Sound familiar?

"The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools fundamental facts and truths were torn away from us. Those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule."  

Hiram Wesley Evans, head of the Ku Klux Klan, eighty years ago, quoted in Robert Dallek's Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life 

Newspapers are so prissy

 A recent Washington Post article said that former Attorney General William Barr "likened Trump’s claims [of voter fraud] to excrement from a male bovine animal." You know, bullshit. A writer ought to be embarrassed over resorting to such coy circumlocutions, but this is what U.S. mainstream newspapers have led us to expect. 

For years at The Sun, house policy on bad words was to provide the initial letter followed by two em-dashes. Writers had previously used the initial letter with a hyphen for all the subsequent letters, but John S. Carroll said he didn't want reading the news to be like working the Jumble. 

Submissive to the policy, I wrote a post on this blog reviewing Jesse Sheidlower's The F Word without once using the word fuck and a similarly seemly review for The Sun of Melissa Mohr's Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. 

Such policies survive, of course, because most of the readers of daily newspapers are older people, who we think are used to more decorous language.* When The Sun allowed some profanity or vulgarity to escape into print, letters would come in chastising the editors for putting such words where impressionable young people would see them. (I challenge you: Show me a young person who reads a newspaper.)

I am of that decorous era. When I was a child, the only profanity my grandfather ever uttered was a deep, throaty Hell!, and then only on special occasions. I came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as did many of my newspaper colleagues, and despite our youthful freedom of speech we remained captive to the straitlaced standards we inherited, even though our readers are hearing those very words daily. 

Oh, our weekly free newsstand effort to entrap younger readers once caused a minor stir with DOUCHEBAG as a headline on the cover, but the boldness faded. 

I have slipped The Sun's yoke in retirement, and while I do not plan to write here quite as I used to speak in the newsroom, I embrace the freedom, when something is shitty, to say that it is shitty.

*My former Sun colleague Steve Auerweck once presciently suggested changing the OBITUARIES logo to SUBSCRIBER COUNTDOWN. 

The spell of spelling

 Many Sunday afternoons when I was in the fifth and sixth grades at Elizaville Elementary were spent copying the week's spelling words, ten times each, to be submitted Monday.

English spelling is a notorious mess, a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, ecclesiastical Latin, and words that Britain and the United States lifted from indigenous peoples. The need to master spelling as a mark of literacy made Noah Webster's Blue Back Speller a bestseller in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. 

(Also in the nineteenth century, misspellings were common fodder for humor, mocking the subliterate. We have the word OK thanks to the jocular spelling oll korrect in a Boston newspaper.)

A friend has lent me a copy of Book One of The Twentieth Century Spellers, Maryland Edition, published in 1912 by Appleton, and it is a window into public education a century ago. 

Each week has a specified set of words, with spelling and syllabification, and a set of example sentences using the week's words. 

But there is more. One finds an abundance of the sententiae adults love to unload on the young: Alice Carey's verses beginning "True worth is in being, not seeming; / In doing each day that goes by / Some little good, not in dreaming. ..." 

There are occasional interpolations of random information: "The Chinese are a curious people and live a great distance from us. They are different from us in many ways. They think that one girl in a family is enough. They prefer to have boys. Their near neighbors are the Japanese." 

And, of course, patriotism: "Admiral Dewey received great honors after his triumph over the Spaniards in the harbor of Manila."

To a modern reader, the example sentences each week read like found poetry:

"The fox is covered with fur.

"Did John peddle the potatoes from house to house?

"The bird flew out of the cage.

"The class can sing the song by rote but not by note.

"The stone was a real diamond

"Did you hear that whispering?"

Did John encounter the fox on his route selling potatoes? The students' singing is faulty, but the diamond is genuine. The bird is free, but the whispering is ominous. 

The appendix of Local Words is a little window into the Maryland of the time: Annapolis, brickyard, bombardment, cotton duck mills, Cecilius Calvert, Mt. Clare Shops, slavery, tonging, Wells and McComas. 

