, has become much more casual, more conversational, more informal, more colloquial. And Ms. Palin, Dr. McWhorter argues, has carried this development further. Though you owe it to yourself to read his entire article, what his examination of a set of Palin utterances shows is that she does not link words and phrases so much syntactically or logically, but associatively.

The people who like that form of speech are those who are uncomfortable with the formalities and structures of written English. And that, though Dr. McWhorter does not address the point, is a potential source of difficulty for President Obama. The American people, taken as a whole, admire educational credentials more than they admire education, and Mr. Obama’s careful, structured, lawyerly sentences are likely to pall over time.

Mr. Obama’s supporters like to think that he is a model American, but I suspect that Dr. McWhorter is closer to the mark in his conclusion:

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” – while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

Remember the Confederacy

2010-04-06T19:55:00.001-04:00

The Hon. Bob McDonnell, governor of Virginia, reminds us in an official proclamation that we are in the middle of Confederate History Month. In three days we can commemorate the 145th anniversary of those events at Appomattox Court House that determined that the Confederacy was, for all practical purposes, over.

I wish that we could mark the Confederacy to honor figures like Robert E. Lee, who fought bravely and determinedly for his cause and, when defeated, acknowledged the loss and contributed no further to resistance – who would not allow a word to be said against General Grant in his presence.

I wish that we could mark it in the manner of those aging veterans in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary who, after shambling though a re-enactment of Pickett’s futile charge at Gettysburg, fell into one another’s arms in recognition that, much as they had once tried to kill one another, there was something in their common heritage that bound them together forever.

But I grew up in a border state, a great-great grandson of slaveowners, a fact of which I cannot be proud, and I live in another border state, whose official song* calls the federal government a bloody tyrant. I have seen the degree to which identification with the Confederacy became solidarity for racist yahoos over the past six decades.

I have also read William W. Freehling’s books (both excellent) on the secession movement from the Colonial and Federal eras to the Civil War, and I know that, despite the feeble apologetics for the Lost Cause today, you know, that it was more about states’ rights and cultural and economic differences than about slavery, that slavery was the states’ right at issue.

You need only read what the secessionists themselves wrote, and it is not a cause you would want to take pride in today.

So commemorate away, but get your facts straight. The Stars and Bars was the official flag, not the battle flag you and Dukes of Hazzard fans display. And General Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Joseph Johnston and all the others whose memory we honor were good men, even noble men, who battled heroically in a bad cause.

We are better off that they lost.

*Sung to “O Tannenbaum.” Dear Lord, the embarrassment.

Just thinkin' about tomorrow

2010-04-05T12:05:00.000-04:00

Last night, after the conclusion of the final Easter Day service at Memorial Episcopal Church, seventy people swarmed over the premises. Furniture was removed from the chancel; doors were opened in odd corners of the church, the parish house, and the rectory; gangs of adults and children hauled heavy and ungainly-shaped wooden objects into the nave. An ant colony would have looked leisurely by comparison.

When the Memorial Players present their annual production, they do so on a cunningly designed modular stage, assembled to fit over the chancel to provide an elevated platform for the performers. With this year’s production of Annie a mere two weeks off, all those hundred of pieces have to be assembled, bolted, and fitted together to permit the cast to carry out the last feverish set of rehearsals in the actual performing space.

The six performances of Annie have a novel aspect this year: a double cast. Though the adult actors (including a relentless blogger cast as Franklin Roosevelt) will appear in all performances, the lead role and the roles of the named orphans will be performed by separate casts. The two Annies, Holly Hornbeck and Clare Peyton, have been troupers in rehearsal, mastering their lines early and singing ably. You will be impressed by them.

To be impressed, of course, you will have to show up. The performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, April 24, 25, 30, and May 1, and 3:00 p.m. on Sundays, April 26 and May 2.

The performances are free, with the doors opening half an hour in advance, but there are also opportunities to pay for a combined reserved seating/reception package, with details here.

Now that the title of this post has put that insistent earworm in your head – oh, tomorrow, tomorrow, I love yah, tomorrow – you might as well give in and plan to attend.

Three things the Vatican could learn from Richard Nixon

2010-04-02T14:28:00.001-04:00

1. Yes, some people dislike you and take glee in your misfortune. Do not give them ammunition; they will use it.

2. Not everyone, however, who reports on what you did – or failed to do – is an enemy, and, anyhow, facts are facts.

3. Cover-ups magnify and spread the initial crime.

Gee, I used to think I was a journalist

2010-04-02T09:04:00.003-04:00

A good, strong burst of cleansing anger gets the day off to a running start.

Steve Yelvington quotes on Twitter a remarkably stupid remark by someone named Chris Pirillo, a self-described “media-friendly geek who produces content and catalyzes communities” (whatever that means). Here is what catalyzed me:

If you didn't get a degree in Journalism, you're not a journalist - not even a “citizen journalist.”*

It is no secret – I disclose it to my students at Loyola every semester – that I have no degree in journalism, that, in fact, I never took a course in journalism in college. At Michigan State in the 1970s you had to take the three-term introduction to communications sequence as a prerequisite, and the one term I spent in that sequence was the single dumbest waste of time in my undergraduate career.

As much as journalists like to think of themselves as members of a profession, like physicians and lawyers, they –after thirty years in newspapering, is it permissible for me to say “we”? – are engaged instead in a craft. It is a craft that can be learned in journalism school, but it is also one that can be learned, as I learned it, by apprenticeship.

There is no board certification in journalism, no qualifying examination, no licensing. Edmund Wilson – Edmund Wilson! – described himself as a “literary journalist,” and the people who compile announcements of church suppers and school lunch menus for publication also call themselves journalists. Just about anyone who writes anything that is published – and putting things up on the Internet counts as publication – has a reasonable claim to that elastic term journalist, whatever some bumptious content producer and community catalyzer may say.

This bedevils legislators trying to figure out who should be covered by a shield law and journalism school deans struggling to divine where, if anywhere, their programs are headed, but that is their problem, the reality to be dealt with.

The current status of the craft is this: If someone writing for publication calls himself a journalist, anyone who challenges the assertion has to prove otherwise. Insisting on a degree in journalism? Well, the abundance of published journalists who have not studied journalism – and in some cases lack an undergraduate degree – makes that a shaky argument to stand on.

*Copy-editing note for Mr. Pirillo: Because journalism is not a proper noun, it is not capitalized.

The last of the Earlys

2010-04-02T07:03:00.003-04:00

My mother had a sharp tongue – as the proverbial expression has it, the only edged tool that gets sharper with use. It is part of her legacy to me.

She employed it on Election Day one year when she heard that a local official in Fleming County, Kentucky, had made improper use of an official vehicle to ferry supporters to the polls. When word got around, that official confronted my mother and demanded to know whether she had been spreading the story.

That official, commonly for the area, was a tall, beefy character, and he obviously intended to intimidate my mother, a short, slender woman. His mistake. My mother looked him in the eye and said, “I told everybody I saw, and the ones I didn’t see I called and told.”

(I suspect she also fixed him with the expression that we her children knew as “the camel look,” a glare that could have melted glass. My daughter can produce the same look, evidently by genetic inheritance.)

As the postmaster of the fourth-class office in Elizaville for twenty-four years, she was admirably placed to both receive and transmit information. Nearly everyone in town came by the post office, and in the long interval between the morning mail and the afternoon mail she observed all the comings and goings. If someone drove past, she could identify who it was, where he was going, what he would do there, and when he could be expected back. And if she couldn’t tell you that, she would work the phone until she could.

Living in a small town in Kentucky in those days subjected you to a level of surveillance that Stalin would have envied.

My sisters and I came to call her “Murn,” a local mispronunciation of her name, Marian. “Murn, why are those children calling you Murn?” the source of the mispronunciation once asked her. It became one of her favorite stories. She liked to tell stories, stories of the family, stories of the local people, and mildly improper jokes. (Ask me sometime about the three clergymen who called on the farmer’s wife.)

In her seventies and eighties, after the death of my father, she started dating, and at the time of her death in November 2001 was seeing someone who had been a sweetheart in elementary school, whom she had not seen in decades. Afflicted with Parkinsonism and half a dozen other chronic ailments, she insisted on remaining independent, living alone in the house on the family farm, grudgingly consenting to the presence of a companion at nights.

Independent is one term, stubborn another, and, as you may imagine, she was not always easy to get along with. As her heart was giving out, my older sister, Georgia, tried to comfort her. Almost her last words were a sharp remark about the likelihood of the ambulance’s arriving in time. She spoke her mind, and she lived on her own terms to the end.

Marian Early McIntyre, the last of the Earlys, would have been ninety-three years old today.

