August update

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

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.

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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.