On this date in 1880, Henry Louis Mencken was born. By the time of the stroke in 1948 that robbed him of the ability to read and write, he had produced an imposing oeuvre of reportage, essays, criticism, memoir, and linguistic research, and he had bestowed upon The Baltimore Sun a fame whose afterglow has not completely faded.
Quoting him is irresistible: “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
Writing on Warren Harding’s inaugural address, he said that the president “writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
He denounced chiropractic as quackery and then affected to worry that it might actually work, failing to “suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal.” Ever the stout libertarian, he continued: “If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.”
In a letter to William Saroyan, he wrote: “I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to Hell and learn from other editors how dreadful their job was on earth.”
In Newspaper Days, his memoir of the no-holds-barred journalism in Baltimore in the early years of the 20th century, he describes how he and two other reporters, assigned to cover the docks of South Baltimore, increased their efficiency by repairing to a saloon and agreeing on invented details for the stories they would file. Their managing editors, monitoring the competition closely, noted the correspondences and praised the three for their accuracy. Thus, he said, he “took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.”
It still isn’t.
Today is his birthday, and if you get a chance, lift a glass of pilsner to his shade.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
A catholic taste
The mark of a mature taste is the ability to appreciate excellence in different forms — Carolina barbecue as well as steak au poivre. Thus, in proper appreciation of writing, one should be able to appreciate a writer who adheres to the most formal conventions of usage as well as one who writes colloquially with flair.
Here’s a parallel. I admire and appreciate the work that has been done in music with period instruments and period technique. I love the recordings that Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other musicians have done with the music of Bach, for example.
But once, more than thirty years ago, the formidable Lili Kraus came out on stage at one of the Mostly Mozrt concerts at Lincoln Center to play as an encore the Rondo Alla Turca from Mozart’s A-major piano sonata. She didn’t play it on some tinkly little reconstructed pianoforte; she banged out the bejeezus on a Steinway grand, and I can hear that glorious sound in my head to this day.
You have to be able to appreciate both.
Here’s a parallel. I admire and appreciate the work that has been done in music with period instruments and period technique. I love the recordings that Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other musicians have done with the music of Bach, for example.
But once, more than thirty years ago, the formidable Lili Kraus came out on stage at one of the Mostly Mozrt concerts at Lincoln Center to play as an encore the Rondo Alla Turca from Mozart’s A-major piano sonata. She didn’t play it on some tinkly little reconstructed pianoforte; she banged out the bejeezus on a Steinway grand, and I can hear that glorious sound in my head to this day.
You have to be able to appreciate both.
Congress has a lot to learn
There was a brief brouhaha this week after the gentleman from South Carolina blurted, “You lie!” during the president’s address to Congress, with much pious commentary about decorum. Defenders of the gentleman from South Carolina reminded us that Democrats had booed President George W. Bush on more than one occasion — a defense rather like “those other kids did it first.”
What has been lost in this largely pointless exchange — and distraction from the national issue of health care ostensibly under discussion — is the pathetic feebleness of Congressional invective. “Boo!” and “You lie!” in the legislative body where the puissant John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that a prominent figure “shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.” (It is thought that Mr. Randolph was referring to Henry Clay.)
At Language Log, they are celebrating the invective of Paul Keating, the former prime minister of Australia whose comments in Parliament identified his opponents as, among other things, harlots, blackguards, brain-damaged, dullards, fools and incompetents, perfumed gigolos, unrepresentative swill, and stunned mullets. A commenter added this picturesque item:
One of Paul Keating's best insults came when he was berating the leader of the Country Party, who came from a family of undertakers. He described him as a man who had ‘accrued his wealth by stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’*
When will the Republic elect legislators who can meet this lofty standard?
*Iambic hexameter. Classy.
What has been lost in this largely pointless exchange — and distraction from the national issue of health care ostensibly under discussion — is the pathetic feebleness of Congressional invective. “Boo!” and “You lie!” in the legislative body where the puissant John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that a prominent figure “shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.” (It is thought that Mr. Randolph was referring to Henry Clay.)