Worse than Groundhog Day

2010-04-01T17:42:00.002-04:00

April 1 is a day on which I ought to do the same things I do on Superbowl Sunday: lock the door, draw the blinds, and lie on the floor until it’s all over.*

Though some wit manifests itself – Google’s transforming itself to Topeka for the day to mock that city’s offer to change its name to Google to acquire fiber optics, or the announcement on the Johns Hopkins Web site that it is changing its name to John Hopkins, with a photo of a crane removing an s from a building – we are mainly subjected to a flood of tedious japes.

Some of them come from newspapers, which you might imagine would have more regard for their credibility.

Hoaxes always take someone in. It was not April but December in 1917 that H.L. Mencken published a history of the bathtub in the United States, a jocular essay entirely fictional. To his mingled amusement and chagrin, it took on a life of its own, being solemnly quoted in newspaper articles and books for decades, even after he had exposed the hoax.

And there is the problem. Tina Stone, one of the members of the Michigan Hutaree militia arrested last month, “thought that President Barack Obama had signed into law this month a bill that would spend $20 billion to help the terrorist group Hamas settle in the U.S.,” according to the Detroit Free Press. She had, you see, read it on the Internet. Practicing on the simple will not make your life illustrious.

When the public struggles in a torrent of information, much of it only approximately accurate and some of it outright fraudulent, when the discipline of skeptical editing appears to be as archaic as illuminating manuscripts, the charm of hoaxes fades quickly.**

*This method also works for the Academy Awards.

**Yes, I’m an old grump.

Death of Susan Tifft

2010-04-01T12:01:00.000-04:00

I was sorry to learn today of the death of Susan Tifft from brain cancer.

Ms. Tifft was a professor of journalism at Duke University. She collaborated with her husband, Alex S. Jones, on two notable books about American newspaper dynasties: The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty and The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.

There are two ways to honor those who accomplish great things in our craft. The first is to read and celebrate their work. The second is to follow their example.

Don't mock the afflicted

2010-03-31T15:13:00.001-04:00

The saddest examples of Teabonics, the photo array of hand-printed signs displayed at Tea Party rallies, are those championing the English language.

He has to pay WHAT?

2010-03-30T14:48:00.002-04:00

W. Charles Bailey Jr., a Baltimore attorney who says that this blog is one of his favorite diversions, has found what he thinks is an error in an Associated Press article, and with it, he raises a question about editing.

He has given me permission to quote at length from his note:

Mr. Bailey: I have a copy editor question that may actually be a topic for your blog. It seems to be a classic example of a lack of good copy editing.

I opened my NY Times browser I and found the following AP Article:

Maryland: Dead Marine 's Father Must Pay Protestor

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

March 29, 2010

Lawyers for the father of a Marine who died in Iraq say a court has ordered him to pay legal costs for the anti-gay protesters who picketed his son’s funeral. The protesters are led by Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan. The father, Albert Snyder of York, Pa., had won a $5 million verdict against Mr. Phelps, but it was thrown out on appeal. On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Maryland, ordered Mr. Snyder to pay the costs of Mr. Phelps’s appeal. The United States Supreme Court agreed earlier this month to consider whether the protesters’ provocative messages, which include phrases like “Thank God for dead soldiers,” are protected by the First Amendment. Members of the church maintain that God hates homosexuality and that the death of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is God’s way of punishing the United States for its tolerance of it.

Reading the article, I was left with the understanding that the Court ordered the deceased Marine's Father to pay the legal fees of that despicable organization that pickets soldiers' funerals. As a lawyer, I was stunned, because the American rule is that legal fees are not paid by the losing side. The only time the rule is set aside is when there is some statutory exception mandating a fee shift.

I suspected that the AP was mistaking "legal fees" with "costs" associated with an appeal. Specifically, I suspected that the Court did not order the Marine's father to pay legal fees, but only ordered him to pay under a standard procedure that taxes the costs of photocopies to the losing party. This is found in Federal Rule of Civil procedure 39, and applies in every case. Suffice it to say, though, that the cost of copies, while expensive, are not the same thing as "legal costs" such as attorneys' fees in litigating an appeal.

I looked up the opinion and, sure enough, the only thing that was assessed was the usual copy fees. In other words, this was what happens in every case.

So, my question is whether or not this is the sort of thing that a good copy editor should catch? It certainly would be news if the court had assessed legal fees. That's why I took the time to go and look up the case. That didn't happen, though. Instead, the Court just applied the rules that have applied to all appeals for a long, long, time.

So is this a blunder or what?

My response: There certainly appears to be sloppiness in the Associated Press reports. One dated March 29 referred to an order “to pay the protesters’ appeal costs,” and one dated March 30 to an order “to pay legal costs.” Both stories were posted on The New York Times’s Web site, and the language appears in numerous other news sites.

I too thought that the order was to pay the legal fees. Had the article referred to an order to pay “court costs,” I would have assumed that it meant expenses such as filing fees and photocopying of documents, rather than attorney fees.

This is precisely the sort of distinction that a sharp-eyed copy editor might have made, and a well-timed question could have led to a call to the AP for a clarification, which the AP could have in turn sent out to subscribers. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer copy editors in the business, and those who remain have less and less time and encouragement to raise necessary questions.

Recognize the inner bully

2010-03-30T10:44:00.000-04:00

Never mind that Romantic era and Victorian gush about the innocence of children. I have been convinced for years that on any given day any given group of children is thisclose to Lord of the Flies.

You might want to consider the nine students at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts who face criminal charges over a relentless campaign of harassment that led fifteen-year-old Phoebe Prince to hang herself.

No, children are not civilized human beings, and it takes a great deal of effort over a long span to bring them to that point. Judging from the behavior we can witness on the Internet and in public discourse, the process has been incomplete for a substantial segment of the adult population.

I am not speaking from a platform of moral superiority here, and I suspect that most of us have reason to feel shame in recollecting our childhood and adolescence. Though I was, as a bookish, nearsighted teacher’s pet, occasionally bullied in elementary school, I sometimes took the other side.

Children have a feral gift of identifying the weak in the pack and turning on them. There was a girl in elementary school in Elizaville, Kentucky, who was cross-eyed and slow-witted, and some playground genius recognized one day the phonetic similarity of Margaret and maggot. I’m not sure that she was ever taunted to her face with the word, but I can’t rule that out.

I said nothing. If you ally yourself with the weak, you too step forward to be attacked.

There was a boy in my class, until the year he failed to be promoted to the next grade, who was short and wizened and quiet. I remember mocking him one winter because he wore a red jacket with a hood. (I no longer recall what led me to single that garment out.) As an adult, I realize that he, like most of the class, was a child of farmers of limited resources, and any clothing he wound up with he was doomed to wear. But, as usual, compassion arrives late in the day.

It appears that the teachers and administrators at South Hadley did little or nothing to help Phoebe Prince, and I doubt that there are many places where anyone would. In the first place, it is extraordinarily difficult to govern the behavior of children and teenagers. In the second, there appears to be a widespread belief that, like puberty, enduring bullies is a necessary part of adult formation, the toughening required for a harsh world. And in the third – you have probably known them – there are people who appear to have gone into teaching because they like to push people around and children are available for it.

I have no remedy. I would like to think that those of us who aspire to be civilized can take a hard look at the bully who lives within us and keep him in restraints, modeling better behavior. But it’s not easy, and it doesn’t always work.

Try to keep up

2010-03-30T08:54:00.000-04:00

I’ve been meaning to write up some appreciations of Jack Lynch’s The Lexicographer’s Dilemma and some books on language sent over by Oxford University Press, but other matters have pushed themselves to the fore. Be patient. The posts will be coming, as will one about the important matter I hinted at previously.

For now, some random amusements:

Item: Arrant Pedantry suggests that there could and should be peace in the valley between prescriptivits and descriptivists (the while linking my name, though I am not worthy, with Bill Walsh’s and Jan Freeman’s). You Don’t Say heartily endorses his reasoned and irenic tone.

Item: One of Andy Bechtel’s students at Chapel Hill has written a guest post at The Editor’s Desk about the importance of editing beyond journalism:

When I received my employee handbook at orientation, I was appalled to see a typo, spelling error and incorrect word choice on every single page. The PowerPoint presentation wasn’t any better. And when my boss got up to speak, I cringed when I heard the word “interpretated” fall out of his mouth.

Individuals and businesses seem to be under the mistaken impression that editing is only for news media. But it’s not just about using the language correctly. It’s about maintaining an image.

Worth a longer look.

Item: As a longtime reader of British detective fiction, I would be happy to see some Britishisms creep into common use here, in exchange for the Americanisms we have exported.

