The estimable Jan Freeman of The Boston Globe, whose column and blog I heartily endorse, keeps encountering some kind of obstacle in posting comments here. This comment on misused words came in an e-mail, which I am pleased to publish:
I'm on a mini-campaign to get people to remember that "confusions" like there/there and then/than are not actually semantic confusions, like infer for imply or flaunt for flout, but simply misspellings. Of course I care about spelling, but the people who think a mistake like "bigger then me" means the writer doesn't know "then" from "than" are truly confused. I wrote about it (briefly) in January (with itals in original, of course):
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/25/the_unkindliest_cut/
True, then for than is a fairly common spelling error, and one that spellcheckers don't catch. Then and (unstressed) than sound almost the same, and like other homophone pairs, they can be hard to keep straight. But then for than, like principle for principal, is not a confusion of sense -- it's just a spelling error.
For some reason, though, the Confusable Words industry -- dozens of websites use that label -- wants to scare us into thinking of spelling mixups as serious misunderstandings. "Check your dictionary," they intone. "Use than to make a comparison. Use then when referring to time."
But this is ludicrous. The person who types "he's bigger then me" isn't accidentally using then, the word that refers to time; he's just spelling than the way it sounds. In fact, than was often spelled then until the 18th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. "I had rather be a doore keeper in the house of my God, then to dwell in the tents of wickednesse," reads the psalm in the 1611 King James Bible.
Should students (and journalists) learn to spell correctly? Of course. But there's no need to overreact. The writer who mixes up hanger and hangar needs a spelling tip, not a brain transplant. ...
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Further distinctions
We’ll start out with some additions to the “Making distinctions” post and then proceed to odds and ends.
I meant to add there, their, they’re to the list of distinctions to be preserved. But the really interesting ones are the distinctions in transition. Please be clear about this: You’re perfectly free to observe these distinctions in your own writing — as I often do. But in editing, you should be aware that the ground is shifting under your feet and you don’t get to legislate from personal preferences.
Distinctions that are dissolving
enormity I’m trying to hold on to enormity in the sense of “a great evil.” It seems to me that once you have used it in the context of the Holocaust or the millions killed by Stalin and Mao, you trivialize the word by using it to mean merely something large. I also resist the “task of daunting dimensions” sense — the enormity of health care reform. But it’s almost certainly a losing battle.
hanged/hung Restricting hanged to execution by rope is another lost cause. (A wag, commenting on Facebook about the distinctions, said that there’s a cable TV show that explains it.)
lend/loan Loan as a verb is out there. It has been out there for centuries.
who/whom Whom is not dead yet, but it is increasingly feeble. Since the language appears to be moving steadily toward using who as both subject and object, the safe course for the skittish writer is to do just that.
Verdict rendered
A reader who has acces to a a listserve of Maryland criminal defense attorneys reports concern about the opening of an article in The Sun about the reporting of a life verdict in a capital case: “A federal jury on Wednesday failed to agree on a death sentence, sparing the lives of two convicted killers and showing them the mercy that they denied their victims.”
The reader asks: “Both the use of the verb “fail” and the last phrase were objected to as being judgmental. I opined that a lead like that wouldn't have gotten through in the “old days.” Was I right?
Fail suggests that the jury attempted to impose the death penalty but was unsuccessful, something that it is doubtful the reporter could have known. Neutral, factual language would have been preferable: A federal jury declined to impose the death penalty or, even better, A federal jury reached a sentence of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. ...
The mercy they denied their victims is one of those superfluous flourishes that writers think will juice up their dry reporting. Its effect is to telegraph that the writer thinks that killing people is a Bad Thing, which scarcely needs telling.
And, while I’m piling on, on Wednesday, at least in idiomatic English syntax, belongs after agree. Putting adverbs of time in the wrong place in sentences is an annoying journalistic tic.
Greek to me
This query arrived in an e-mail, and I have no idea what the writer is seeking.
What not to say to greeks?
I was thinking that your advice would be very helpful. I know you must be very busy so any pointers would be very much appreciated. A little advice would go a long way right now.
Maybe not to praise Turks?
On the air
I recorded an interview yesterday on the state of copy editing for National Public Radio’s On the Media. In Baltimore, you can hear it on WYPR-FM at 2:00 p.m. this Sunday. Then you can return to this blog and comment on how fatuous I sounded.
I meant to add there, their, they’re to the list of distinctions to be preserved. But the really interesting ones are the distinctions in transition. Please be clear about this: You’re perfectly free to observe these distinctions in your own writing — as I often do. But in editing, you should be aware that the ground is shifting under your feet and you don’t get to legislate from personal preferences.
Distinctions that are dissolving
enormity I’m trying to hold on to enormity in the sense of “a great evil.” It seems to me that once you have used it in the context of the Holocaust or the millions killed by Stalin and Mao, you trivialize the word by using it to mean merely something large. I also resist the “task of daunting dimensions” sense — the enormity of health care reform. But it’s almost certainly a losing battle.
hanged/hung Restricting hanged to execution by rope is another lost cause. (A wag, commenting on Facebook about the distinctions, said that there’s a cable TV show that explains it.)
lend/loan Loan as a verb is out there. It has been out there for centuries.
who/whom Whom is not dead yet, but it is increasingly feeble. Since the language appears to be moving steadily toward using who as both subject and object, the safe course for the skittish writer is to do just that.