Did you hear that whispering? It was the past. 

On the first morning of retirement ...

I picked up the Associated Press Stylebook from my desk and placed it on the shelf. 

Penguin has been bringing out Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret mysteries in new translations, and I think I'll read one out on the porch before the day grows too hot. 

In the afternoon I can join my former colleague Fred Rasmussen and the assorted barflies he has gathered about him at Zen West to sample the healing waters. (Damn, Fred's at work today and I am not. Sad.) Retirement merits a quiet ale. 

Then, I think, since it's to be a hot day, I'll chill a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc and make a Nicoise salad for dinner with Kathleen. 

Moving forward, this version of You Don't Say is the blog I set up in 2009 to continue writing when The Sun laid me off, and at least temporarily I will post here occasionally. One benefit is that people in the United Kingdom and Ireland who would like to read it should now be able to see it. 

The impulse to harangue the young has not completely faded, so if you have a class to teach in the Baltimore area this fall, I'd be open to a guest appearance to talk about grammar, usage, editing, or journalism. 

Not gone yet. 

Family continuity represented in furniture

 This swivel chair was in the general store my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, operated in Elizaville, Kentucky. He sat in it to keep his accounts and pay his bills. After he died in 1945 and my father, Raymond McIntyre, took on the operation of the store, he sat in it as he kept his accounts. After he was no longer operating the store, the chair was in the Elizaville Post Office, where my mother, Marian Early McIntyre sat in it each month to maintain her postal accounts. After she retired, the chair came to me, and it is now at my desk, where I sit to pay bills and write letters. 

Yes, that is a spittoon on the floor by the desk. 

Working from home is hardly working

For the past year a desk, table, and chair in the basement have served as my remote newsroom of The Baltimore Sun. My wife, Kathleen Capcara, has had to do a good deal of her work for Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson from our house, making videos at the dining room table and performing other tasks by email and Zoom sessions. 

She has a desk in a neighboring room in the basement. Recently she suggested turning the children's old toy room, between our two desks, into a break room that we could share as colleagues. 

She put out some candies, Gummi Bears (which I detest), and cough drops on a table. I supplied an electric kettle and a selection of teas. We moved the clock above my desk into the break room. 

It has worked out well enough. Since our hours do not usually overlap much, neither my swearing nor her muttering constantly to herself has caused friction. People are clearing their own dishes and cups, emptying the wastebaskets, and refraining from leaving garments and personal possessions strewn about. 

There is room for improvement. Crucially, there is no water cooler around which the staff could gather and exchange gossip. I could bring in a cafetiere, but I refuse to remove the coffee grinder and beans from the kitchen, where they are desperately needed in the morning. 

And frankly, the ambience lacks pizzazz. I proposed setting up an Employee of the Month poster to bolster morale, but the idea has gone nowhere.

What the break room has fundamentally done is to throw into high relief that the management of this outfit stinks. 

I am not suggesting that unionizing is the remedy, but options must be given consideration. 

And now I'm going upstairs. 

Yokely-dokely

In a fit of frustration I recently posted an injudicious statement, "I try to say that the people where I come from aren't all a bunch of gullible yokels, and then, dammit, they go online," and have since been reproached that I was not raised to speak of people that way. 

I have explained elsewhere how I was raised, and by whom, and I understand how the larger world views the Commonwealth. Only last week I got another "You're from Kentucky?"

But, as they say, let's look at the record of how some of my former classmates disport themselves online. 

The New York Times, of course, gets immediately rejected as a source of information. I've even seen the Associated Press—the dear, gray, drab AP—discounted as utterly corrupted by liberal bias. Some go so far as to dismiss all journalism as unreliable. (One gentleman said journalists just publish things to make money, revealing a hitherto unexpected anti-capitalist streak.) 

Absent journalism, I wonder where they get information, short of divine inspiration. 

Oh, at least one gets it from Breitbart, and others chime in on the comments. Say no more. 

