Give my regards, irregardless

 Facebook's Captain Grammar Pants laid down the law this week: "Irregardless is a double negative, and we all know that we can’t not never, no way, no how, use a double negative. You mean 'regardless.' If you use 'irregardless,' regardless of the consequences, you might not get that job interview. Please be aware that certain dictionaries that SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS have given up the fight and now accept 'irregardless' as a synonym of regardless. I do not! Stem the tide of ignorance and use the correct word, regardless!"

This post predictably brought out the peververein in force to chime in and offer additional crotchets. Whinge as you like, but English is, and continues to be, what we, its speakers and writers, collectively make it over time, and we made irregardless  a word some time ago, as I posted out in a post five years ago: 

Irregardless is too a word; you just don't understand dictionaries

While off for the holiday yesterday, I witnessed a spasm of dictionary panic online, after someone discovered that Merriam-Webster includes irregardless in its dictionaries.

Responses varied: [Gasp] [Clutch pearls] [Recline on chaise longue, applying cold cloths to forehead], accompanied by sentiments such as “Not a word,” “English is Over,” and “The worrrrrld is coming to an end.”

Let’s unpack the misapprehensions crowding together here.

Take “not a word” first. Irregardless is by any measure a word. It has a spelling and a pronunciation. It has a meaning, “regardless.” (Not unusual for English to have more than one word for the same meaning.) It has an etymology, a combination of regardless and irrespective. It has a history, surfacing in the United States circa 1900, with multiple citations since.

When people say that irregardless is “not a word,” then, they can’t mean it literally. What they mean is that it is not a word in use in standard English (which Merriam-Webster points out with the note “nonstandard”).

So we arrive at our second misapprehension, that standard English is the One, True English, all other dialects being inferior, subliterate, nasty. But there is no English Academy (laus Deo) to determine what is “correct” or “proper” English, which is instead the most democratic thing we have. Dialects bobble up against one another, and you get to choose from them whatever suits your purpose.

Let’s look at wicked Merriam-Webster, which had the temerity to include this word. Someone inquired whether any other dictionary does so. I reach over to the shelf adjacent to my desk and find irregardless in the American Heritage Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. All of them, like Merriam-Webster, label the word as “nonstandard” or “informal.”

And they all have some sort of usage note appended to the entry, of which American Heritage offers the most comprehensive: “Irregardless is a word that many people believe to be correct in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. The word was coined in the United States in the early 1900s, probably from a blend of irrespective and regardless. Many critics have complained that it is a redundancy, the negative prefix ir- duplicating the negativity of the –less suffix. Perhaps its reputation as a blend of ill-fitting parts has caused some to insist that it is a “nonword,” a charge they would not think of leveling at a nonstandard word with a longer history, such as ain’t. It is undoubtedly a word in the broader sense of the language, but it has never been accepted in standard English and is almost always changed by copyeditors to regardless.”

(My copy of American Heritage is the fifth edition, from 2011, and it is already beginning to look a little quaint, with its assumption that there are still copy editors.)

Now we arrive at our final misapprehension: what dictionaries are for and how they operate. Just as there is no English Academy dictating correctness, lexicographers are not the club membership committee, deciding what gets in and what gets blackballed. Inclusion in a dictionary does not amount to an imprimatur. Dictionaries exist to tell you what you might want to know about words, both standard and nonstandard: how they are spelled and pronounced, what they mean, where they came from, who uses them. That’s it.

Yesterday’s online kerfuffle was an echo of the brouhaha from half a century ago, when Webster’s Third came out with neutral rather than judgmental notes and was taken to endorse ain’t. Dwight Macdonald had a major hissy fit in the pages of The New Yorker, and the whole clamor is described in David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t.

Now, perhaps you could take a deep, cleansing breath.

The Old editor glares at AI

 A while back I shared a post, then deleted it after I was persuaded that the image in it had been generated by AI. I do not trust AI and do not consciously use it, for the following reasons. And because I am posting this online, I am confident that some generous soul will point out how misinformed I am. 

AI depends on accumulating a vast store of texts from which to generate material. Some of that text is copyrighted, and my understanding is that the copyright holders are neither cited nor compensated. 

The ability to generate new texts from this store makes both plagiarism and fabrication easy, leaving the reader with the task of identifying what can be trusted. We've seen accounts of teachers who cannot vouch for the authenticity of the work their students submit, as well as of legal filings that include bogus citations. (In a proper society, this phenomenon would mean more work for editors to ferret out the genuine from the dross, but few care enough about accuracy to engage editors.) 

AI requires enormous quantities of electricity for its servers, which leads to increases in cost for ordinary consumers and strain on the power grid. It also requires huge quantities of water to cool those servers, which makes it environmentally questionable.

I am beginning to see articles questioning the sustainability of the project: millions invested in  technology that is made obsolete by further technical advances before the initial investment is recouped. This could, these articles warn, lead to a financial collapse comparable to the housing bubble and subprime mortgage collapse of 2008. 

So, yes, I am not a cheerleader. 