Verdict rendered
A reader who has acces to a a listserve of Maryland criminal defense attorneys reports concern about the opening of an article in The Sun about the reporting of a life verdict in a capital case: “A federal jury on Wednesday failed to agree on a death sentence, sparing the lives of two convicted killers and showing them the mercy that they denied their victims.”
The reader asks: “Both the use of the verb “fail” and the last phrase were objected to as being judgmental. I opined that a lead like that wouldn't have gotten through in the “old days.” Was I right?
Fail suggests that the jury attempted to impose the death penalty but was unsuccessful, something that it is doubtful the reporter could have known. Neutral, factual language would have been preferable: A federal jury declined to impose the death penalty or, even better, A federal jury reached a sentence of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. ...
The mercy they denied their victims is one of those superfluous flourishes that writers think will juice up their dry reporting. Its effect is to telegraph that the writer thinks that killing people is a Bad Thing, which scarcely needs telling.
And, while I’m piling on, on Wednesday, at least in idiomatic English syntax, belongs after agree. Putting adverbs of time in the wrong place in sentences is an annoying journalistic tic.
Greek to me
This query arrived in an e-mail, and I have no idea what the writer is seeking.
What not to say to greeks?
I was thinking that your advice would be very helpful. I know you must be very busy so any pointers would be very much appreciated. A little advice would go a long way right now.
Maybe not to praise Turks?
On the air
I recorded an interview yesterday on the state of copy editing for National Public Radio’s On the Media. In Baltimore, you can hear it on WYPR-FM at 2:00 p.m. this Sunday. Then you can return to this blog and comment on how fatuous I sounded.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The diaspora of editors
In 1997, when American newspapers were still hugely profitable and it looked as if they might come to grips with this Internet thing, a respect for editing was on the increase.
That was the year that the American Copy Editors Society was founded, with the backing of senior figures in the newspaper industry. Within a few years, a number of major newspapers created the position of assistant managing editor for the copy desk (or an equivalent), to consolidate scattered operations, to achieve uniformity in editing practices, to make clear that editing involves more than formatting for typesetting and running the spell-check, and to give editing a voice within the high command.
You know what happened. The bottom fell out of the newspaper business model and a recession accelerated the decline. Increasingly, desperation and panic led to round after round of buyouts and layoffs. The wolves are closing in, and the children are being tossed from the troika.
Many of those assistant managing editors are gone — Melissa McCoy in Los Angeles, Kay Jarvis in Denver, Leslie Guevarra in San Francisco, Don Podesta in Washington, Merrill Perlman in New York. Kathy Schenck announced last week that she is leaving the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee. Some of them were replaced after they took buyouts, but the position itself has sometimes been eliminated or restructured.
It is not just the ranking editors who are gone. Copy desks around the country have been decimated, and the practice is repeated in magazine journalism and book publishing. Decades of skill and experience have walked out the door, to teach, to consult, to write, to do public relations — but less and less to edit.
But I did not invite you into this post to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of editing. There is work to be done.
As the economy slowly reconstitutes itself and journalism staggers blindly toward whatever its future will be, it is much more urgent than in 1997 to establish the importance of editing and to give editors a voice.
I see that ACES is working to find its footing again in training and retraining editors for the new environment, and I trust that it will continue reach out to editors and careers beyond newspapering.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications will be meeting in Boston at the beginning of August, and Leslie-Jean Thornton of the Cronkite School at Arizona State has been inviting colleagues on Twitter to suggest ideas for the Future of Editing session. (You can also make suggestions here; I’ll forward them.)
The Poynter Institute is in the middle of a “Big Ideas” conference to sort out what is working in journalism and what avenues look productive. There’s a live blog.
Those of you who teach composition at the secondary or college level have the opportunity to make a substantial difference by showing your students that writing is more than mere self-expression, that accuracy and precision and focus and clarity can be achieved through self-editing, that precision in grammar and usage is an important skill to master.
Those of you who are readers should consider protesting shoddy work rather than shrugging it off. If an article — newspaper, magazine, online — is riddled with silly errors or shoddily constructed, complain. If the book you purchased is similarly sloppy, complain. I’m not giddy with optimism about the outcome, but I do think that over time, customers’ complaints can have an effect.
And those of you who have any authority over hiring, particularly in the growing online enterprises: When you get resumes that show experience in editing, pay attention to those candidates. They know useful things.
That was the year that the American Copy Editors Society was founded, with the backing of senior figures in the newspaper industry. Within a few years, a number of major newspapers created the position of assistant managing editor for the copy desk (or an equivalent), to consolidate scattered operations, to achieve uniformity in editing practices, to make clear that editing involves more than formatting for typesetting and running the spell-check, and to give editing a voice within the high command.