There has been some whingeing (whining, peevish complaint) about gone missing (a perfectly fine neutral term that can accommodate both abductions and simple wandering off), though even a git (a fool, a twit, a useless person – think of the contempt you can pack into that short vowel and terminal consonant) can suss out (figure out, investigate to discover) what it means in context.

Any other admirers of P.D. James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, Martha Grimes, Ian Rankin (Scotland for aye!), and their like out there who would care to suggest additional terms?

Preoccupied

2010-03-28T06:50:00.003-04:00

You must have thought we were down to seeds and stems this past week, but there were reasons for the less frequent posting.

Item: I had a real job for five days, working temporarily as an editor at Baltimore’s Daily Record for my old Sun colleague Tom Linthicum. He and his staff were both professional and cordial, a delight to work with, but an 11 a.m.-8 p.m. shift cuts a little into the day.

Item: There was also the event that finally marked me as a true Baltimorean: A man was shot to death half a block from my house on Tuesday night.

Just as I had turned the corner from Roselawn and headed down Plymouth to pick up my son from the train station, Kathleen heard half a dozen gunshots in rapid succession. By the time J.P. and I got back, the ambulance had gone and police officers were stretching crime scene tape around the area.

What emerged over the next couple of days was that a 22-year-old man in a sedan service car, parked on Roselawn halfway between Plymouth and Pioneer, had been shot in the head, through the window of his car. Neighbors reported seeing two other cars drive away rapidly but could furnish no details.

A truck carrying floodlights drove up, and police officers combed the street for evidence. The next morning, homicide detectives were examining the area and questioning neighbors, and a fire truck appeared to wash the blood off the street.

Neighborhood speculation is that the drug trade, which can been seen operating in the area as two cars rendezvous for a brief exchange and then drive off, was involved, though some personal revenge is also possible. We will almost certainly never know.

Item: A certain amount of time was also taken up with a developing matter that I am not yet free to disclose but hope to bring to light within the next few days.

All in all, an eventful week, but not on the blog. I’ll be back to posting this week.

Gray is good

2010-03-27T12:14:00.002-04:00

You can tell from the photograph above that I am a grizzled gentleman. Grizzled, meaning gray or graying or streaked with gray hair, comes to us from the French grisel, a diminutive that rises in turn from gris, gray.

I am not a grizzly, the common name of the Ursus arctos horribilis, or grizzly bear. The bear has brown fur with white tips, so the bear is grizzled too.

Grizzly is sometimes confused with grisly, from the Old English grislic, or terrifying. What a grizzly bear can do to a human being may be grisly to look at, but the two words have no connection other than similarity of sound.

There is also a verb, to grizzle, an old dialect word from Devon and Cornwall meaning to cry or whine.

If you are a devote of voodoo, you may possess a gris-gris (also grigri), a word of West African origin for an amulet or a bag containing herbs, small bones, hair, and other objects, worn to attract good luck and ward off evil. It can also be a charm performed by an adept, so you want to be careful not to confuse grizzled, grizzly, and grisly, lest someone put the gris-gris on you. Grizzling about it will not help.

Writing is overrated

2010-03-25T17:10:00.003-04:00

I’ve worked with people who believed in writing memos – I used to believe in the practice myself. Spoken English is too sloppy, too casual, too little thought-out, they think. Sitting down with a pen or resorting to the keyboard, they think, gives them time to collect their ideas and present them in an orderly, succinct progression. It is more efficient, they say, clearer and less likely to result in misunderstandings.

Unfortunately, and my heart goes out to them, they are completely mistaken.

If you are to avoid their mistake, there are some things you have to understand.

First, people will not read your e-mail and your memos. They just don’t. They have pieces of prose flying at them all day long, as if they were pilots navigating through a barrage over Berlin. So they skim, or they stop at the third sentence in and never go back, or they ignore the text altogether.

That may be just as well, because if they paid attention to what you wrote, you might well be in trouble. Writing may be precise, but it lacks the cues of facial expression, tone, and gestures with which you communicate meaning in speech. That makes it dangerously easy for readers to misinterpret your tone and attention. What you intended as patient explanation, they see as pompous condescension; what you saw as puckish wit, they see as a sarcastic affront; what you present as a reasoned plan to correct faults, they will regard as impudence. You will do yourself no favors with these documents.

In government, in ecclesiastical circles, in business, and in other bureaucracies employing people of modest abilities keen to establish their value to the enterprise, the writing of memos resembles those Confucian exams that the Chinese imperial bureaucracy favored, or the dissertations that earn contemporary academics their doctorates: exercises pointless in themselves that serve to qualify the author for advancement. Keep it bland, and do not expect anyone to pay serious attention.

In my hot-blooded youth I imagined that wooing could be accomplished by lyrical letters and poetry, only to have the inutility of that approach regularly established. At work as in love, try face-to-face first.

Oh, that

2010-03-22T08:30:00.002-04:00

Since being given a thorough thumping by Professor Geoffrey Pullum in 2008, I have not returned to the which thicket, but a former Sun colleague now operating elsewhere has called for assistance. His shop includes editors from different backgrounds who do not agree on that/which usage.

In 1926 H.W. Fowler suggested in Modern English Usage that it would be a good thing to use that for restrictive clauses and which for nonrestrictive clauses.

We interrupt continuity to discuss the vexatious terminology. You may have been taught different terms. Fowler referred to “defining clauses.” You may have been taught “restrictive,” “limiting,” or “essential” as the terms for clauses that limit meaning, identifying one out of two or more possibilities, and “nonrestrictive,” “non-limiting,” or “non-essential” for information that is merely additional or parenthetical.

Restrictive: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.”* Not all people, but the specific class of people who have been in darkness. Nonrestrictive: “Jainism, which was born at about the same time as Buddhism, has had a great impact on Indian culture.” The coincidental rise of Buddhism is not an essential element of the sentence. The former class of clauses is not set off by commas; the latter is.

To get back to Fowler’s distinction, the first thing to stress is that this is not a rule. He merely offered that observing it would be a “gain in both lucidity & ease,” a recommendation that Garner’s Modern American Usage stoutly maintains.

The distinction is frequently, but not universally, maintained in American English, especially in written English, but British and Commonwealth writers continue to use which in both restrictive and non-restrictive senses, and nobody complains.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, after a discussion of the historical switches back and forth, comes to this:

We conclude that at the end of the 20th century, the usage of which and that—at least in prose—has pretty much settled down. You can use which or that to introduce a restrictive clause—the grounds for your choice should be stylistic—and which to introduce a nonrestrictive clause.

So if you are writing for American readers, observing the that/which distinction is a safe and advisable course. But unless you can identify some actual ambiguity that would lead to misunderstanding, it’s not a matter worth fretting over.

I am a little disconcerted, however, to see in newspaper journalism increasing instances of that clauses that are plainly nonrestrictive. Perhaps it is just another example of the carelessness and sloppiness characteristic of journalism. But – I want to be charitable – perhaps reporters are adopting it because of their immersion in the prose of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the nonrestrictive that was common.

*I can’t resist saying again that you were mistaught if you were told that that may not be used to refer to people. That is a perfectly acceptable pronoun to identify groups of people, as in the example sentence, or a person whose name is not known.

Tea Party, please note

2010-03-20T10:04:00.002-04:00

The New York Times has an article on the accelerating collapse of ACORN, the grassroots community-organizing group, which appears to be on the brink of bankruptcy:

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella. …

But wait, there’s more:

[T]he organization was dogged for years by financial problems and accusations of fraud. In the summer of 2008, infighting erupted over embezzlement of Acorn funds by the brother of the organization’s founder. Some chapters were also found to have submitted voter application forms with incorrect information on them during the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, leading to blistering charges from conservative organizations linking Acorn’s errors to the Obama campaign.

The extent of sheer incompetence, tinged with possibilities of corruption, does indeed give off a bad smell. But before conservatives indulge themselves in the shouting of hosannas, there is this to consider.

The Tea Party movement, like ACORN, includes many impassioned and well-meaning people who are not part of established groups and whose expertise in setting up and maintaining a national political organization is unproven. There are fledgling organizations within the movement whose goals and tactics may turn out to be inconsistent. And there appear to be large sums of money floating about – and conservatives know as well as anyone that when the money is flowing many people will be tempted to dip their own buckets into the stream.

Both ACORN and the Tea Party movement have their origins in citizens’ disenchantment with the existing political parties and lobbying operations, which they have found ineffective, unresponsive, or susceptible to corruption – or all three. Unfortunately, good intentions do not guarantee immunity from bad decisions, or protection from lurking rascals.