Some believe that Christians are being persecuted in the United States and as an act of bold defiance post pictures of Jesus, the cross, the American flag, and the Pledge of Allegiance on Facebook. (There appears to be some difficulty in differentiating Jesus from the American flag, but we don't have time for theology today.) 

They are given to posting nostalgic reminders of the Fifties, when white men were in charge of everything, women were in the kitchen, Blacks were in the back of the bus, and gays were in the closet. (I was there in the Fifties, in a segregated public school in poverty-stricken Appalachia, and I have no interest in going back.) 

I see people posting dumbass memes (sample: "It's been six months. Shouldn't all the people who don't wear masks be dead by now?") denying the reality of a pandemic that has claimed probably more than 200,000 lives in this country and devastated the economy, while nations that took it seriously are  regaining their footing. 

Any attempt to engage in a discussion is quickly met by whataboutism, straw men, and defensive complaints that I'm trying to make them look dumb by using big words. 

And there's the gentleman who appears to think that calling me a libtard is a sockdolager of a counter-argument. 

So, you tell me. How far off the mark was I? 

 

Embattled whiteness

 I occasionally sample the wackadoodle political opinions of former classmates at Fleming County High School in Kentucky. 

One of them, after months of reportage about the efforts of Republican governors and legislators to limit access to voting, after the president's unsupported claims that voting by mail is susceptible to fraud (for God's sake, Utah votes by mail), and the ham-handed attempts of the administration to cripple the Postal Service in an election year, insists that Democrats are trying to steal the election. 

Another has not gained a vocabulary beyond libtard to respond to argument and evidence. 

It baffles me. We had the same teachers: Jimmy Johnson for American history in my junior year, who invited us to challenge received views; Lloyd Story, a science teacher who believed in science; Lynda McKee, who taught us how to construct arguments based on evidence. Yeah, I read a lot of books and moved away from Appalachia, but we all had teachers who did not discount external reality. 

True, Kentucky has always been a conservative state, apart from Louisville and, to some degree, Lexington, but it once elected Republican senators like Thruston Morton and John Sherman Cooper, people of integrity and purpose. 

Some of my former classmates flinch at the implication that there is a layer of racism in their views. That's because they understand racism to be individual, that racists, like those spittle-flowing crowds screaming at little Black girls going to an all-white school, are bad people; and if you're a good person, you can't be racist. They don't own slaves; they're not bad people. 

I have the tax receipt showing that my great-great grandfather, John Early, paid $12.30 in property taxes in 1852 on 200 acres, four mules and horses, and four slaves. My grandfather, who inherited the farm a century ago, owned no slaves; neither did my mother, who inherited it in turn, nor my sisters and I. But all of us benefited from the wealth (a modest wealth) built in part by the labor of unpaid Black people. 

We attended the Presbyterian church in Elizaville. It was part of the Southern Presbyterian Church, which split from the Northern denomination in the 1850s over the slavery issue. It took more than a century after the Civil War for the two denominations to conclude that slavery was maybe no longer a live issue. 

This is what systemic racism is about. If you grow up white in Appalachia, as I did, whiteness is the template, the norm by which everything is measured. It is supported by the history textbooks, which shy away from the unsavory aspects of the country's past, by the de facto segregation of churches, by all the customs of the time and place. 

Now that the white template is slowly being dismantled by demographics and other social changes. I understand how upsetting that can be to people among whom I grew up, who feel threatened, who feel that the world as it was meant to be is being taken from them. I understand how fear leaves them susceptible to believing nonsense from dishonest sources, to posting dumbass right-wing memes online in a feeble show of resistance. 

But the tide is against them. Oh, it might be possible to set up an apartheid regime in some states or even the country, after the South African model, to keep the white minority in charge, but over time it could not last in South Africa either. 

So I feel sorry for them, in part for the disappointment in store for them, and in part for the damage they unwittingly do. 

