Corpora Punishment: A Grammar Noir Tale

Part 1: An editor walks into a bar

The day was leaking sunlight all over Baltimore at three o'clock, but that was not doing me any good. I was taking the healing waters in a dark saloon with a group of congenial barflies, discussing the finer points of demurrage and maritime law, when a seedy character crept in, put his hat on the bar, and ordered a beer. 

The tapster set down a brimming beaker, and the seedy character said, "Hey, don't splash it on my fedora."

"It's a trilby," I said. 

"What?"

"Those stingy-brim hats are called trilbies, named for the headgear of the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier's novel. Fedoras, which have wide brims and a center crease, were named for the hat Sarah Bernhardt wore as she played the eponymous heroine of Victorien Sardou's drama." 

"You must be a copy editor. Nobody else knows that kind of stuff. Hey, are you the one that upstart publication lured out of retirement?"

"I own the soft impeachment. What's your game?"

"You're the guy I came to see. They told me you hang out with these tosspots all the time. But, like, it has to be confidential."

"All right," I said. "Let's step into the back room for a minute."

We repaired to an even darker corner. He looked around guardedly and turned a sweaty face to me.

"Spill it," I said.

He whispered, "The peeververein are consolidating."

"Usage cranks? Consolidating"?

"Yeah. Different groups coming together. The Decimate Means 10 Percent crowd and the Kids Are Goats group have formed Etymology Is Destiny. Then they hooked up with the Two Spaces After a Period mob, the Over/More Than element, and the Standard English Is the Only English alliance." 

"And?"

"They're calling their organization Make English Great Again."

"So what? They can't do anything beyond infesting social media and talking among themselves."

"You're wrong, I'm tellin' ya. They've consulted Nevile Gwynne and Jacob Rees-Mogg. They mean business."

"What kind of business?"

He looked around again and bent close to my ear.

"Their goons got Paula Froke."

Part 2: The plot that failed

I gave him a look of disbelief that would credit a managing editor looking over a foreign correspondent's expense report. "What in the name of Henry Watson Fowler do they think they're going to do with the editor of the Associated Press Stylebook?

"They're going to slap her up in a secure facility at the University of Austin and make her revoke all the changes she's made since becoming editor, and then they're going to start dictating new rules to her." 

"Where are they holding her now?"

"They got her in a ballroom at the Hotel Pedantry."

"Drink your Smithwick's. I've got this."

The cabbie who dropped me off at the hotel half an hour later gave a fishy look at my bow tie, but my tip kept his mouth buttoned. 

I entered the lobby and walked up to the muscle standing at the ballroom door.

"No admission," he said. 

"Listen, sunshine," I said, "I used to be an assistant managing editor, and I don't take any guff from reptiles like you."

He went pale and swung the door open.

I walked up to some dimwit standing in front of a MEGA banner and gassing on about the split-verb rule, and took the microphone from him.

"Listen, you mugs," I told the crowd, "this little escapade is as pointless as reverse body type. Writers don't pay any attention to the AP Stylebook. They've never opened one. The only people who care about the stylebook are the copy editors, and the copy editor has been snuffed out like the dodo, the passenger pigeon, and the moderate Republican."

They gasped. 

"Now scram, the lot of you. I've got an autographed copy of Dreyer's English, and I'm not afraid to use it."

They scuttled away like an op-ed columnist who's seen a fact checker.

As I untied the ropes holding Froke in a chair she opened her mouth to begin thanking me, but I said, "Skip it, sister. There's still enough afternoon left to take the healing waters. Come along and I'll buy you a drink."

She likes Manhattans. 

The End

I have to say it again: English ain't algebra

 Yesterday brought a Twitterspat in which I engaged, probably unwisely, with a woman who commented that logic governs English grammar and punctuation. 

This misconception rises because people become literate and are taught English grammar and stylebook conventions of punctuation, but are never taught the language, that is, the principles of language that linguists have discerned. (Neither was I taught linguistics in school or college, and I've had a great deal of catching up to do.)