 

To the students

 Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, from which I graduated in 1969, has announced on Facebook that it is looking for guest speakers "passionate about their careers" who would be willing to "invest in students' futures for the 2025-2026 school year during school hours." One of the categories for speakers is journalism. 

Well, I am elderly, in Baltimore, and disinclined to drive there to talk for twenty minutes or so, but Fleming County did prepare me for a career of more than forty-five years in journalism, and I know a few things from which those students might benefit. 

I am writing this for the chance that a high school student might look at it. If you are a jaded sophisticate, you might want to read somewhere else. 

The first thing to be passionate about is reading. I was starved for books in the 1950s and early 1960s, before the library was established and when the school libraries were skimpy. I read comic books. I read history, biography, science fiction, everything I could get my hands on. And I kept on reading. Wide reading is the foundation of work in writing, how you know what works and what doesn't; and for an editor it is not possible to know too much about many subjects. 

Even before that wide reading, I picked up standard English grammar quickly in class. Yes, I was a teacher's pet and obnoxiously officious, but if you want a career that involves writing, you have to know and use the standard English dialect. Savor and speak in all the Englishes you encounter and like--there is nothing wrong with that. But mastering standard English grammar and usage is your entry point to the profession. 

When I was a junior in high school, Lowell Denton, the publisher of the Flemingsburg Gazette, invited me to work there in the summers. His wife, Jean, liked to take the summer off, and so I worked as reporter, columnist, and copy editor for six summers in high school and college. This was invaluable experience. Writing and editing are a craft; you learn them by doing them. If someone gives you a chance to learn it as you go along and make your mistakes early, do not pass it up. 

In college and graduate school I majored in English. Once again, the reading: different authors at different times in different genres, seeing how they stretched the language, seeing how they put things together in different structures, talking about books and authors with knowledgeable friends. 

Abandoning a misguided plan to become a Ph.D. in English literature, I by chance landed a job on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer and there through working with helpful and knowledgeable colleagues, I learned to be a copy editor. It's a craft that you learn by doing, remember? That in turn led to a thirty-four-year career at The Baltimore Sun during which I oversaw the copy desk and a retirement gig as an editor for The Baltimore Banner. 

So thanks to Frances Dorsey in the fourth grade and Lynda McKee in high school, to Lowell and Jean Denton, and to colleagues in Cincinnati and Baltimore and nationally who saw some prospect of ability in me, I have had the satisfaction of doing the work I was meant to do. I hope that you will discover as fortunate an outcome. 

What we have lost

The tone in newspapers, when I started out as a copy editor forty years ago, was that the copy desk was a place where reporters fetched  up after their legs or livers gave out, or a domain of quibblers obsessed with minuscule details--comma jockeys. 

Well, I do like to see a verb agree with its subject, and I can punctuate with the precision of a marksman. But the key thing, the fundamental thing about the traditional copy desk, is that it was set apart. It was not connected with the desks that generated stories, and it played no part in their processes. Instead, it was independent, and its members looked fresh at each story, much like a reader. 

Reporters work with their editors on stories, on which they come to an understanding of what should be in them and how the material should be treated. The back-and-forth between editors and reporters carries an inherent hazard of developing groupthink. The copy editor, traditionally understood, has not been a part of groupthink and can raise questions of importance about the focus, tone, and structure of the story. 

That gives, as former Baltimore Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, the opportunity to raise the most important question that a copy editor can ever articulate: Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"

On one occasion, a story came to the Sun's copy desk from a department head in which our copy editors identified not only an incoherent structure but a set of passages that could have constituted outright libel, and we defused it, to the publisher's subsequent gratitude. (I used a version of this story, with substitutions for all proper nouns, for years in my editing class at Loyola Maryland, and it never failed to leave the students agog. "You were going to publish this?) 

But as the newspaper business declined, the sharp-pencil people determined that copy editors were an expensive frill. The Sun's last copy editor departed in 2019, and some years ago The New York Times, once famed for its copy editing, disbanded its copy desks and assigned survivors to the respective originating desks, where they can resist groupthink, or perhaps not. 

We once had a model, and it served the reader well. 

The You Didn't Read the Book Club: Rules for Participants

 Two weeks ago I proposed a You Didn't Read the Book club: Membership limited to English majors, who are not permitted to confess to not having read a book in the canon. It will be an evening of bluffing, exaggerated by drink. Response was so enthusiastic that I have drawn up details for anyone wishing to form a chapter. 

Participants: Limited to English majors. Non-English majors may attend, but only as mute observers. No actual books may be consulted. 

Drinks: Sufficient quantities of wine, beer, and spirits are to be provided. 

The first round: Participants enjoy their first drink and engage in general conversation. When they are ready to begin, a member draws a card at random from the stack provided (list below) and must lead the discussion of the book on the card. Every member must comment. 

The second round: The second drink is provided. Now each remaining participant, in turn, takes a card from the stack and leads the discussion, in which all members must comment. The process continues until every participant has done a book. In this round, no one may dismiss an author as derivative. The club has the option to adjourn after the second round is completed. 