No more chalk dust on the suit

Today I notified Sara Magee, chair of the Communication Department at Loyola University Maryland, that I am giving up the editing class I have taught for twenty-five years.

 I will turn seventy in February, and the pleasure of yelling at undergraduates no longer compensates fully for the effort.

 

On the first day of class every semester, my efforts to Mirandize the students (see the video here) included this quotation from a student evaluation: “He is a horrible teacher. DO NOT TAKE HIM! The course is interesting but this guy is a stiff who thinks he knows it all. You will leave this class so confused and end up with a grade that definitely deserves to be better than what you actually get. Don't get me wrong, he's a funny guy but not worth it.”

 

Some of my more than 750 students, though, have managed rather well. Among them:

Kevin Atticks, one of my early victims, teaches at Loyola, overseeing the Apprentice House student publishing operation.

 

Mike Memoli, who as a member of Tribune’s Washington bureau was, to my knowledge, the only one of my former students to have flown on Air Force One with the president of the United States, is now a correspondent at NBC news.

 

Jon Meoli is a sports reporter at The Baltimore Sun.

Peter Blair heads the flexible editing desk at The New York Times. 

 

Eve Strilacci is an acquisitions editor at Callisto Media.

 

Christina Santucci is a former night photo editor at the New York Post.

 

Andrew Zaleski, to be found at https://www.andrewzaleski.com/, is building a solid career as a freelance writer.

 

Jenn Ladd is a food writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

Katie Krzaczck is an editor at Business Insider.

 

Lindsay VanAsdalan is a reporter at the York Dispatch.

 

Anyone I have overlooked is welcome to weigh in with a comment.

 

In time, I came to leave them on the last day of class with Chaucer’s rueful line, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

 

Now it will be someone else’s job.

Maybe you could stop congratulating yourself on your grammar

People who preen online about their command of English grammar often assert that they see a general cultural and educational decline, most frequently calling it a "dumbing-down."

In a forty-year career as an editor at newspapers, I have edited the work of people twenty and thirty years older who received, as I did, the traditional instruction in grammar at school, and of people twenty and thirty and forty years younger who received little or none of the traditional instruction.

And every day for forty years, I have sat down at my desk to deal with the same things. The same damn things: subject-verb agreement, misplaced modifiers, incorrect homonyms. All of it, mind you, the work of college-educated journalists whose profession is writing in standard English.

For that matter, my classmates in the public schools of Fleming County, Kentucky, in the 1960s do not necessarily do any better, despite their exposure to the traditional teaching of English grammar.

The traditional method was not particularly effective, and it left a bad taste in the mouth. Some did learn from it, as some will learn something in almost any pedagogical circumstances—Dr. Johnson believed that boys could not learn the classical languages unless they were beaten.

The British linguist David Crystal writes in Making Sense that "the negative associations that surround grammar are the result of unhappy learning experiences, in which complex sentences, artificial examples, pedantic rules, mechanical analyses, and poor explanations have combined to produce a penitential mindset: 'Grammar is good for me, and if it causes mental anguish, then so be it,' "

That people could develop a solid grasp of formal English grammar under such unpromising circumstances is a real accomplishment, even though, as you can read in Bad Advice, a great deal of what they remember is unreliable.

So let's not make proficiency in grammar, the grammar of formal English, which was badly taught for decades, and then not taught at all, a measure of individual or national intelligence.

Speech comes naturally, but writing has to be learned, and most people never get very good at it, particularly in the dialect known as formal written English. We can see that online, where anyone with a computer can become a published writer. As Gretchen McCullough writes in Because Internet, we can look beyond edited publications to see how people actually write.

From there we can surmise that people in general are about as dumb, or intelligent, as they have always been. We can further surmise, from internal evidence, that the "dumbing-down" trope is trotted out when the writer merely wishes to establish a superior social class standing. That is when the reader will recognize that it is time to move on.

There's a difference between cache and cachet, but knowing that does not confer cachet.