No Irish need apply

2010-03-18T17:55:00.000-04:00

Sure and it was a grand day when conservatives finally claimed political correctitude for themselves.

William F. Gavin, writing for National Review Online, opines that McCarthyism is a slur against the Irish.

Don’t leave it with me. See what you make of his argument.

After years of scorning the “culture of victimization” and ridiculing style guides that prohibited paddy wagon and dutch treat and welsh on a bet, a conservative stands up to defend an alcoholic senator who made incoherent and unsubstantiated accusations of subversion, and who was ultimately censured (Do you know what it takes for the United States Senate to censure one of its own?) on the basis of defending his Irish Catholic ethnicity.

A different ethnic tradition might term this chutzpa.

Religion and politics

2010-03-18T09:05:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I sent out this tweet: The Rev. Canon* Mary Douglas Glasspool has received the necessary consents for her consecration as a suffragan bishop. This is significant because her consecration in May will make her only the second openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church and the first lesbian bishop.

Subsequently, @mkecoffee tweeted thus: I think the Episcopal church has long been little more than a thin veneer on top of a secular worldview.

There is something to that. (Thought I was going to spring to the defense of liberal ecclesiology, didn’t you?) If I will concede that there is an argument to be made here, will Mr. Coffee and those who agree with him entertain the possibility that other denominations or congregations are cloaking secular conservative cultural views in the mantle of religion?

Discuss.

*Because she serves as canon to the bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, her formal title is the Rev. Canon. My former newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, continues to refer to her as the Rev. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Maybe hire a copy editor?

2010-03-17T09:01:00.001-04:00

Yahoo News headline: Women, girls rape victims in Haiti quake

Comment on CNN screen crawl: Jewish lobby runs America

MSNBC: I-Team: Judge Married Woman, Suspected Abuser

WJZ-TV: Man Arrested For Sexual Assault On College Campus

Reuters: BOJ split vote raises doubts about future easing

CNBC: End of Mortgage Buys Form of Tightening: Pimco

Manners maketh man

2010-03-16T08:22:00.000-04:00

A post from last September, “Take off your hat, sir,” continues to provoke occasional comments, including this most recent one: “I know you say it's disrespectful [to leave one’s hat on in a courtroom], but why is that? it just doesn't make sense.... so please explain that to me so I have a better understanding and so I have a better reason than ‘because it shows respect.’ ”

I can give some historical perspective. Removing headgear was likely a gesture of peacefulness. A warrior removing his helmet exposes his head, and this gesture of vulnerability indicates that no harm is intended. Similarly, the custom of shaking hands upon meeting seems to have originated as an indication that one is not carrying a weapon.

Over time the practice of uncovering took on additional meanings. A man removed his hat as a gesture of respect for authority in the presence of the monarch or a judge. And in time good manners dictated such practices as removing the hat at the theater, at the dinner table, at the opera, in church, in an elevator when a lady is present. Tipping the hat in encountering acquaintances became a gesture of friendly acknowledgement.

This may seem quaint and arbitrary to you, particularly if you’re wearing a baseball cap at table in a laughable effort to conceal your male-pattern baldness. And it is. Manners are inherently arbitrary. If you are male and Jewish and Orthodox, you follow a completely different set of customs about headgear.

Manners are like idioms in language. Idioms convey meanings that are not expressed by the literal words, which is why students learning a new language have to memorize idioms. There is no point in arguing over the gender of nouns in French or German; they’re just that way, and if you don’t trouble to learn them you will sound uneducated and crude to native speakers.

The force of custom can be stronger than law, which is, I think, why some people who write about usage often mistake stylistic preferences for rules of grammar. And even though they are wrong-headed in their advice, such people are on to something. The way you dress and conduct yourself and the way you write transmit messages about yourself.

You may think that wearing a baseball cap in court demonstrates your autonomy and your freedom from the dead hand of archaic custom. That’s fine, but you should be aware that the judge is going to think that you’re just a jerk or a slob. You can ignore or flout the conventions of standard written English, “just so long as you get your meaning across,” as my freshman composition students used to say, so long as you can accept that some readers will conclude that you’re subliterate and will then ignore what you have to say.

Just take off your hat, and no backtalk.

Beware of the editor

2010-03-14T09:18:00.002-04:00

I have spent thirty years working with copy editors, several of whom I have trained and many of whom I admire. They have been boon companions. But it is regrettably true that not all copy editors are equally able, and, even more regrettably, some can be positively dangerous. Here are a few you will want to watch out for.

SPEED DEMON

Speed Demon tears through copy. Hand him a text and he’ll return it to you before you’ve swallowed another sip of coffee. Speed can keep up this pace all night. Unfortunately, as he careers along he fails to notice that a proper name is spelled two different ways, not all of the subjects and verbs agree, and he has left a typo in his headline.

ONE GEAR

One Gear goes to the opposite extreme. One is meticulous. Every name is checked, every fact looked up, every sentence weighed, tested, and verified. One can handle three, maybe four texts a shift, and the pace never changes. If it is twenty minutes past deadline, steam is escaping under pressure from the news editor’s head, and the printing plant foreman is approaching hysteria, One’s lumbering pace never quickens.

PICKY PICKY PICKY

You should have been suspicious when you scored Picky Picky Picky’s applicant test. Something was marked wrong in every single sentence, usually two or three things. Picky is determined to show you that she is, by gum, an editor, and being an editor means finding lots of things wrong, without regard to significance. Large errors, small errors, things that are not errors — Picky vacuums them all up and dumps them on your desk.

BLACK/WHITE

Editing, as Black/White understands it, means following the Rules. The Rules can mainly be found in the Associated Press Stylebook, which Black/White has annotated more thoroughly than the Talmud. For every instance, there is a clear right answer and a clear wrong answer, and Black/White has a no-tolerance policy for wrong answers. Everything that comes from Black/White’s hands has a coat of battleship gray slapped over it.

LOOSEY GOOSEY

If you wrote it, it’s fine with Loosey Goosey, because changing it would interfere with the Writer’s Voice, and the voice of God is not any more sacred than the Writer’s. Loosey is particularly treasured by writers in features departments, because she never thinks that a self-indulgent goat-choker ought to be shorter or that a metaphor that would look excessive in the Bulwer-Lytton competition ought to be challenged.

AUTHOR MANQUE

There are, one blushes to admit, copy editors who fit the stereotype that writers cherish: the frustrated writer who rewrites other people’s prose just because he can. Author, unlike Picky Picky Picky, does not hold that the texts he edits are factually or grammatically defective; he just thinks that he could have written them better, and, whenever he is not closely watched, he simply rewrites to suit his own taste.

I KNOW BETTER

Those reference books on grammar and usage on the shelf next to the copy desk? That list of electronic references painstaking compiled, vetted, and distributed to the editors? I Know has never looked at any of them, because I Know knows better. I Know, as you can count on being reminded, was editing copy when you were still a zygote, and he has forgotten more about the craft than you will ever learn. (Both those statements, oddly, may be true.) He isn’t having any truck with your newfangled enthusiasms about language and editing, and if you are weak and cowardly, you will let him get away with this.

OUT OF MY DEPTH

Nobody knows why Out Of applied to be a copy editor. Perhaps someone on the parole board suggested it. Perhaps Out Of just heard that it was a job where you could sit down all day without having to run around town and talk to people you don’t know who don’t want to answer your questions anyhow. Nobody knows why Out Of was hired, either, except that the managers don’t have a clue about what editing is and imagine that just about anybody can run spell-check and format a text for the Web. Out Of doesn’t know much about language, so he doesn’t fix anything. He’s not particularly curious, so he doesn’t ask many questions. He just takes what comes along and passes it along.

I Know Better is the past of editing. Out Of My Depth is the future.

It just don't add up

2010-03-12T09:06:00.001-05:00

Before you go all peevy on me about the headline, you should be reminded that it is a direct quotation from a Warner Bros. cartoon of my youth. I will offer a public salute to the first reader who accurately identifies the source.* What it does indicate is that we live in a world in which many things simply make no sense.

Item: Mattel is producing a series of Barbie-style dolls based on characters from Mad Men. But the dolls will not have drinks and cigarettes as accessories. What next, a Glenn Beck doll that doesn’t cry?

Item: A lawsuit has been filed claiming that the E-Trade commercial showing a “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay appropriates Lindsay Lohan’s name and image without her consent. Oddly, milk is an addiction with which Ms. Lohan has not previously been associated.

As my first news editor, the late Bob Johnson, used to say, “You can sue the Bishop of Boston for bastardy. But can you get a judgment?”

Item: The Itawamba County School Board in Mississippi canceled a high school prom to which a lesbian student wanted to bring a date, saying that it did so “taking into consideration the education, safety and well-being of our students.”