You know what happened. The bottom fell out of the newspaper business model and a recession accelerated the decline. Increasingly, desperation and panic led to round after round of buyouts and layoffs. The wolves are closing in, and the children are being tossed from the troika.
Many of those assistant managing editors are gone — Melissa McCoy in Los Angeles, Kay Jarvis in Denver, Leslie Guevarra in San Francisco, Don Podesta in Washington, Merrill Perlman in New York. Kathy Schenck announced last week that she is leaving the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee. Some of them were replaced after they took buyouts, but the position itself has sometimes been eliminated or restructured.
It is not just the ranking editors who are gone. Copy desks around the country have been decimated, and the practice is repeated in magazine journalism and book publishing. Decades of skill and experience have walked out the door, to teach, to consult, to write, to do public relations — but less and less to edit.
But I did not invite you into this post to sit on the ground and tell sad stories of the death of editing. There is work to be done.
As the economy slowly reconstitutes itself and journalism staggers blindly toward whatever its future will be, it is much more urgent than in 1997 to establish the importance of editing and to give editors a voice.
I see that ACES is working to find its footing again in training and retraining editors for the new environment, and I trust that it will continue reach out to editors and careers beyond newspapering.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications will be meeting in Boston at the beginning of August, and Leslie-Jean Thornton of the Cronkite School at Arizona State has been inviting colleagues on Twitter to suggest ideas for the Future of Editing session. (You can also make suggestions here; I’ll forward them.)
The Poynter Institute is in the middle of a “Big Ideas” conference to sort out what is working in journalism and what avenues look productive. There’s a live blog.
Those of you who teach composition at the secondary or college level have the opportunity to make a substantial difference by showing your students that writing is more than mere self-expression, that accuracy and precision and focus and clarity can be achieved through self-editing, that precision in grammar and usage is an important skill to master.
Those of you who are readers should consider protesting shoddy work rather than shrugging it off. If an article — newspaper, magazine, online — is riddled with silly errors or shoddily constructed, complain. If the book you purchased is similarly sloppy, complain. I’m not giddy with optimism about the outcome, but I do think that over time, customers’ complaints can have an effect.
And those of you who have any authority over hiring, particularly in the growing online enterprises: When you get resumes that show experience in editing, pay attention to those candidates. They know useful things.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Murder and intelligent design
Over the weekend I was delighted to pick up at the library the twenty-fourth Gregor Demarkian murder mystery by Jane Haddam, Living Witness (Minotaur Books, 391 pages, $25.95). *
Living Witness, in which a small town in Pennsylvania is in an uproar over a lawsuit against the school board’s attempt to introduce intelligent design, is evidently inspired by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005, which resulted in a federal judge’s ruling that intelligent design was not a scientific theory but an attempt to introduce religion into the classroom.
Ms. Haddam has invested considerable time and attention to the debate over intelligent design, and she includes in the novel citations of the major books and Web sites that readers can consult for further information.
Her characters reflect the tensions entwined in this debate: the feeling among some evangelical Protestants that their faith is under attack by a hostile secular society, the apprehension of secularists that they are going to be subjected to theocratic rule, the often-unspoken class conflicts (small-town America against the influx of college-educated suburbanites), and everyone’s willingness to carry the fight into the courts.**
Unfortunately, she appears to have taken the intelligent design debate a little too much to heart. The vehement — indeed, strident — internal monologues of the paranoid Christians and secularists go on at some length and are repeated needlessly throughout the novel. It is only near the end that it seems to occur to her that there is a murder mystery to wrap up, which she does quite satisfactorily. While Living Witness has a great deal of good material in it, it cannot be said to be one of her more successful efforts.
I also note, with professional regret, the numerous typographical errors throughout the book, many of which have been corrected by a previous library patron. Apparently I am not alone in finding them irritating.
*For the uninitiated, Gregor Demarkian, a former FBI agent, lives on Cavanaugh Street, a small Armenian-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and consults with law enforcement agencies on baffling crimes. A running subplot through the series is his involvement with Bennis Hannaford, a member of a Main Line family and author of a series of best-selling fantasy novels.
**Let this stand for a personal comment on the issue, which you should feel free to skip.
I’ve read aloud the account of Creation from the opening of Genesis at Easter Vigil services for more than a quarter-century, but I do not believe that the earth is a flat disk or that there is water above the dome of the sky. Treating Genesis as science serves neither science nor religion well.
Christianity had to accommodate itself to a heliocentric solar system — it took time, and the prosecution of Galileo was ugly, but at least we don’t have lawsuits in federal courts arguing that the Copernican system is “only a theory.” The evidence for evolution has grown steadily more overwhelming for more than a century and a half, and in time believers will have to come to grips with that, too.
Science operates by consensus, subject to change. There was a long-dominant consensus on the Ptolemaic solar system, and the Copernican theory displaced it by argument from evidence. There is a broad scientific consensus on evolution, though there are disagreements about details of the process. If scientists are mistaken, the mistakes get worked out through argument from evidence. Attempts to impose a consensus through lawsuits or other governmental action are good for neither science nor law.