At Language Log, they are celebrating the invective of Paul Keating, the former prime minister of Australia whose comments in Parliament identified his opponents as, among other things, harlots, blackguards, brain-damaged, dullards, fools and incompetents, perfumed gigolos, unrepresentative swill, and stunned mullets. A commenter added this picturesque item:
One of Paul Keating's best insults came when he was berating the leader of the Country Party, who came from a family of undertakers. He described him as a man who had ‘accrued his wealth by stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’*
When will the Republic elect legislators who can meet this lofty standard?
*Iambic hexameter. Classy.
You lie, you lay, you have lain
Thanks to a dispatch from a reader of this blog, I learned that a reader of the Maryland Gazette complained about the grammar of the opening sentence in a recent article:
An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week.
The complaint, that laid should have been lain, prompted a defense from Rick Hutzell, the editor and, he says, “the ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling for the newspaper.”* In his defense, Mr. Hutzell wrote:
“... I made a conscious decision to use laid in the lead, or opening paragraph, and headline instead of the grammatically correct lain.
“While the transitive verb was called for, Strunk and White note in ‘The Elements of Style’ that laid can be used in colloquial or slang speech. Because lain is almost never used in common conversation, I felt its presence in the lead paragraph and headline would have been a stopper for most readers. I ran this by another editor, who agreed.”
Permit me to express regret that a fellow ultimate aribiter should use Strunk and White as a prop for his authority and, even more regrettably, confuse transitive and intransitive.
Perhaps if the revenues of the Maryland Gazette hold up, Mr. Hutzell could lay out $45 for the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage,** which would help him sort out transitive and intransitive and give him a little more support for his decision on laid and lain.
Bryan Garner explains that the nonstandard use of forms of lay in place of lie is very common in speech and that some commentators insist that it is not even an error. “But make no mistake,” he says, “using these verbs correctly is a mark of refinement.”***
On his new “language-change index” feature, Mr. Garner rates laid for a past tense of lie as “virtually universal” but “opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts.”
There you go, Mr. Hutzell, a defensible decision but a faulty explanation. It is never easy being an ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling.
And catching up ...
Did you miss me during the past week? Preoccupied with new class preps and a series of freelance editing gigs, I lacked the time to post.**** So:
Item: Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word is formally published. Maybe you say, “DILLIGAF,” a term you will find therein.
Item: On Twitter, @henryhitchings is marking the run-up to the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson’s birth (September 18) with a tweet-a-day quote. The first was Johnson’s decisive riposte to the hoary artists’ complaint that non-artists aren’t qualified to criticize their work:
“You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
And subsequently, a salutary reminder to those of us who quibble over words:
“No word is ... intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words ... depends wholly upon accident and custom.”
Item: Look at Headsup: The Blog for some prime examples of tortured journalistic syntax. Then ask yourself whether sheer bad writing might have something to do with the plight of newspapers.
Item: Belatedly but appropriately, the British government, in the person of the prime minister, has apologized for the unconscionable persecution of Alan Turing, which drove him to suicide. As a bonus, as Language Log notes, it is an illustration of a proper apology.
*I, too, was once such a tinpot authority. Ah, the bygone palmy days.
**About which, more in a future post.
***I am not a reader of the Maryland Gazette and so cannot comment on its degree of refinement or that of its readers.
****Dearly as I love you all, the freelance clients pay me, and you do not.
An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week.
The complaint, that laid should have been lain, prompted a defense from Rick Hutzell, the editor and, he says, “the ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling for the newspaper.”* In his defense, Mr. Hutzell wrote:
“... I made a conscious decision to use laid in the lead, or opening paragraph, and headline instead of the grammatically correct lain.
“While the transitive verb was called for, Strunk and White note in ‘The Elements of Style’ that laid can be used in colloquial or slang speech. Because lain is almost never used in common conversation, I felt its presence in the lead paragraph and headline would have been a stopper for most readers. I ran this by another editor, who agreed.”