Now I see that I must have been psychologically scarred by the sight of girls dancing with each other at dances when I was in high school. (Not because they were lesbian, mind you, but because the boys mistook awkwardness for masculinity and gracefulness for effeminacy.)

Item: There appear to be a great number of people interested in Tiger Woods’s sex life. There appear also to be a great number of people interested in golf. Neither interest is fathomable.

Item: Warner Bros. has begun development of a Gilligan’s Island movie. Further comment should be superfluous, though you may still have time to light out for the territory.

*Hint: Did you remember the gravy?

The world turned upside down

2010-03-11T10:50:00.000-05:00

Two propositions worth considering:

Item: Glenn Beck is a satirist employed by the sinister left-wing media to subvert conservatism by making it look ridiculous.

Evidence: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show simply runs excerpts of the Beck interview with Eric Massa. Commentary is hardly necessary.

Item: The Onion is not a satirical publication, but a factual one.

Evidence: Yesterday’s article, “Nation Shudders at Large Block on Uninterrupted text”:

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won't it just tell me what it's about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words.”

“Ow,” Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about. …

Think of the students whose eyes glaze over if they are asked to read more than a page, or the managers unable to conceptualize except in PowerPoint. This is a documentary article.

It's good to be the king

2010-03-10T10:47:00.002-05:00

Memories have not yet faded of the pleasure derived from being the benevolent despot of The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, so I took a natural interest in learning that Randy Michaels, the CEO of the Tribune Company, has issued a ukase forbidding the use of 119 words or phrases on WGN-AM.

Some of his preferences merit hearty endorsement. I was rolling my eyes at giving 110 percent from the mouths of blowhard coaches at mandatory school assemblies forty years ago. Anyone on television or radio who refers to snow as white stuff should be sent to a re-education camp in Thunder Bay, Ontario, for the winter. He scorns close proximity (where else would it be?) and the confusion of podium for lectern.

Some preferences may leave you shaking your head. No seek for look for. Motorist is out, officials verboten, pedestrian eighty-sixed. Don’t ask me why. I can understand tired vogue words like diva, idiotic weather-speak like shower activity for showers, and affected diction like perished, but allegations has always seemed to me to be a perfectly good word for unproven claims.

Still, it’s his radio station, and he has say-so.

What will be interesting to see will be the long-term effect. Those of us in the paragraph game were long familiar with decrees from Jupiter Optimus Maximus coming down from the summit of Olympus.

One Sun managing editor took exception to escapee. The –ee suffix, he insisted goes with the name of the person who is the object of the action, not the doer of the action. He decreed that any miscreant who slipped his collar was to be referred to as an escaper. And so we did, for a time. But that managing editor moved on, and the decree lapsed into desuetude. At some point, I silently deleted it from the electronic stylebook, and no one noticed.

But some idiosyncratic directives linger long after the departure of the lawgiver, even past the point at which anyone can remember its rationale. Newspaper stylebooks and copy desk lore are full of these fossil remnants. The phenomenon has been explored in Jan Freeman’s excellent Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right, which identifies arbitrary edicts about usage that have survived for generations in American newspapers, along with other idiosyncratic preferences that are completely, and rightly, ignored. It is analogous to the way that people retain actual rules of grammar and usage mixed with utter superstitions from their childhood, solid ware and junk eternally mixed.

But, as I said, it’s Mr. Michaels’s shop. He has the scepter, and, baby, he can flaunt it.

Some people at WGN will see it as their responsibility to honor Mr. Michael’s directive to the letter; some, I suspect, will take glee in subverting it at every opportunity. And someday, when Mr. Michaels himself has progressed to fresh woods and pastures new, some of his strictures will remain in force and some will have dropped from living memory.

And no man can say today which will be which.

Those who can't, teach

2010-03-09T08:09:00.001-05:00

Geoffrey K. Pullum, the celebrated linguist, laid down a full barrage yesterday, directed at a Web site called The Apple, which proclaims itself to be “Where Teachers Meet and Learn.”

The object of Professor Pullum’s artillery was a post, “11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid.” As he brought each gun to bear, the target disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and smithereens. Some of the eleven “mistakes” were not even about grammar but about subjective stylistic preferences, and the ones that were about grammar and usage were manifestly defective. You owe it to yourself to click on the link and watch the action.

Repeat customers at this location will recognize that I have exercised my own more modest battery in similar manner, recently taking aim at the bogus advice of one Sam Greenspan, whose own “11 Little-Known Grammatical Errors That Will Shock and Horrify You” also curiously follows the ten-plus-one pattern, but to no better effect.

Yielding to temptation, I sampled the comments on The Apple’s “11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid,” and, reader, I tremble for the future of the Republic. Some of the respondents, presumably teachers in our nation’s schools, heartily endorsed the author’s misguided advice. “Great post!”

A few pointed out the questionable nature of the author’s assertions about language, but some of the comments that challenged the article or other commenters did so on equally faulty grounds, as in this gorgeous specimen:

Actually, the comment should read, “The clouds appeared; then, it rained.” The “then” is separating 2 complete sentences and requires a semicolon between them and a comma after the “then”. Shame on you, writer, on national grammer day!

Language snobs were also well represented:

I am such a grammar snob and this is right up my alley. I know it may sound as though I am being arrogant but nothing makes me cringe more than when people use bad grammar. I physically feel the shivers up my spine when either one of my students or colleagues makes a grammatical mistake.

I thought for a moment that it might be the snobs and the peevers the writer was attacking in this comment:

They do serve to divide people and keep the status quo alive and well as well as serving as a very effective hegemonic tool where we police ourselves.

But on reading further I realized that this writer was aligned with the other members of the tribe holding forth at The Apple that teaching the grammar and usage of standard written English inhibits learning, leaving students’ free expression cabined, cribbed, and confined. We’ve seen the attitude before, that students cannot be taught things that they do not already know, but seldom as openly expressed.

This display of ignorance combined with arrogance is at once laughable and deeply saddening: people instructing the young in English who do not and apparently cannot identify actual rules of grammar, or distinguish standard usage from personal stylistic preference, or identify shibboleths that even diehard prescriptivists identify as errors.

It used to distress me that so many of my juniors and seniors in the editing class have trouble with grammar and usage. Now I realize that I should be humbly grateful that any of them can write intelligibly at all.

Curse you, Microsoft Word

2010-03-08T09:52:00.002-05:00

A couple of readers have complained that the ¾ symbol is showing up in these blog posts, and one suggests that they are occurring where I use the em dash. That surmise is correct.

The em dash is the one on Microsoft Word’s insert symbol menu -- Word 2007, not the earlier version I had been using -- and apparently the Blogger software does not recognize it. (I realize just now that Microsoft Word has used its symbol for the 3/4 fraction, and God knows how that will appear to you.) So now I am reduced to typing in two hyphens if I want a dash, as if I were still working on a damn typewriter.

It’s hard enough to make these dispatches intelligible without having to wrestle with inconsistencies in software. So I will consult with someone more knowledgeable about the quirks of Microsoft Word and the Blogger software – just about anyone is – to see whether some resolution of the matter is possible without my having to go back to school and earn a degree in programming. (Now I notice that something, probably the damn auto-correct feature that I forgot to shut off is converting some of the double hyphens, but not all, to en dashes. Grrrr.)

In the meantime, I may just stop using dashes altogether, which for many writers and all journalists would not be a bad idea.

More than one in ten is OK

2010-03-08T08:27:00.002-05:00

Etymology can suggest, but it cannot command.

The Latin word decem, “ten,” is the root of decimal and also decimate, which originally identified that fine old Roman custom of disciplining a mutinous legion by executing one man out of every ten.

Some finicky self-appointed guardians of language have insisted that decimate should retain its one-in-ten sense in all contexts, but English has moved on. Decimate is perfectly acceptable standard English in the sense of “to kill or destroy a large part of.” A population can be decimated ¾ substantially reduced, not precisely by a tenth, but not eliminated altogether ¾ in the outbreak of a disease.

That degree of license does not, however, mean that anything goes, as can be seen in the initial paragraph of a recent Baltimore Sun article:

An Anne Arundel County firefighter admitted Wednesday to emptying the bank accounts of a regional firefighter charity when he was its treasurer, a crime that has decimated the organization.

One is left wondering what happened. Has the organization lost a great part of its members? Or is the writer trying to indicate financial hardship? Or what? It seems likely that the word for which the writer was reaching, and missed, is devastate.

Another misuse of decimate is in the sense of “to defeat utterly,” as in the warmongering hyperbole favored by the sports pages.

If you can avoid false precision on one side and sloppiness of expression on the other, decimate is still a perfectly useful word.