Take punctuation. It doesn't require deep thought to see that its conventions are arbitrary. In American English, we put commas and periods inside quotation marks; British English does the opposite. I have seen people indulge in online disputes over which convention is more logical, but you can argue one side and then argue the other side until the cows come home. 

Punctuation is more fashion than logic, as you can see in Making a Point, David Crystal's history of English punctuation, or Keith Houston's Shady Characters The Secret Life of Punctuation Symbols & Other Typographical Marks. (Crystal here.)

As to grammar, we know many principles on which it operates, but they too are arbitrary, often accidents of cultural development. Old English collided with Norman French after A.D. 1066, and the Middle English that developed shed most of the inflections of Old English and the gendered nouns of the French. Other languages, though, maintain inflections and gendered nouns; are they more or less logical than English?

We know that the fundamental syntactical pattern in English is subject-verb-object. That isn't necessarily the case elsewhere. We know the order of adjectives, the deep grammar that enables us to talk about the little gray stone church and to see that the stone gray little church isn't right. They are principles, but logic has nothing to do with them. And neither does it seem logical that English should harbor a clutch of words called contranyms, like sanction, which bear opposite meanings. 

Places where reliable information about English grammar can be found are Don't Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari and The Joy of Syntax by June Casagrande. (Shariatmadari here; Casagrande here.) Then you will see that logic is useful for argument but irrelevant for grammar. 

The person in the Twitterspat was a lawyer who took it ill when I mentioned Samuel Johnson's observation that we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction. I think I deserve some credit for not quoting what Dr. Johnson said about lawyers. 

Don't be an eejit on March 17

 Patrick Abdalla reminded me on Facebook this morning that March is nearly upon us, time to counter the ignorance that besmirches St. Patrick's Day. 

For ONE MORE TIME, the familiar term for the saint's day is St. Paddy's Day, not St. Patty's Day. St.Patty's Day is no more than you would expect from ersatz Irish who drink watery American beer dyed green. 

Paddy is the diminutive form of Padraic, the Irish form of the name Patrick. Patty is the diminutive form of Patricia. Do try to grasp that. 

Paddy is also a generic term for an Irishman. It survives in the ethnic slur paddy wagon, for police patrol wagon, which arose from nineteenth-century prejudice assuming that the Irish get drunk and violent every payday. 

I assume that on Twitter @paddynotpatty is prepared to swing into action. 

Do not tolerate the prevalence of ignorance. 

And treat yourself to a reviving pint of Guinness or Smithwick's. Slainte. 

A brief announcement

 I have contracted to provide editing services to The Baltimore Banner, the pending online local news site of The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism. 

Not rusting out

 Since retiring in June I have been attending to household chores, cooking chicken for the cat, and reading books by the dozen. But the itch to edit is not easily ignored. 

So I spoke to a dozen and a half members of a public relations firm in Columbus, Ohio, during a Zoom luncheon session on grammar and usage, talked with one of Professor Rick Brunson's journalism classes at the University of Central Florida (again online), and spent an hour or so on Zoom to discuss self-editing and changes in English usage with the news staff of the Christian Science Monitor. 

As I have mentioned previously, I worked as a copy editor on several articles in the Printing Hate series by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland at College Park. Apparently satisfied with the work, the Howard Center has engaged me as a copy editor for an additional project. 

Some talks or work I do for love, but, like you, I would usually prefer money. If you think that hearing from a not-yet-extinct veteran editor would benefit your class/office/agency/group, or that you have a text or texts that could stand some close attention, don't be too shy to inquire. I can be reached at jemcintyre@gmail.com or at 410-963-2931. 

Call the pressroom

 You've seen it. A reporter dashes in to a busy newsroom with a hot scoop, and a crusty old editor picks up a phone, usually a candlestick, and barks into it, "Stop the presses!"