Living Witness, in which a small town in Pennsylvania is in an uproar over a lawsuit against the school board’s attempt to introduce intelligent design, is evidently inspired by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005, which resulted in a federal judge’s ruling that intelligent design was not a scientific theory but an attempt to introduce religion into the classroom.
Ms. Haddam has invested considerable time and attention to the debate over intelligent design, and she includes in the novel citations of the major books and Web sites that readers can consult for further information.
Her characters reflect the tensions entwined in this debate: the feeling among some evangelical Protestants that their faith is under attack by a hostile secular society, the apprehension of secularists that they are going to be subjected to theocratic rule, the often-unspoken class conflicts (small-town America against the influx of college-educated suburbanites), and everyone’s willingness to carry the fight into the courts.**
Unfortunately, she appears to have taken the intelligent design debate a little too much to heart. The vehement — indeed, strident — internal monologues of the paranoid Christians and secularists go on at some length and are repeated needlessly throughout the novel. It is only near the end that it seems to occur to her that there is a murder mystery to wrap up, which she does quite satisfactorily. While Living Witness has a great deal of good material in it, it cannot be said to be one of her more successful efforts.
I also note, with professional regret, the numerous typographical errors throughout the book, many of which have been corrected by a previous library patron. Apparently I am not alone in finding them irritating.
*For the uninitiated, Gregor Demarkian, a former FBI agent, lives on Cavanaugh Street, a small Armenian-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and consults with law enforcement agencies on baffling crimes. A running subplot through the series is his involvement with Bennis Hannaford, a member of a Main Line family and author of a series of best-selling fantasy novels.
**Let this stand for a personal comment on the issue, which you should feel free to skip.
I’ve read aloud the account of Creation from the opening of Genesis at Easter Vigil services for more than a quarter-century, but I do not believe that the earth is a flat disk or that there is water above the dome of the sky. Treating Genesis as science serves neither science nor religion well.
Christianity had to accommodate itself to a heliocentric solar system — it took time, and the prosecution of Galileo was ugly, but at least we don’t have lawsuits in federal courts arguing that the Copernican system is “only a theory.” The evidence for evolution has grown steadily more overwhelming for more than a century and a half, and in time believers will have to come to grips with that, too.
Science operates by consensus, subject to change. There was a long-dominant consensus on the Ptolemaic solar system, and the Copernican theory displaced it by argument from evidence. There is a broad scientific consensus on evolution, though there are disagreements about details of the process. If scientists are mistaken, the mistakes get worked out through argument from evidence. Attempts to impose a consensus through lawsuits or other governmental action are good for neither science nor law.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Politics muddles grammar
At Language Log this morning, Mark Liberman comments, “For most intellectuals today, grammar is no longer a tool of rational analysis, but rather a source of incoherent metaphor.”
The instance giving rise to the generalization is an episode of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown in which Margaret Carlson belittles Sarah Palin’s syntax in a statement that is flat wrong about Ms. Palin’s grammar. Professor Liberman suggests that interested readers might compare Ms. Carlson’s syntax and Ms. Palin’s. *
Also today, Headsup characterizes an NPR segment on “Orwellian” political speech as “a burst of semantic weirdness.”
Guest Joe Queenan said, “ ‘War on terror’ is very, very specific. Everybody knows exactly what it means.”
To which “fev” replies: “With all due respect, but — are you out of your mind? The great advantage of ‘war on terror’ is that it's anything but ‘very, very specific.’ It's everything from a metaphor to an actual shooting war, and it happens everywhere from the Afghan-Pakistan border to whatever those suspicious neighbors of yours are up to behind the curtains there. It means vastly different things to different members of the audience. That's why — at least partly why — it works so well.”
There should be considerable benefit in a close analysis of the things public officials say and the way they say them — particularly the resort to euphemisms and code words. But to accomplish this requires knowing something about the language beyond casual use of technical terms for effect.
* Language Log also explored the shakiness of commentators’ grasp of grammar when Geoffrey Pullum demonstrated that Charles Krauthammer doesn’t appear to know what the passive voice is.
The instance giving rise to the generalization is an episode of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown in which Margaret Carlson belittles Sarah Palin’s syntax in a statement that is flat wrong about Ms. Palin’s grammar. Professor Liberman suggests that interested readers might compare Ms. Carlson’s syntax and Ms. Palin’s. *
Also today, Headsup characterizes an NPR segment on “Orwellian” political speech as “a burst of semantic weirdness.”
Guest Joe Queenan said, “ ‘War on terror’ is very, very specific. Everybody knows exactly what it means.”
To which “fev” replies: “With all due respect, but — are you out of your mind? The great advantage of ‘war on terror’ is that it's anything but ‘very, very specific.’ It's everything from a metaphor to an actual shooting war, and it happens everywhere from the Afghan-Pakistan border to whatever those suspicious neighbors of yours are up to behind the curtains there. It means vastly different things to different members of the audience. That's why — at least partly why — it works so well.”