Permit me to express regret that a fellow ultimate aribiter should use Strunk and White as a prop for his authority and, even more regrettably, confuse transitive and intransitive.
Perhaps if the revenues of the Maryland Gazette hold up, Mr. Hutzell could lay out $45 for the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage,** which would help him sort out transitive and intransitive and give him a little more support for his decision on laid and lain.
Bryan Garner explains that the nonstandard use of forms of lay in place of lie is very common in speech and that some commentators insist that it is not even an error. “But make no mistake,” he says, “using these verbs correctly is a mark of refinement.”***
On his new “language-change index” feature, Mr. Garner rates laid for a past tense of lie as “virtually universal” but “opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts.”
There you go, Mr. Hutzell, a defensible decision but a faulty explanation. It is never easy being an ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling.
And catching up ...
Did you miss me during the past week? Preoccupied with new class preps and a series of freelance editing gigs, I lacked the time to post.**** So:
Item: Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word is formally published. Maybe you say, “DILLIGAF,” a term you will find therein.
Item: On Twitter, @henryhitchings is marking the run-up to the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson’s birth (September 18) with a tweet-a-day quote. The first was Johnson’s decisive riposte to the hoary artists’ complaint that non-artists aren’t qualified to criticize their work:
“You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
And subsequently, a salutary reminder to those of us who quibble over words:
“No word is ... intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words ... depends wholly upon accident and custom.”
Item: Look at Headsup: The Blog for some prime examples of tortured journalistic syntax. Then ask yourself whether sheer bad writing might have something to do with the plight of newspapers.
Item: Belatedly but appropriately, the British government, in the person of the prime minister, has apologized for the unconscionable persecution of Alan Turing, which drove him to suicide. As a bonus, as Language Log notes, it is an illustration of a proper apology.
*I, too, was once such a tinpot authority. Ah, the bygone palmy days.
**About which, more in a future post.
***I am not a reader of the Maryland Gazette and so cannot comment on its degree of refinement or that of its readers.
****Dearly as I love you all, the freelance clients pay me, and you do not.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
A qualified endorsement of the press
George Chandler-Powell is a character, a surgeon, in P.D. James’s most recent novel, The Private Patient. At one point Mr. Chandler-Powell (British surgeons do not call themselves “doctor”) expresses views about the press:
“[F]rankly, I wouldn’t lift a finger to muzzle the popular press. When you consider the machinations and deviousness of governments, we need some organisation strong enough to shout occasionally. I used to believe that I lived in a free country. Now I have to accept that I don’t. But at least we have a free press, and I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of vulgarity, popularisation, sentimentality and even misrepresentation to ensure it remains free.”
“[F]rankly, I wouldn’t lift a finger to muzzle the popular press. When you consider the machinations and deviousness of governments, we need some organisation strong enough to shout occasionally. I used to believe that I lived in a free country. Now I have to accept that I don’t. But at least we have a free press, and I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of vulgarity, popularisation, sentimentality and even misrepresentation to ensure it remains free.”
Friday, September 4, 2009
No easy pun here about The Sun setting
Too preoccupied with various editing projects to blog much this week, I still got around to reading the Baltimore Magazine article by Evan Serpick about the parlous state of The Baltimore Sun, my former employer. I wish it had been better.
There is factual matter in the article about the precipitous drop in revenue over the past few years and the consequent reduction of the size and scope of the paper and of the staff — and the electronic version of the article corrects the blunder about the Seattle newspaper scene from the print edition of the magazine.
But I wish that Mr. Serpick had made more of an effort to put the newspaper’s plight in a broader context.
Yes, Tribune Company officials made decisions they came to rue in acquiring Times Mirror, and Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune saddled the company with even greater debt and brought it into bankruptcy. But Tribune does not stand alone, as Mr. Serpick mentions casually but does not explore. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight Ridder, may be at risk of bankruptcy, and Freedom Communications, the parent company of the Orange County Register, once a fabulously profitable newspaper, filed for Chapter 11 this week. Lots of colossi are teetering.