Why not the worst?

2010-03-07T06:34:00.001-05:00

You English majors and lovers of literature (not necessarily identical categories), a while back on the old blog I posed a question: What’s the worst writing you ever read?

Before you spring on us extracts from the poetry of William McGonagall or Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, or from your cousin’s child’s fifth-grade book report or the latest memo on benefits from your human resources department, or the latest winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, observe a couple of rules.

(1) It must be published writing.

(2)It must be of some literary standing, not the work of a misguided amateur but rather that of a misguided professional, a writer of some reputation.

(3)It must be limited to a single, discrete passage.

(4)It must be from literature, broadly defined, rather than from criticism or (save us) from newspaper journalism.

(5) Dan Brown doesn’t count.

Some of my favorites:

Item: From Richard Crashaw’s “Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper” (referring to Magdalene’s eyes):

And now wher’er he strays,

Among the Galilean mountains,

Or more unwelcome ways,

He’s followed by two faithful fountains;

Two walking baths, two weeping motions;

Portable and compendious oceans.

Item: From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”:

“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball¾I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me¾I am part or particle of God.”

Item: From Pecy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude:

At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes.

Item: From Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

So at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature ¾ now, while the waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.

(Whew.) Have at it.

A caution about St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-06T07:36:00.002-05:00

Though the Irish in my genome is probably the deplorable Scotch-Irish Presbyterian form rather than the genuine article,* I do know this: Do not refer casually to St. Patrick’s Day as St. Patty’s Day, or you will betray ignorance.

The diminutive form of Patrick, from the Irish Padraig, is Paddy. If you want to be cute about March 17, call it St. Paddy’s Day.

Paddy is also a slang term for an Irishman, one that can give offense because of condescending, stereotypical associations.

A police van, for example, is sometimes called a paddy wagon. The New Oxford American Dictionary speculates that that came about in the 1930s or so because many police officers in major Eastern cities were of Irish descent. I suspect that the term may be associated with the stereotype of an Irishman as someone who drinks up his weekly wages, becomes violent, and has to be carted away to jail to sleep it off. Your sense of the etymology of paddy wagon will depend on whether you think the term refers to the driver or the cargo. In any case, steer clear of it; you don’t want to get anyone’s Irish up.

*St. Patrick himself was a Brit. So no harm and no foul if you choose to be honorary Irish on the grand day as you lift a pint of Guinness to your lips. Slainte.

Counting heads

2010-03-05T09:26:00.002-05:00

This is a year for midterm elections, some primaries having already been conducted, so you can be confident of being battered with polling results from now till November. Like Satchel the dog playing “food, not food” in Get Fuzzy, you’ll want to be careful about what you taste.

Advice for reporters:

That 140-character tweet isn’t going to allow for much nuance, so plan on being more thorough in the full story. Keep in mind that your readers do not have the time, and often not the expertise, to evaluate opinion polls, so you are responsible for reporting them accurately. Ask the necessary questions.

1. Who sponsored the poll? If it is a genuinely nonpartisan organization, fine. But if it is a business or labor union or party/advocacy organization, you need to be cautious about the results, and so does the reader. Unless a turncoat slips you a copy, no campaign organization is going to reveal that its candidate is less popular than registered sex offenders.

2. Who conducted the poll? Was it an organization known to be reputable, with a history of reliable results? Or not?

3. How big was the sample, and who was in it? Too small a sample, or too narrow a choice of groups within the population, and the results will be highly questionable. Make sure that the respondents were randomly selected rather than a self-selected population like the people who participate in those worthless online or call-in surveys.

4. How were the questions worded? Changes in the wording of questions can produce opposite responses from the same people. Loaded language will skew results.

5. What’s the margin of error? The confidence level? Responsible polls report both these elements. If Candidate A has 42 percent and Candidate B has 40 percent and the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percent, Candidate A might in fact be leading, but you can’t say that for sure. Confidence level for results in the overall sample will almost certainly be very different from the confidence level for subgroups.

6. When was it taken? Attitudes can fluctuate widely during a campaign. A poll more than a few days old may represent views that have since shifted. And, generally, the more distant from Election Day, the less reliable the data will be in predicting the outcome.

7. Why aren’t you asking these questions? There is nothing novel about these questions about opinion polls. Multiple sources tell you how to deal with polls ¾ much of the information in this post, for example, can also be found in the Associated Press Stylebook. So why are Associated Press articles and journalism in general so careless about repeating just about anything any pollster says?

Advice for readers:

You may not have the background to evaluate polling data, but you know enough to evaluate the articles about the polls. Be skeptical. If the article describing poll results doesn’t give you indications that the writer has done the homework described above, then you have no reason to trust the claims being made. And if the article makes exaggerated claims for the significance of the poll, you’d be well advised to be even more suspicious.

Written sources — newspapers, magazines, online publications — obviously have more scope to do the necessary level of reporting than broadcast television, though cable news operations will often describe polling data in some detail.

In the 2008 election season you could find people publishing averages of polls ¾ different surveys conducted by different organizations at different times for different populations with different questions, under the highly questionable assumption that mashing inconsistent data into a single lump provides a nugget of reliable information.

The word poll, originally meaning head, is very old; the OED records a citation from the late thirteenth century. So an opinion poll is a counting of heads. Just make sure that you don’t allow your noggin to be stuffed with dubious information.

Pulp Diction: The complete serial

2010-03-05T08:56:00.001-05:00

1. 15 items or trouble

You get ’em in the checkout at Safeway — harried mothers with kids clamoring for candy, bleary-eyed old guys pushing a cartload into the fifteen-items line, kids with green hair buying exotic produce. Some chat with the cashier, but nobody talks to the bag boy. Fine with me. I liked anonymity when I was a copy editor. I like it better now.

I was pushing a train of carts back toward the store when she grabbed my arm. I turned. “You,” I said. It wasn’t friendly.

“Mr. McIntyre, I really need to talk with you,” she said. Mostly, she was a pert little thing, but this time her voice trembled.

“I don’t have anything to say to you, Fogarty.” That’s Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Dame, Grammar Girl, something like that. Big-time blogger, raking in big bucks from rubes who couldn’t tell the present from the preterite if it jabbed them in the keister.

“Please, it’s urgent. I’ve heard from Martha Brockenbrough.”

More female trouble. The last time I saw the Brockenbrough skirt, I was in the witness stand, and she was at the defense table, trying — not convincingly — to look innocent. I’d turned her in for a homicide. I didn’t stay for the rest of the trial, but I’d heard she copped a plea to manslaughter while the jury was still out. Now she’s in the Big House for a good long while. You know the story.

“Sister, I’ve still got nothing to say to you. How the hell did you know to look for me here, anyhow?”

“I asked about you at the Intelligencer-Argus, and they said you’d been let go. Somebody said you might be here.”

“Let go? Let go? Toots, I was unceremoniously dumped, made redundant, sacked, eighty-sixed, kicked to the curb, reduced in force, right-sized. A year ago I was a minor-league copy desk tsar, and today I’m wearing a cardboard belt. The big boys got this idea that editors were interposing too many touches between the writer and the reader, and they sacked the lot of us. Just as well. They were talking about touching more than the staff at a day care center that’s hired a pedophile. I’m well rid of ’em.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I know you were well thought of. But I’m in trouble, and I really need your help.”

“Why? Caught with counterfeit gerunds again?”

“It’s not like that. Ever since I heard from Martha, I’ve been followed. I think my phone is tapped. My mail is being tampered with. My car is making a funny noise. I think it needs an oil change.”

She was getting rattled. Nothing new there. “So who cares about you?” I asked. “You’re just some two-bit grammar fancier who made it big on the Internet. There’re dozens like you — scores.”

“It’s not over,” she said, her voice breaking. “That plot you stopped last time, the one to sabotage National Grammar Day, that’s not over. They just got some of the little fish.”

“And now that you’ve been seen talking to me, they’ll come after me. Thanks a heap, lady.”

“I know where to go to find out more, but I can’t go myself. I thought you might.”

“Where is it that you can’t go that you want me to?”

She looked at me. Something cold enveloped my whole body.

“Calvert Street.”

NEXT: The last copy editor

2. The last copy editor

At the old Sun building on Calvert Street the front door yielded with a rusty creak. Dust lay thick on the guard’s desk, and small birds flew through broken windows. Bundled stacks of the last print edition displayed the headline: SEE US ON THE WEB.

Windows were out on the second floor, too, and scurrying and skittering sounds preceded me as I rounded the corner into the main room. Row on row of cubicles stretched out, each with a computer terminal like a headstone, each with a sad little collection of photos, figurines, long-dead plants. It was like walking the deck of the Mary Celeste.