There should be considerable benefit in a close analysis of the things public officials say and the way they say them — particularly the resort to euphemisms and code words. But to accomplish this requires knowing something about the language beyond casual use of technical terms for effect.
* Language Log also explored the shakiness of commentators’ grasp of grammar when Geoffrey Pullum demonstrated that Charles Krauthammer doesn’t appear to know what the passive voice is.
Summer Saturday catchup
A miscellany.
More pointless distinctions
Having cheerfully bashed The Associated Press Stylebook for its persistence in maintaining obsolete or ill-advised style rules — and I’ll gladly do so again — I am equally happy to point out that the stylebook no longer maintains the archaic distinction between pupil and student. It’s a distinction, that pupils, up to the level of secondary education are being instructed and high school and college students learn independently, I held on to at The Sun long after its usefulness had passed.
One can still receive an occasional complaint from some elderly party about a headline referring to children as kids. (Is that “Mairzy Doats” I hear playing in the background?) “Kids are goats, not children,” the complaint invariably runs. I explained this once to my students at Loyola, and they gaped at me as if I had finally gone around the bend. Kids might still look a little colloquial in the context of a deeply serious story, but a term in universal use by parents and teachers cannot be ignored.
A legacy of Wikipedia
In Canada, a new educational term has popped up: Wikipedia kid. According to Word Spy, a Wikipedia kid is “a student who has poor research skills and lacks the ability to think critically.” Thanks to Lori Kasenter for the citation.
Ask the Times
Time got Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, to respond to ten questions posed by readers. The tenth question: “Why is the Times so anti-American?”
I assume that if there had been an eleventh question, it would have been this: Has The Times stopped beating its wife?
Restless leg syndrome?
An article in the latest Columbia Journalism Review describes someone as sitting “with legs akimbo.” Akimbo describes a posture with hands on hips and elbows extended. Visualizing “legs akimbo” calls up some kind of yoga posture that is painful to contemplate.
Still could care less
A reader commenting on the “Making distinctions” post takes me to task with a familiar complaint:
You are dead wrong yourself on "could care less" and "couldn't care less." The former is a corruption of the traditional one. When one says "I could care less" he is saying that there are things for which he could care even less than the thing for which he could care less. When he says, "I couldn't care less," he is saying that that thing is the least of his concerns. Many of the things you say are perfectly correct are not in fact correct at all. These disappearing distinctions of language are what make modern speech incomprensible to some people and invite the destruction of the rules of grammar and syntax. I'd say Shame on you, but for the few things you got right. How on earth did you ever teach copyediting at Loyola? Well, then again, I guess it's silly to ask, if one considers the condition of language in print today.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage comments:
The reason why* the negative particle was lost without changing the meaning of the phrase [emphasis added] has been the subject of much speculation, much of it not very convincing. No one seems to have advanced the simple idea that the rhythm of the phrase may be better for purposes of emphatic sarcasm.
Bryan Garner disagrees, finding could care less “sloppy,” and here I have to part company with him. In the hundreds of times I have heard the expression could care less, I have never once understood it in the literal sense, and I’ve never heard anyone express confusion over the speaker’s intent. The objection to could care less is always that it is not logical. That is because it is an idiom, an expression in which the meaning can’t be understood from the literal sense of the component words.
If the commenter remains puzzled, he or she is welcome to sign up for my class at Loyola, CM 361, Copy Editing, Tuesday and Thursday, 9:25 a.m.
Wannabe
A reader solicits a “reaction to the use of the word ‘wannabe,’ as in ‘wannabe gang member,’ in the Metro section of the Wash Post last week. It struck me as a bit too informal, but I wonder if this was an example of careless editing or a perhaps a more formal and accepted use of the word. OED lists its use, of course, in newspapers, but the word seems to be used in sections of the paper less formal than the Metro section.”
There’s no question that the word, originally a colloquialism, is making headway in print. There is a good reason for that; it expresses useful distinctions of meaning. If The Post had referred to “an aspiring gang member,” the phrase would have conveyed the sense of someone who has an ambition that has not been fulfilled. But wannabe carries not only the sense of aspiration but also that of pretense — someone unsuccessfully imitating a role. The more traditional term is would-be, but I don’t think that it carries quite the same intensity of scorn.
A classic comment
Bill Walsh of The Washington Post, in a succinct post on Facebook:
Bill Walsh assures the assignment editor that the 60-inch story he gave us five minutes ago is probably still in the copy editor's hands.
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d
*Oh, good Lord, Merriam Webster’s says the reason why. Obviously worthless as an authority on usage.
More pointless distinctions
Having cheerfully bashed The Associated Press Stylebook for its persistence in maintaining obsolete or ill-advised style rules — and I’ll gladly do so again — I am equally happy to point out that the stylebook no longer maintains the archaic distinction between pupil and student. It’s a distinction, that pupils, up to the level of secondary education are being instructed and high school and college students learn independently, I held on to at The Sun long after its usefulness had passed.