Similarly, Monty Cook’s efforts as editor of The Sun to develop “platform-neutral” articles for both electronic and print publication are hardly an eccentricity. Most other newspapers, watching their aging readership steadily decline, are struggling to find new readers and new advertising revenue on the Internet. What The Sun is attempting may not work, but no one else has come up with a better approach for a metropolitan daily.
But it is a series of remarks that I find most regrettable. The most regrettable is Mr. Serpick’s statement, “Many Sun staffers groan about Cook's incompetence and complain that he has tried to solve the paper's problems with endless redesigns.” You’ll note that Mr. Cook’s supposed incompetence is presented as a settled fact, for which the article does not provide substantiation. And two of most the recent redesigns were conducted before he became editor.
Then there are the anonymous comments, some bashing the editor, some scornful of the younger employees, some indignant about the older employees — exactly the sort of backbiting one would expect in a situation in which people are angry and fearful. But once again, they are assertions for which no support is offered. In my time at The Sun, the paper’s guidelines on anonymous quotations held that they could be justified only when they contributed substantially to the meaning of the story. These don’t.
Toward the end of the article, there is a perfunctory effort to look ahead, at such possible remedies as local ownership, about which I have previously expressed doubts, and David Simon’s proposal to erect a pay wall around newspapers — which has been greeted with widespread skepticism, one observer having suggested that Mr. Simon might make an HBO series about the failure of newspapers that take his advice.
Mr. Serpick is quite correct about the diminished state of a proud newspaper, suffering like many others from demographic, technological, and economic circumstances beyond any single paper’s control. He is correct that the remaining staff is struggling to weather the storm and navigate to calmer waters. But his article does not add much to what was already known.
There is factual matter in the article about the precipitous drop in revenue over the past few years and the consequent reduction of the size and scope of the paper and of the staff — and the electronic version of the article corrects the blunder about the Seattle newspaper scene from the print edition of the magazine.
But I wish that Mr. Serpick had made more of an effort to put the newspaper’s plight in a broader context.
Yes, Tribune Company officials made decisions they came to rue in acquiring Times Mirror, and Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune saddled the company with even greater debt and brought it into bankruptcy. But Tribune does not stand alone, as Mr. Serpick mentions casually but does not explore. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight Ridder, may be at risk of bankruptcy, and Freedom Communications, the parent company of the Orange County Register, once a fabulously profitable newspaper, filed for Chapter 11 this week. Lots of colossi are teetering.
Similarly, Monty Cook’s efforts as editor of The Sun to develop “platform-neutral” articles for both electronic and print publication are hardly an eccentricity. Most other newspapers, watching their aging readership steadily decline, are struggling to find new readers and new advertising revenue on the Internet. What The Sun is attempting may not work, but no one else has come up with a better approach for a metropolitan daily.
But it is a series of remarks that I find most regrettable. The most regrettable is Mr. Serpick’s statement, “Many Sun staffers groan about Cook's incompetence and complain that he has tried to solve the paper's problems with endless redesigns.” You’ll note that Mr. Cook’s supposed incompetence is presented as a settled fact, for which the article does not provide substantiation. And two of most the recent redesigns were conducted before he became editor.
Then there are the anonymous comments, some bashing the editor, some scornful of the younger employees, some indignant about the older employees — exactly the sort of backbiting one would expect in a situation in which people are angry and fearful. But once again, they are assertions for which no support is offered. In my time at The Sun, the paper’s guidelines on anonymous quotations held that they could be justified only when they contributed substantially to the meaning of the story. These don’t.
Toward the end of the article, there is a perfunctory effort to look ahead, at such possible remedies as local ownership, about which I have previously expressed doubts, and David Simon’s proposal to erect a pay wall around newspapers — which has been greeted with widespread skepticism, one observer having suggested that Mr. Simon might make an HBO series about the failure of newspapers that take his advice.