On a bulletin board near the old copy desk, dangling from a single push pin, a yellowed memo listed a set of banned holiday cliches. The office next to the bulletin board was empty except for a Webster’s New World College Dictionary missing its cover.

A quavering voice asked, “Who’s there?”

A stooped figure, brandishing a red stapler, rose from one of the copy desk work stations where he had been dozing on an improvised pallet of final-edition bundles. His hair was white, his beard untrimmed, his gaze wary. He wore a green eyeshade, and I recognized my quarry: the last copy editor.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I used to be a copy editor myself. Tell me how it all ended,” I said, with a sweeping gesture.

“Son, I started here when it was the A.S. Abell Company. Then Times Mirror. Then Tribune. When Tribune went belly-up and the Scavenger Group acquired the place, it was a new editor every six months. Each one came in, did a redesign, announced a new strategy to attract readers, and got bounced before his chair got warm.

“Last one was a fellow named White. Three-barreled name. Allen William White. Lasted a month and a half. They fired him for spending too much on farewell cakes for people leaving the staff.”

“And then?”

“Then they sent in this manager — name of Volponi — who walked into the newsroom, announced that the paper didn’t really need an editor, that editors were just vestiges of an outmoded nineteenth-century industrial model, and fired just about everybody.”

“So why are you still here?”

“See this?” He held up a battered Associated Press Stylebook. “At the end, they could only afford one copy. Kept it locked in the editor’s office. You had to file a form to look at it. When they were all gone, I snagged it. Now it’s mine.”

“So what?”

“See here?” He pointed to a table with a roll of leftover newsprint stretched across the surface. It was covered with writing in a small, crabbed hand. “Now that I’ve got it, I’m revising it, making it right. I’m fixing all the stuff those arrogant fools got wrong for years.”

He was a loony, but I had to humor him. “May I see the book?”

”You have to give it back.” But he handed it over, reluctantly.

It fell open to the VERBS entry. Someone had put a dot under certain letters with a red grease pencil:

“The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of the verb forms of words frequently misspelled.

“SPLIT FORMS: In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb. ...”

illuminati

Next: The wider web

3. The wider web

“What happened to this place?”

I whirled around. “Fogarty! I told you to stay out.”

The Old Copy Editor said, “Fogarty? Mignon Fogarty? Great Fowler’s Ghost, is this Grammar Girl herself?”

“Yeah,” I said, “minus the cape and the winged boots.”

“Could I have your autograph, Ms. Fogarty? On my copy of The Grammar Devotional?”

“We’ve got more important things to do,” I said. She didn’t listen. She never listens.

“Why, certainly,” she said, whipping out a pen faster than the Earp boys slapped leather at the O.K. Corral. “But tell me, what happened to this place?”

“Well,” the Old Copy Editor said, “with nobody going into print journalism anymore, they ran out of unpaid interns, and then they couldn’t generate enough copy to fill as much as six pages. They tried to sell the building, but even the state penitentiary system turned them down. Plan to turn the printing plant into luxury waterfront condos went bust, too. They offered up the computer equipment, but it was so old and broken down from lack of maintenance that even the Third World wouldn’t touch it.

“But the worst was, they lost the Web. They cheesed off the funeral directors — tried to jack up the prices for the death notices on the Web, and the funeral directors set up their own obituary Web site. Turns out the obits were the only things of ours anyone still read. Web traffic dropped to a couple of dozen hits a day, and the Scavenger Group abandoned the whole shebang. One day, everybody just left.”

“Fogarty!” I yelled. “Enough! You have to look at this.” I shoved the VERBS entry at her, and her big brown eyes widened.

“This is big,” she said, “bigger than just the Peevers.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

“Look,” she said, her broad brow furrowing. “Did you see? There are pinpricks under other letters.”

“What? Let me look.”

She was right:

“The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of the verb forms of words frequently misspelled.

“SPLIT FORMS: In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb. ...”

mensa

“You know what this means?” she asked.

“It means the conspiracy is broader than anyone could have imagined. It’s big, all right. The AP itself. The Peevers. The self-appointed language authorities. The Illuminati. And now the aristocrats of the multiple-choice test. They’re all in on it. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve recruited the Myers-Briggsians, too — they’ll fall for anything. And it’s all coded in the AP Stylebook. You see what we have to do now?”

“You mean ...”

“Yes, sister. We’ve got to break into AP Stylebook Headquarters. Fast.”

Next: The dark tower

4. The dark tower

The Amtrak from Baltimore to New York was only ninety minutes late to Penn Station, and the sun was setting as Fogarty and I crept up on AP Stylebook Headquarters.

“We’re in luck,” I whispered. “They haven’t lowered the portcullis yet.”

“But there’s a guard,” she said.

“Maybe you could distract that slab of brawn while I slip past.”

“Leave it to me.” She loosened two buttons on her blouse and walked up to the muscle. His head turned; I slipped past. A minute later, after a dull thud and a splash, Fogarty was beside me.

“This place is a damn labyrinth,” I swore. Corridors, dimly lit by flaring torches, stretched in all directions, and there was no sound but the dripping of water on the stone floors.

A rumbling came behind us. “Quick, in here,” I hissed, and we ducked through a doorway.

A cart rolled by, just an intern delivering a hamper of inconsistencies to the Numbers department.

“Safe,” I breathed, and then noticed that we were in a stairway leading upward. “Come this way.”

A door at the top opened into a turret room. As we stepped inside, the door slammed behind us, and a dry, thin voice said, “I’ve been expecting you, McIntyre, but I didn’t realize that the Grammar Magnate would be with you.”

“Wane Waly,” I said. He stood behind a desk, a wizened figure radiating malice like a corporate vice president purging people who actually work.

“Who?” Fogarty whispered.

“A failed copy editor who turned against the craft. I should have guessed he would be the cat’s paw for this conspiracy.”

“And you, McIntyre,” he said, “you were never more than a caricature, a fossil who needed to be swept out of the newsroom. Whereas I am one with the future.”

“What future are you talking about?” Fogarty asked.

“Anyone who reads Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue can see how effectively language can be an instrument of social control. But the lexicographers and linguists went descriptive and democratic and frittered away their opportunity. Now, with the Peevers and the Mensans puffed up in their imagined superior intellects and on our side, and the AP Stylebook binding and distracting editors with trivia and idiotic restrictions, we can strike.”

“You’re mad,” Fogarty said.

“Cliche,” I murmured.

“By sunset today, National Grammar Day,” he snickered, “all those smutty lexicographers — that McKean wretch with her crossword dress, and that radio blowhard Grant Barrett, and that upstart Ben Zimmer — they’ll all be clapped in irons. Along with that popinjay Sheidlower. Then,” his voice rising to a shriek, “the Illuminati will decree what people speak and write and thus how they think —”

With the thunder of many boots, a battering ram burst open the door. In strode Mark Liberman of Penn at the head of Language Log’s Modal Auxiliary Corps. Quickly seized and bound, Waly was borne away screaming, spittle flying from his contorted lips.

The room fell silent.

“How did you know we were here?” I asked Liberman.

“You’re not hard to tail,” he said.

“Is it all over?” Fogarty asked.

“The language is secure again, ma’am,” Liberman said in the clipped tones of command.

“Good for you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Baltimore. Safeway has a big coupon sale starting tomorrow, and all the bag boys have been called in.”

The End

Pulp Diction 4: The dark tower

2010-03-04T07:33:00.000-05:00

(Previously: 15 items or trouble, The last copy editor, The wider web)

The Amtrak from Baltimore to New York was only ninety minutes late to Penn Station, and the sun was setting as Fogarty and I crept up on AP Stylebook Headquarters.

“We’re in luck,” I whispered. “They haven’t lowered the portcullis yet.”

“But there’s a guard,” she said.

“Maybe you could distract that slab of brawn while I slip past.”

“Leave it to me.” She loosened two buttons on her blouse and walked up to the muscle. His head turned; I slipped past. A minute later, after a dull thud and a splash, Fogarty was beside me.

“This place is a damn labyrinth,” I swore. Corridors, dimly lit by flaring torches, stretched in all directions, and there was no sound but the dripping of water on the stone floors.

A rumbling came behind us. “Quick, in here,” I hissed, and we ducked through a doorway.

A cart rolled by, just an intern delivering a hamper of inconsistencies to the Numbers department.

“Safe,” I breathed, and then noticed that we were in a stairway leading upward. “Come this way.”

“Wane Waly,” I said. He stood behind a desk, a wizened figure radiating malice like a corporate vice president purging people who actually work.

“Who?” Fogarty whispered.