One can still receive an occasional complaint from some elderly party about a headline referring to children as kids. (Is that “Mairzy Doats” I hear playing in the background?) “Kids are goats, not children,” the complaint invariably runs. I explained this once to my students at Loyola, and they gaped at me as if I had finally gone around the bend. Kids might still look a little colloquial in the context of a deeply serious story, but a term in universal use by parents and teachers cannot be ignored.
A legacy of Wikipedia
In Canada, a new educational term has popped up: Wikipedia kid. According to Word Spy, a Wikipedia kid is “a student who has poor research skills and lacks the ability to think critically.” Thanks to Lori Kasenter for the citation.
Ask the Times
Time got Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, to respond to ten questions posed by readers. The tenth question: “Why is the Times so anti-American?”
I assume that if there had been an eleventh question, it would have been this: Has The Times stopped beating its wife?
Restless leg syndrome?
An article in the latest Columbia Journalism Review describes someone as sitting “with legs akimbo.” Akimbo describes a posture with hands on hips and elbows extended. Visualizing “legs akimbo” calls up some kind of yoga posture that is painful to contemplate.
Still could care less
A reader commenting on the “Making distinctions” post takes me to task with a familiar complaint:
You are dead wrong yourself on "could care less" and "couldn't care less." The former is a corruption of the traditional one. When one says "I could care less" he is saying that there are things for which he could care even less than the thing for which he could care less. When he says, "I couldn't care less," he is saying that that thing is the least of his concerns. Many of the things you say are perfectly correct are not in fact correct at all. These disappearing distinctions of language are what make modern speech incomprensible to some people and invite the destruction of the rules of grammar and syntax. I'd say Shame on you, but for the few things you got right. How on earth did you ever teach copyediting at Loyola? Well, then again, I guess it's silly to ask, if one considers the condition of language in print today.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage comments:
The reason why* the negative particle was lost without changing the meaning of the phrase [emphasis added] has been the subject of much speculation, much of it not very convincing. No one seems to have advanced the simple idea that the rhythm of the phrase may be better for purposes of emphatic sarcasm.
Bryan Garner disagrees, finding could care less “sloppy,” and here I have to part company with him. In the hundreds of times I have heard the expression could care less, I have never once understood it in the literal sense, and I’ve never heard anyone express confusion over the speaker’s intent. The objection to could care less is always that it is not logical. That is because it is an idiom, an expression in which the meaning can’t be understood from the literal sense of the component words.
If the commenter remains puzzled, he or she is welcome to sign up for my class at Loyola, CM 361, Copy Editing, Tuesday and Thursday, 9:25 a.m.
Wannabe
A reader solicits a “reaction to the use of the word ‘wannabe,’ as in ‘wannabe gang member,’ in the Metro section of the Wash Post last week. It struck me as a bit too informal, but I wonder if this was an example of careless editing or a perhaps a more formal and accepted use of the word. OED lists its use, of course, in newspapers, but the word seems to be used in sections of the paper less formal than the Metro section.”
There’s no question that the word, originally a colloquialism, is making headway in print. There is a good reason for that; it expresses useful distinctions of meaning. If The Post had referred to “an aspiring gang member,” the phrase would have conveyed the sense of someone who has an ambition that has not been fulfilled. But wannabe carries not only the sense of aspiration but also that of pretense — someone unsuccessfully imitating a role. The more traditional term is would-be, but I don’t think that it carries quite the same intensity of scorn.
A classic comment
Bill Walsh of The Washington Post, in a succinct post on Facebook:
Bill Walsh assures the assignment editor that the 60-inch story he gave us five minutes ago is probably still in the copy editor's hands.
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d
*Oh, good Lord, Merriam Webster’s says the reason why. Obviously worthless as an authority on usage.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Calling all subs
Susan Keith, a professor of journalism at Rutgers and a colleague from the American Copy Editors Society, is at work on a project on the state of copy editing/sub editing in the English-speaking world, and she appeals for help:
I'm attempting to interview several copy editors each from the U.S. and Canada and sub editors in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Locating copy editors in the U.S. hasn't been a problem, of course, and I've made some contacts in Canada and among the gregarious Aussies. But I'm still trying to identify sub editors in the U.K., Ireland and South Africa.
Here is a fuller description of the project:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~susank/subcopyeditorproject.html
If anyone from this blog’s international audience would like to assist Professor Keith, here is her e-mail address: susank@rci.rutgers.edu
Professor Keith adds that “there's no need for copy/sub editors to be identified by name or newspaper in my study. I understand that many people might not want to speak, for attribution, about conditions at their workplaces, so I can keep identities confidential.”
A personal note
This is the eight-hundredth post of this blog, begun in a burst of optimism and exploration in December 2005. This week Gannett is discharging more than a thousand employees, and word of the fate of colleagues around the country — people I’ve met through conferences and workshops, people whose worth I know and whose work I value — is beginning to trickle in. And the fate of those left behind is hardly to be envied. I hope that Professor Keith’s study will help to illuminate the situation as journalism gropes its way toward a new path, but just today I lack the heart to say anything further.