Mr. Serpick is quite correct about the diminished state of a proud newspaper, suffering like many others from demographic, technological, and economic circumstances beyond any single paper’s control. He is correct that the remaining staff is struggling to weather the storm and navigate to calmer waters. But his article does not add much to what was already known.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Say 'Arrrrrrrr'
With International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) just a couple of weeks off, here is an important reminder:
A pirate’s rhotic growl is rendered thus: Arrrrrrr, with the number of consonants at your discretion.
Arrrrrrgh is an expression of disappointment, distress, anguish. It is thus not appropriate for pirate talk and should not be confused with Arrrrrrr.
Please note this particularly for headline and caption purposes.
A pirate’s rhotic growl is rendered thus: Arrrrrrr, with the number of consonants at your discretion.
Arrrrrrgh is an expression of disappointment, distress, anguish. It is thus not appropriate for pirate talk and should not be confused with Arrrrrrr.
Please note this particularly for headline and caption purposes.
Peevologist psychology
The peevologist, a self-proclaimed expert on language, can be readily identified by certain key characteristics: a belief, stated or implicit, that the English language is in decline and being corrupted; much moaning about falling standards, often violated by identifiable groups, particularly the young; repeated brandishing of fetishes unsupported by linguistics, history, or practice (think of the split infinitive).
A post last week, “Musée des Peevologies,” offered some exhibits of peevology, and this week, as promised, we undertake a look at the psychological elements that contribute to full-blown peevology.
The teacher’s pet: The student who actually does the assignment and gives the correct answer earns the teacher’s praise. That praise being especially valuable if the student is a bookworm and inept at sports, coming up with the right answer every time becomes a powerful motivator. And when the teacher is a former teacher’s pet, grown up in the belief that there is always a right answer that the student can and should supply, the loop is closed.
The English major: The teacher’s pet who goes on to be an English major is ripe for seduction by High Modernism, with its doctrine that the greatest literary texts can be understood only by an embattled minority sensitive to nuance and allusion, and surrounded by the herd. That the prestige of majoring in English is close to nil (though still a notch or two higher than going into the School of Education) makes it necessary to hold even more firmly to that sense of being among an elect.
The copy editor: Once succumbing to journalism, job prospects for English majors being what they are and always have been, the developing peevologist likely fetches up on the copy desk. Copy editors (a dwindling species) focus on the minutiae of language, and the former English major is expected to be an expert on grammar and usage (though chances are excellent that he has never studied linguistics*). In this environment, the peevologist’s bent is reinforced by the copy editor’s conviction, echoing the lesson of the teacher’s pet, that there is always a right answer. Everything in editing is a 1 or a 0, right or wrong, as specified by the Associated Press Stylebook or some tortured exegesis of it.
The cranky old white guy:** As the arteries harden, so do the attitudes. There was, it seems, a golden age, usually dating from the peevologist’s youth or just before his time, when there were Standards. Those Standards are always being undermined, and the greatest danger comes from people who are younger than the peevologist, or of a different ethnic, cultural, or class background. The peevologist stands bravely on the ramparts, menaced by the barbarian hordes, and he will not capitulate. In plain fact, he is merely a snob.
H.L. Mencken, a gifted amateur student of the English language in its American version, was rightly skeptical of snobs and self-anointed authorities, writing in his monumental work, The American Language:
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.
We have English because some exceedingly plain people, a rabble of illiterate peasants, abandoned the standards of Anglo-Saxon, and English remains, like all other languages, what its speakers and writers collectively make of it. Linguists understand this, and they explore the mechanisms and richnesses of the language, as it is actually spoken and actually written. Reasonable prescriptivists, among whom I number myself,*** who aim to advise people how to write more clearly, more effectively, more elegantly, acknowledge this and labor to offer advice that is better informed than the misguided strictures of the peevologists.