I've had occasion, often on a night when the Orioles were in extra innings, to call the pressroom about slowing or pausing the run to get the game score into a few thousand copies. (Really, nighttime baseball is unnatural.) But in forty years in the paragraph game I've only heard "Stop the presses" twice. 

The first occasion was the Saturday evening when Princess Diana and her boyfriend went for a drive. I was at the desk, and the Sunday edition of The Sun was falling nicely into place when a bulletin came over the wire services that Princess Diana had been in an automobile accident. My reaction was that of any seasoned journalist: "Shit!" I said. "We'll have to get something in about that."

The phone rang. Bill Glauber, then The Sun's London correspondent, was on vacation--in Paris. It was a serious accident, he said, and he would file. So we carved out some space on the front page for a story about Princess Diana having been seriously injured, and typeset the page for the first edition. 

The phone rang again. Glauber said we should be ready. "I think she's dead. They're not talking about her the way they would if she were alive or expected to live." 

We had just typeset the front page for the second edition when a bulletin came over the wires: Princess Diana dead. "Shit!" I remarked. And the news editor called the pressroom and said, "Stop the presses. We're tearing up Page One."

Forty minutes later, an eternity in press time, we typeset a front page with Princess Diana's death as the lead story, written by our correspondent on the scene. And in Anne Arundel and Howard counties, where we were then in competition with The Washington Post, the deadlines for The Post's Arundel and Howard editions were earlier than ours, and we beat them on the story on those jurisdictions. Sweet.

The second occasion was three o'clock in the morning after the 2000 presidential election. Half the lights in the newsroom had gone off automatically. We were holding Page One and one inside page for the election story. Finally a service called the election, and we typeset a front page with a BUSH WINS headline. 

The telephone rang. It was Paul West, from The Sun's Washington bureau. "They're still counting," he said. 

The news editor picked up the phone: "Stop the presses." We sent through a TOO CLOSE TO CALL headline and instructed the pressroom to junk any copies that had been run off with the previous headline, and also to destroy the plates immediately. We didn't want to be tagged with a DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN embarrassment. 

Last night The Sun's plant at Port Covington published the paper for the last time. The Sun has been printed continuously in Baltimore since 1837, apart from a brief interval after the Great Fire of 1904 destroyed the newspaper building, and tonight begins production of print editions at Gannett's plant in Wilmington, Delaware. 

The presses have been stopped. 

Knowing your ass from a hole in the wall

Tweeted and posted yesterday: Let me just say that a breach is where you have broken through the wall and a breech is where your ass is. You may be interested in more of the why and the wherefore. 

Breach encompasses a sense of breaking. The noun can mean a broken condition,  a break in a wall from battering ("Once more unto the breach" in Henry V), a violation of a law, or a break in previously friendly relations. The verb means to break or violate. 

Breech originally meant short pants covering the hips and thighs, often as breeches or britches, later broadening the encompass pants in general. Breech also means buttocks, the part of the body covered by the breeches, the place at which the body forks into the legs. In childbirth, a breech delivery is one in which the fetus emerges buttocks/feet first instead of head first. In firearms, the breech is the part at the rear of the barrel, and a breech loader is a firearm in which the ammunition is inserted at the breech. A breeches buoy is a suspended canvas seat for transfer or rescue in water. 

Broach, like breach, is associated with breaking. It can be an instrument for piecing, a spit, or a tool for tapping a cask. The verb means to break open, such as literally to open a cask of beer or figuratively to open a subject for discussion. 

Broach, confusingly, since English is not necessarily an orderly language, is an alternative spelling for brooch, an ornament fastened by a pin or clasp. 

It's your language, and it's your responsibility to make sure that what you say or write is what you mean. 

When education is not one of your community values

 The McMinn County School Board, which removed the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from its schools, evidently employs someone able to write a sentence. This is its formal statement on the action:

"One of the most important roles of an elected board of education is to reflect the values of the community it serves.  The McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the graphic novel Maus from McMinn County Schools because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.  Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools." Yadda, yadda, yadda. 