“A failed copy editor who turned against the craft. I should have guessed he would be the cat’s paw for this conspiracy.”

“And you, McIntyre,” he said, “you were never more than a caricature, a fossil who needed to be swept out of the newsroom. Whereas I am one with the future.”

“What future are you talking about?” Fogarty asked.

“Anyone who reads Swift’s Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue can see how effectively language can be an instrument of social control. But the lexicographers and linguists went descriptive and democratic and frittered away their opportunity. Now, with the Peevers and the Mensans puffed up in their imagined superior intellects and on our side, and the AP Stylebook binding and distracting editors with trivia and idiotic restrictions, we can strike.”

“You’re mad,” Fogarty said.

“Cliche,” I murmured.

The room fell silent.

“How did you know we were here?” I asked Liberman.

“You’re not hard to tail,” he said.

“Is it all over?” Fogarty asked.

“The language is secure again, ma’am,” Liberman said in the clipped tones of command.

“Good for you,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Baltimore. Safeway has a big coupon sale starting tomorrow, and all the bag boys have been called in.”

The End

Wrapped in the mantle of shame

2010-03-03T09:00:00.002-05:00

More in sorrow ...

The current issue of The New Yorker has an article on Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, in which one passage describes the mayor’s boyhood home as having “seven bronzed baby shoes on the mantle.”

Your role in National Grammar Day

2010-03-03T06:23:00.002-05:00

Admittedly, National Grammar Day was cooked up by Martha Brockenbrough as a stunt. She wanted to publicize her book. This year, Mignon Fogarty (you know, Grammar Girl) has taken over, and she has two books to flog. I don’t object to this for a nanosecond. First off, it’s fun. And both of them are agreeable people who offer sensible advice. I salute them. (If I should find a publisher for my book on editing (more than 30,000 words to date in a very rough draft), I will push it as shamelessly as you can imagine.)

But National Grammar Day can also be more than a stunt. One way to make it substantial — no, not by acting as an officious prig and peever — is to practice the craft to produce more effective writing.

Item: Hire an editor. Hundreds of us have been driven out of our jobs by the drop in revenues for publications and by the pernicious misapprehension that no one really cares any longer for accuracy, clarity, and precision in prose. If you have hiring authority, or influence on someone who has hiring authority, hire a damn copy editor. You know, or ought to know, that you need one. Probably more than one. If you are not in hiring authority but are working on a manuscript or a Web site, hire a freelancer. You’re not that good on your own. There are many able people looking for work, and you would benefit from their expertise.

Item: Get yourself some good advice. If you were taught bogus “rules” in school, or if no one ever taught you any rules at all, you need additional education. Buy Garner’s Modern American Usage and/or Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Get hold of Joseph Williams’s Style. Start reading what the linguists say at Language Log. Read through the posts on this site’s blogroll. Hell, read my back posts. Are you going to be a serious writer or are you content to be some schmuck who can’t put a noun against a verb without embarrassing himself?

Item: Writing is a craft, people. You learn it by practicing it. You want anyone to see that first birdhouse or shoeshine box you built in carpentry class or that first dress you ever sewed? You want anyone to hear that first work you learned on the piano or the clarinet? Practice, practice, if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, and brace yourself to embarrass yourself along the way. Stay humble, be open to learning more than you already know, and keep writing. If you actually have something to say, you will find a way to say it. But find someone whose taste and honesty you can rely on to tell you what works and what doesn’t.

Item: To go beyond simple grammar and usage, if you want to write with integrity and earn the loyalty of your readers, you cannot simply repeat statements of fact that you have made no attempt to verify — however well they match your personal preferences. You cannot crib from other writers without giving them credit. You cannot make things up. You cannot afford to bore your readers with slack, unfocused, careless writing. You are imposing on your reader’s time; do not waste it.

Item: I started in journalism after my junior year in high school, when I began work in the summers for Lowell and Jean Denton at the Flemingsburg Gazette in Fleminsgburg, Kentucky. I spent four years as an undergraduate at Michigan State and six years as a graduate student at Syracuse, six and a half years at The Cincinnati Enquirer, and nearly twenty-three years at The Baltimore Sun. I quote Chaucer at the end of the semester in my editing class at Loyola: “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” I still learn something new about the language and writing and editing every day. So can you, but you must be willing to look for it.

DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:

If a reader should order any of these books from Amazon.com by clicking on the links, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.

Community organized

2010-03-02T06:23:00.000-05:00

Last week I heard an apologist for business interests refer to people concerned about global warming as “the alarmist community.” Then on Sunday an innocuous post about gluten on Dining@Large yielded an increasingly strident series of comments, one by a person self-identified as a member of the “gluten free community.” *

I do not speak on behalf of the language usage community but for myself when I say that I am mildly disturbed and to a greater degree annoyed by this vogue for identifying single-issue groups as a “community.” **

Community and common are etymologically related, and I understand that people who suffer from a disorder have common interests and concerns. But community suggests, or ought to, something broader. A community of citizens, such as a neighborhood, has multiple interests and concerns: property values, public safety, schools, taxes, socializing, and many more. In ecological terms, a community is made up of different species acting interdependently in a habitat.

I cringe when I read a reference in a news story to the “African-American community,” because such references leave the impression of a uniform, monolithic group rather than suggest the complexity of interests and concerns that must exist among the members.

We would be better off if we trained ourselves to think and speak about ourselves as members of larger communities rather than narrow ones.

*It did not take long at Dining@Large for someone to crop up with obscure nonsense about gluten and vaccines. Is there some kind of Distant Early Warning system to which the members of the tinfoil hat community are connected?

**How am I supposed to decide which community I represent? I am a former member of the pipe-smoking community and in graduate school was a member of the ABD (All But Dissertation or, alternatively, All But Dead) community. For years I was a member of the newspaper community and the East Coast Liberal Media Elite community but am now in the unemployed community — and, buster, there are a lot of us. I am two-thirds of the way toward eligibility for the Dead White Male community, a lifelong member of the nearsighted community, a practicing member of the bookworm community, an enthusiastic member of the bourbon-drinking, martini-mixing, draft-microbrew-swilling community. Not to mention the bow tie community. Who gets to decide which community defines me?

Tune in tomorrow

2010-03-01T12:41:00.000-05:00

As part of the preliminaries to National Grammar Day on Thursday, I recorded an interview this morning that is to be broadcast tomorrow on Sheilah Kast’s Maryland Morning show on WYPR-FM, Baltimore. If you would like to tune in, I am told that the interview is likely to air between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m.

As a further preparation for those of you who may not yet have laid in supplies, here is a link to my instructional video on making a martini, so that you will not let the great day pass without raising to your lips a proper grammartini.

Slainte!

Me, myself, and I

2010-03-01T08:05:00.001-05:00

A reader new to this blog has been puzzled by the photo captions in Gore Vidal’s Snapshots in History’s Glare: “Howard and I at Edgewater in the early fifties” and “Senator Gore and I in the thirties.” She wonders whether these are correct or whether me would be preferable.

Mr. Vidal’s usage is traditional and impeccable. Generally speaking, the pronoun me is used as the object of a verb or preposition, I as a subject. Where the pronoun is not an object and holds the same position as the subject of a sentence, as in these captions, I is the default.

Generally, however, is a regrettably necessary weasel word in talking about usage. There are many situations in which me is acceptable and even preferable in place of I. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage devotes a full page to the historical acceptance of it’s me, and Garner on Usage also accepts it, particularly in informal contexts.

As usage, particularly American usage, has grown more informal, what was once taught and modeled as correct — it is I — can look forbiddingly formal, even pretentious. So photo captions written as in Mr. Vidal’s book can look just a little off to younger readers.

There is a perversely reverse side of informality. Some people, struggling to avoid looking vulgar and undereducated, veer into hypercorrection, shunning me and uttering constructions like between you and I. Don’t go there.

Some, having been trained that using I and me sounds egotistical, use the reflexive pronoun myself in its place for the sake of modesty: The wife and myself had a real swell time, Duchess. All right, I loaded the dice with that one. While myself is best used as a reflexive — I saw it myself — the pronoun has been used regularly over four centuries as both subject and object in casual correspondence or conversation. Merriam-Webster’s cites examples from Samuel Johnson, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and numerous other luminaries.

As we grow less rigid about language, because the prevailing trend is toward less formality in most public writing, the question for the writer is often less whether something is right or wrong, but whether the degree of formality or informality is appropriate for the audience and the context.

Addendum: The reader also wondered about the use of awing in The New York Times: “something to the effect that Meryl Streep was awing audiences. Do you think this is a word? If it is, would it be ‘aweing’?”

Awe is both a noun and a verb, and it drops the e for the present participle