*Actually, English majors and journalists (the latter group often with a less reliable education even than the English major’s) may never have studied grammar much in any form. Thus we can find people railing against the split infinitive who do not know what an infinitive is, or condemning passive voice in constructions that are not passive.
**Not to stereotype, but you must surely have noticed how frequently the peevologist is white, male, and middle-aged or older.
***The ready reader of this blog will have recognized how many dangerous personal traits I have struggled with to move toward such reasonableness.
A post last week, “Musée des Peevologies,” offered some exhibits of peevology, and this week, as promised, we undertake a look at the psychological elements that contribute to full-blown peevology.
The teacher’s pet: The student who actually does the assignment and gives the correct answer earns the teacher’s praise. That praise being especially valuable if the student is a bookworm and inept at sports, coming up with the right answer every time becomes a powerful motivator. And when the teacher is a former teacher’s pet, grown up in the belief that there is always a right answer that the student can and should supply, the loop is closed.
The English major: The teacher’s pet who goes on to be an English major is ripe for seduction by High Modernism, with its doctrine that the greatest literary texts can be understood only by an embattled minority sensitive to nuance and allusion, and surrounded by the herd. That the prestige of majoring in English is close to nil (though still a notch or two higher than going into the School of Education) makes it necessary to hold even more firmly to that sense of being among an elect.
The copy editor: Once succumbing to journalism, job prospects for English majors being what they are and always have been, the developing peevologist likely fetches up on the copy desk. Copy editors (a dwindling species) focus on the minutiae of language, and the former English major is expected to be an expert on grammar and usage (though chances are excellent that he has never studied linguistics*). In this environment, the peevologist’s bent is reinforced by the copy editor’s conviction, echoing the lesson of the teacher’s pet, that there is always a right answer. Everything in editing is a 1 or a 0, right or wrong, as specified by the Associated Press Stylebook or some tortured exegesis of it.
The cranky old white guy:** As the arteries harden, so do the attitudes. There was, it seems, a golden age, usually dating from the peevologist’s youth or just before his time, when there were Standards. Those Standards are always being undermined, and the greatest danger comes from people who are younger than the peevologist, or of a different ethnic, cultural, or class background. The peevologist stands bravely on the ramparts, menaced by the barbarian hordes, and he will not capitulate. In plain fact, he is merely a snob.
H.L. Mencken, a gifted amateur student of the English language in its American version, was rightly skeptical of snobs and self-anointed authorities, writing in his monumental work, The American Language:
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.
We have English because some exceedingly plain people, a rabble of illiterate peasants, abandoned the standards of Anglo-Saxon, and English remains, like all other languages, what its speakers and writers collectively make of it. Linguists understand this, and they explore the mechanisms and richnesses of the language, as it is actually spoken and actually written. Reasonable prescriptivists, among whom I number myself,*** who aim to advise people how to write more clearly, more effectively, more elegantly, acknowledge this and labor to offer advice that is better informed than the misguided strictures of the peevologists.
*Actually, English majors and journalists (the latter group often with a less reliable education even than the English major’s) may never have studied grammar much in any form. Thus we can find people railing against the split infinitive who do not know what an infinitive is, or condemning passive voice in constructions that are not passive.
**Not to stereotype, but you must surely have noticed how frequently the peevologist is white, male, and middle-aged or older.
***The ready reader of this blog will have recognized how many dangerous personal traits I have struggled with to move toward such reasonableness.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Farewell to Professor Hatchett
I only learned today of the death earlier this month of Marion Hatchett. Professor Hatchett was a formidable figure at the school of theology at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He knew more about Christian liturgy than just about anyone else would ever want to know.
He not only participated in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer of 1979 but also wrote the learned and lucid Commentary on the American Prayer Book (the Big Hatchett) and A Manual of Ceremonial for the New Prayer Book (the Little Hatchett), both of which hold honored places on my shelves.
He understood — and said — that public worship in the Episcopal Church could maintain a continuity with its historical origins without becoming a museum liturgy, and he wrote with authority, grace, and humanity.