I vote to acquit the ten members of the school board who banned the book from charges of anti-Semitism. I believe that they were reflecting the values of their community, especially when one member was offended by the use of the word damn and another was aghast at a cartoon drawing of a nekkid figure. 

One frequently sees, after all, obsession with minor community mores over actual education. The high school in Fleming County, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, had an obsession with the length of boys' hair, to the extent that at one point the principal was under pressure to line up the male students in the hallway each day for haircut inspection. One sees it as well in dress codes that dictate how much of a girl's body may be permissibly exposed to the light. 

McMinn County, Tennessee, (whose county seat, in a cruel irony, is Athens) is not far from Dayton, where a century ago John T. Scopes was tried and convicted of the crime of teaching Darwinian evolution. I have not the heart to inquire whether McMinn's biology classes are allowed to contravene Genesis. 

The McMinn board members have been held up to widespread ridicule and condemnation in social media, and doubtless they feel ill-used. This is the only advice I can offer them: If you don't want the world to think of you as a bunch of rubes, try not to act like a bunch of rubes. 

It's over

 A recent online discussion of English usage turned into a tussle concerning the use of over in the sense of more than, a molehill on which some are prepared to die. 

For those of you not in the know, it has been a widespread belief among U.S. journalists that over can only be properly used to indicate a spatial relationship, that to use it to mean more than in the sense of quantities is illogical, illegitimate, and illiterate.

There was a great cry of anguished souls at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society when the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook announced that the over/more than distinction had been dropped. (Since Paula Froke became one of the editors of the stylebook she has busied herself lightening the ship by heaving broken furniture over the side.)

I attended that conference and spoke with three lexicographers, two from Merriam-Webster and one from the American Heritage Dictionary, who were floored to learn of a distinction of usage of which they were completely unaware. Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, and the other standard dictionaries list more than as one meaning of over. 

This meaningless distinction was apparently an invention of nineteenth-century journalists given to unexplained diktats. The instruction not to use over for more than appears in William Cullen Bryant's "Index Expurgatorius" of 1877, the "Don't List" compiled by James Gordon Bennett at the New York Herald, and in Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right. From there it passed into the lore of newspaper editors and then the conventions of journalism schools. 

Here's what Theodore Bernstein of The New York Times wrote about this supposed rule in Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins (1971): Bierce "gave no reason for the objection and it is difficult to see how there could be any. Since the days of late Middle English the meaning in excess of has been in reputable use. Strangely enough, those who dislike over do not hesitate to write 'above $150.' " 

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage observes that "over in the sense of more than has been used in English since the 14th century." Bryan Garner says in Garner's Modern English Usage that "the charge that over is inferior to more than is a baseless crotchet." And Jeremy Butterfield in Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage indulges in a moment of British hauteur to note "a strong tradition in American newspapers and in some American usage guides of absolute, unconditional, almost maniacal hostility to the use of over with a following numeral to mean 'in excess of, more than.' " He advises "editors and writers of other varieties of English to be aware that the anxiety continues (and to judge by some editorial forums, can almost induce nausea or hyperventilation)." 

If you have routinely changed over (quantity) to more than, as I slavishly did for much of my forty years as a working editor, it it NOT YOUR FAULT that you were badly instructed. It is your fault, however, if you continue to do so after being informed that it is a waste of time and invisible to any reader who is not a journalist. 

Go and sin no more.  

In the beginning

I growled today at spotting "new initiatives" in an article. (Growling in the morning while reading the news exerts the lungs and increases blood flow to the brain, both beneficial effects, especially when combined with strong coffee.) 

An initiative is a first step, a beginning. Its sibs from the Latin initiare include initial and initiate, both of which indicate beginnings. If you are taking a first step in a series of actions, you are by definition doing something new, and thus new initiative is redundant. 

Granted, if you are contrasting a new measure with some previous effort, it would be entirely proper to use new initiative, but only to contrast with the earlier one. 

I have grudgingly abandoned a losing campaign against the irritating pleonasm safe haven, but damme if I will accede to new initiative.