I'm attempting to interview several copy editors each from the U.S. and Canada and sub editors in the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Locating copy editors in the U.S. hasn't been a problem, of course, and I've made some contacts in Canada and among the gregarious Aussies. But I'm still trying to identify sub editors in the U.K., Ireland and South Africa.
Here is a fuller description of the project:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~susank/subcopyeditorproject.html
If anyone from this blog’s international audience would like to assist Professor Keith, here is her e-mail address: susank@rci.rutgers.edu
Professor Keith adds that “there's no need for copy/sub editors to be identified by name or newspaper in my study. I understand that many people might not want to speak, for attribution, about conditions at their workplaces, so I can keep identities confidential.”
A personal note
This is the eight-hundredth post of this blog, begun in a burst of optimism and exploration in December 2005. This week Gannett is discharging more than a thousand employees, and word of the fate of colleagues around the country — people I’ve met through conferences and workshops, people whose worth I know and whose work I value — is beginning to trickle in. And the fate of those left behind is hardly to be envied. I hope that Professor Keith’s study will help to illuminate the situation as journalism gropes its way toward a new path, but just today I lack the heart to say anything further.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
A new Garner
Thank you, @mbrockenbrough, for word that the new edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage is forthcoming.
The third edition, due out this month from Oxford University Press, includes a language change index, which, the publisher says, “registers where each disputed usage in modern English falls on a five-stage continuum from nonacceptability (to the language community as a whole) to acceptability, giving the book a consistent standard throughout.”
Mr. Garner is of the tribe of reasonable prescriptivists. His advice is clear and sensible, though you are, of course, not bound by it. You should, however, pay attention to what he says before you disagree.
This is one of the reference books than any editor serious about the craft should have near at hand.
A disclosure: I was one of people from whom Mr. Garner solicited comments on portions of the new edition.
The third edition, due out this month from Oxford University Press, includes a language change index, which, the publisher says, “registers where each disputed usage in modern English falls on a five-stage continuum from nonacceptability (to the language community as a whole) to acceptability, giving the book a consistent standard throughout.”
Mr. Garner is of the tribe of reasonable prescriptivists. His advice is clear and sensible, though you are, of course, not bound by it. You should, however, pay attention to what he says before you disagree.
This is one of the reference books than any editor serious about the craft should have near at hand.
A disclosure: I was one of people from whom Mr. Garner solicited comments on portions of the new edition.
Making distinctions
Part of the copy editor’s responsibility in achieving clarity and precision of prose is to honor nuances of meaning. The trick is to know which nuances are meaningful and which are not — especially as usage shifts over time. Things that you were taught at the beginning of your career may no longer be valid.
Here is a guide to distinctions of usage that are worth preserving, and some that are not. You disagree with me, you know what comments are for.
DISTINCTIONS WORTH PRESERVING
adverse/averse
affect/effect
amount/number
between/among Provided that you understand that between can be legitimately applied to more than two parties in some contexts.
capital/capitol
criteria Plural only.
elicit/illicit
eminent/imminent
explicit/implicit
imply/infer A writer who does not understand that these are opposite actions should be set straight.
its/it’s Observing the distinction remains a mark of literacy and attention to detail.
lead/led
phenomena Plural only.
plus As a conjunction it still sounds colloquial.
principal/principle
raise/rise Former transitive, latter intransitive.
than/then
unique For one of a kind, not merely rare.
who’s/whose
your/you’re
DISTINCTIONS THAT ARE DISSOLVING
Since the easiest thing for the author of a usage manual or textbook on copy editing can do is to copy what was in a previous edition, fossilized preferences last a long time. But sometimes it is most prudent to conclude that nothing is to be gained by fighting lost battles.
anxious/eager
can/may
career/careen Career, for moving recklessly at high speed, has just about vanished.
compare to/compare with
data Increasingly common a singular.
different from/different than
disinterested/uninterested To my profound regret, this one has largely gone away.
due to For because.
everyone/their Prohibition probably best abandoned altogether.
farther/further
finalize For to complete.
graduate As a transitive, e.g., She graduated high school.
hanged/hung
lie/lay Stand firm if you must, but the language is moving away from you.
media Increasingly common as a singular.
shall/will The former is slowly vanishing from both speech and writing.
that/which Could go in the following category. You may well want to use that only for restrictive clauses and which only for nonrestrictive clauses, but that is a personal preference, not a rule of usage.
BOGUS DISTINCTIONS
No one cares that Mrs. Poindexter humiliated you in class in the sixth grade over
using none with a plural verb. She was dead wrong then, and probably dead now.
could care less/couldn’t care less The former is an idiom that no one misunderstands.
hopefully Perfectly idiomatic as a sentence adverb.
however Perfectly acceptable at the beginning of a sentence.
none As a plural. Can be either singular or plural, depending on context.
over/more than
since Acceptable for because. See the comment at the beginning of DISTINCTIONS THAT ARE DISSOLVING. If it didn’t bother you there, it shouldn’t bother you anywhere.
that Can be used in place of who without doing violence to the language.