Whenever I endure some service of mechanical liturgy, mediocre music, and tedious homiletics, as is the fate of many churchgoers, I recall that Professor Hatchett showed us that it does not have to be that bad. He thought that we could achieve a higher standard, and now that he has gone to glory, we would do well to remember his example.
He not only participated in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer of 1979 but also wrote the learned and lucid Commentary on the American Prayer Book (the Big Hatchett) and A Manual of Ceremonial for the New Prayer Book (the Little Hatchett), both of which hold honored places on my shelves.
He understood — and said — that public worship in the Episcopal Church could maintain a continuity with its historical origins without becoming a museum liturgy, and he wrote with authority, grace, and humanity.
Whenever I endure some service of mechanical liturgy, mediocre music, and tedious homiletics, as is the fate of many churchgoers, I recall that Professor Hatchett showed us that it does not have to be that bad. He thought that we could achieve a higher standard, and now that he has gone to glory, we would do well to remember his example.
I am not making this up, you know
Item: Wikipedia, which discovered last week that there might be some value in editing articles before publication, is now going to indicate which articles you can believe with a color-coded background. (Hint: orange, bad; white, good.)
Item: The debate over health care reform is taking on a refreshing candor. Yesterday, David Sheets out in St. Louis put up a link on Facebook to FactCheck.org’s article “Twenty-six lies about H.R. 3200."* Among the Facebookers responding was one Dan Devine, who said, in part:
There are many good ideas to reform the current structure, which has worked well enough for me. I've worked hard to get the coverage I have and don’t want risk losing it. The current package seems to be a way to provide free health care for the baby boomers as they age; sorry, I’m not interested in helping them.
If you, dear reader, are like me, a person in your fifties, particularly if you are also someone whose presence is no longer required in the workplace, I plan to take Mr. Devine’s hint and see whether I can contract with the Oriental Trading Company or Archie McPhee or some similar company to manufacture buttons for us reading:
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
You know it’s the right thing to do.
Item: If you join me in the categories mentioned in the previous item, there’s a word for it, to which we are alerted by the ever-alert Fritinancy: mancession. A mancession is a recession in which unemployment hits men disproportionately more than women.
Item: I will be back in the classroom at Loyola tomorrow morning at 9:25, where seventeen vulnerable undergraduates are signed up to be introduced to the occult secrets of copy editing. Keep them in your thoughts.
*FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, and similar operations are not among those sites for people who already know what they think before they hear any specifics. They hark back to the outdated principles in print journalism — you remember newspapers — of attempting to publish verifiable, factual material.
Item: The debate over health care reform is taking on a refreshing candor. Yesterday, David Sheets out in St. Louis put up a link on Facebook to FactCheck.org’s article “Twenty-six lies about H.R. 3200."* Among the Facebookers responding was one Dan Devine, who said, in part:
There are many good ideas to reform the current structure, which has worked well enough for me. I've worked hard to get the coverage I have and don’t want risk losing it. The current package seems to be a way to provide free health care for the baby boomers as they age; sorry, I’m not interested in helping them.
If you, dear reader, are like me, a person in your fifties, particularly if you are also someone whose presence is no longer required in the workplace, I plan to take Mr. Devine’s hint and see whether I can contract with the Oriental Trading Company or Archie McPhee or some similar company to manufacture buttons for us reading:
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
You know it’s the right thing to do.
Item: If you join me in the categories mentioned in the previous item, there’s a word for it, to which we are alerted by the ever-alert Fritinancy: mancession. A mancession is a recession in which unemployment hits men disproportionately more than women.
Item: I will be back in the classroom at Loyola tomorrow morning at 9:25, where seventeen vulnerable undergraduates are signed up to be introduced to the occult secrets of copy editing. Keep them in your thoughts.
*FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, and similar operations are not among those sites for people who already know what they think before they hear any specifics. They hark back to the outdated principles in print journalism — you remember newspapers — of attempting to publish verifiable, factual material.
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