Here is a guide to distinctions of usage that are worth preserving, and some that are not. You disagree with me, you know what comments are for.
DISTINCTIONS WORTH PRESERVING
adverse/averse
affect/effect
amount/number
between/among Provided that you understand that between can be legitimately applied to more than two parties in some contexts.
capital/capitol
criteria Plural only.
elicit/illicit
eminent/imminent
explicit/implicit
imply/infer A writer who does not understand that these are opposite actions should be set straight.
its/it’s Observing the distinction remains a mark of literacy and attention to detail.
lead/led
phenomena Plural only.
plus As a conjunction it still sounds colloquial.
principal/principle
raise/rise Former transitive, latter intransitive.
than/then
unique For one of a kind, not merely rare.
who’s/whose
your/you’re
DISTINCTIONS THAT ARE DISSOLVING
Since the easiest thing for the author of a usage manual or textbook on copy editing can do is to copy what was in a previous edition, fossilized preferences last a long time. But sometimes it is most prudent to conclude that nothing is to be gained by fighting lost battles.
anxious/eager
can/may
career/careen Career, for moving recklessly at high speed, has just about vanished.
compare to/compare with
data Increasingly common a singular.
different from/different than
disinterested/uninterested To my profound regret, this one has largely gone away.
due to For because.
everyone/their Prohibition probably best abandoned altogether.
farther/further
finalize For to complete.
graduate As a transitive, e.g., She graduated high school.
hanged/hung
lie/lay Stand firm if you must, but the language is moving away from you.
media Increasingly common as a singular.
shall/will The former is slowly vanishing from both speech and writing.
that/which Could go in the following category. You may well want to use that only for restrictive clauses and which only for nonrestrictive clauses, but that is a personal preference, not a rule of usage.
BOGUS DISTINCTIONS
No one cares that Mrs. Poindexter humiliated you in class in the sixth grade over
using none with a plural verb. She was dead wrong then, and probably dead now.
could care less/couldn’t care less The former is an idiom that no one misunderstands.
hopefully Perfectly idiomatic as a sentence adverb.
however Perfectly acceptable at the beginning of a sentence.
none As a plural. Can be either singular or plural, depending on context.
over/more than
since Acceptable for because. See the comment at the beginning of DISTINCTIONS THAT ARE DISSOLVING. If it didn’t bother you there, it shouldn’t bother you anywhere.
that Can be used in place of who without doing violence to the language.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The AP Stylebook: Repository of extinct rules
A correspondent with a stronger stomach than mine follows the AP Stylebook’s “Ask the Editor” feature, where she found this exchange:
Q. I've found that the online version of the AP Stylebook frequently does not adhere to AP rules regarding "over" and "more than." For example, on your home page for subscribers, there's a reference to "over 450 entries." I've seen this type of error several times in your online stylebook. The printed version always is accurate, however. What gives? – from Salem, OR on Thu, Jul 02, 2009
A. The home page now says: More than 460 pages, updated annually. Thank you for the reminder.
[Sound of steam escaping under pressure]
If the editors of the stylebook choose to waste their time on this, well, I have no authority over them. But their devotion to time-wasting non-rules — I won’t call it obstinacy — has unfortunate effects on the craft.
Somewhere today, one of our last surviving copy editors, a species more endangered than the Javan rhinoceros or the Kemp’s Ridley Turtle, is changing an over to more than and imagining that that constitutes editing. It is not. It is rather an adherence to what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls “a hoary American newspaper tradition” dating back to William Cullen Bryant, despite over and more than having been used interchangeably in English since the fourteen century.
Merriam-Webster’s concludes: “There is no reason why you should avoid this usage.” There is also no reason that the AP should continue to trot put this pointless dictum. And there is absolutely no reason that a hard-pressed copy editor should pay any attention to it.
Q. I've found that the online version of the AP Stylebook frequently does not adhere to AP rules regarding "over" and "more than." For example, on your home page for subscribers, there's a reference to "over 450 entries." I've seen this type of error several times in your online stylebook. The printed version always is accurate, however. What gives? – from Salem, OR on Thu, Jul 02, 2009
A. The home page now says: More than 460 pages, updated annually. Thank you for the reminder.
[Sound of steam escaping under pressure]
If the editors of the stylebook choose to waste their time on this, well, I have no authority over them. But their devotion to time-wasting non-rules — I won’t call it obstinacy — has unfortunate effects on the craft.
Somewhere today, one of our last surviving copy editors, a species more endangered than the Javan rhinoceros or the Kemp’s Ridley Turtle, is changing an over to more than and imagining that that constitutes editing. It is not. It is rather an adherence to what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls “a hoary American newspaper tradition” dating back to William Cullen Bryant, despite over and more than having been used interchangeably in English since the fourteen century.
Merriam-Webster’s concludes: “There is no reason why you should avoid this usage.” There is also no reason that the AP should continue to trot put this pointless dictum. And there is absolutely no reason that a hard-pressed copy editor should pay any attention to it.
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