The third round (optional): A third drink is provided. In this round the only work under discussion is Finnegans Wake, and all must comment on it. The club adjourns as soon as any member proposes a fourth drink. 

The list of works

Beowulf 

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales 

Boswell, Life of Johnson

Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Austen, Mansfield Park

Dickens, Bleak House

Eliot, Middlemarch

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

James, The Golden Bowl

Eliot, Four Quartets

Wright, Native Son

Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Ford, The Good Soldier

Nabokov, Pale Fire

Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (in translation)

Tolstoy, War and Peace (in translation) 

Flaubert, Madame Bovary (in translation) 

You were not born yesterday. Be skeptical as editor and reader

In a time when widespread disinformation appears to be overtaking widespread misinformation, you would do well to read and edit cautiously and skeptically. Here are some guidelines.

AREAS REQUIRING CAUTION ABOUT ACCURACY

Names: Persons and places, formal titles, job descriptions.

Numbers: Percentages, averages, rates, ratios, polling data.

Chronology: Comprehensible sequence of events, reader’s orientation in place and time. 

Sources: Credibility, bias, independent confirmation. 

Superlatives: First, only, biggest, oldest. 

Photographs: Genuine or altered. 

Links: Veracity of other sites. 

Inconsistencies: Not only in factual details, but also in vocabulary, syntax, or tone. 

Legal issues: Assertions of illegal or illicit actions. Evidence?

Headlines: Accurate? Oversimplified? Slanted?

SELF-EXAMINATION

Confirmation bias: Reading selectively to focus on data confirming what we already think. 

Backfire effect: Strong reaction to challenges to deeply held beliefs or opinions, with the effect of reinforcing them. 

Biased assimilation: Interpreting new information to make it fit existing beliefs.

Motivated reasoning: Finding persuasive what already fits existing beliefs and reserving criticism for contradictory details and evidence.  

Group polarization: Tendency in discussion to be pulled toward the people expressing the strongest views. 

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE QUESTIONS

What is the source/evidence? Reliable? Independently confirmed?

What is the history of the persons and entities involved?

Who else is saying this?

What need does it fit?

What is the motivation?

Does it meet our standards? 

How do we add value?

DANGER AREAS

Story is too good. Factual details and quotes are perfect, fitting all expectations. 

Publishing in haste. Shortcutting the questioning to get the story out ahead of everyone else. 

Writer is a star. Privileged employee exempted from strong questioning and challenges.

Everyone is on board.  Consensus can be hard to challenge.  

Bad behavior in public? Summon a mob

 If you have been on social media the past few days, you know the story. Video shows a woman confronting a father and son at a baseball game and insisting on taking a ball from the son. Since then her image has been widely circulated, with calls that she be identified, fired from her job, and disgraced into perpetuity. 

I offer no further details; I am not interested in the story itself but in what the spread of the story shows us about ourselves. 

I can't say with authority that bad behavior in public has become more common, but I am sure that the prevalence of cellphones and video surveillance has made accounts of bad behavior in public increasingly common. 

And spreading without perspective. A woman bullying a kid and parent into giving up a baseball at a ballpark gets the same widespread indignant comment as someone shouting racial abuse at Black or Latino persons and trying to get them arrested or deported, or threatening physical violence. Perhaps lack of confidence in government and institutions prompts people to go on these vigilante jags, and a public that seems increasingly angry also appears to be increasingly eager to find subjects on which to vent that anger--with a lack of any oversight or norms leaving one wondering whether justice is actually served. 

Then there is the Karen thing. The woman at the ballpark has been repeatedly called a Karen, which has become a widespread pejorative term for a middle-class woman, usually white, who is caught in public displaying behavior that is entitled, demanding, and obnoxious. As these Karen reports multiply online, it is hard not to see that to the class issue has been added a tincture of something very much like misogyny. 

People who circulate these reports of bad behavior might consider whether the bad behavior is limited to the subjects. 

Discoveries

 Some forty-odd years ago, I picked up a copy of Amy Clampitt's The Kingfisher from the slush pile of books to be reviewed at The Cincinnati Enquirer. I chose it because I had seen and liked one of her poems in The New Yorker. 

That book has been shifted from place to place, apartment to house, unread, for four decades. This week I picked it up, began to read it, and discovered that it is astonishingly good. That should have been obvious because Richard Wilbur, whose taste was infallible, proclaimed it astonishingly good in the copy on the dust jacket. 

One touch: 

"Grief / is original, but it / repeats itself; there's nothing / more original that it can do."

I wonder, can you name a book whose belated discovery has overpowered you with its quality? 

Cracker Barrel culture will not nourish you

 When my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, died in 1945, my father, Raymond McIntyre, took over the operation of his general store in Elizaville, Kentucky. It was a going concern. 

For one thing, Elizaville, population about 100, was on the road from Maysville to Lexington. Travelers would stop at the store for cheese, cold cuts, and snacks because of the lack of restaurants along the highway. On Saturdays, people from outlying farms would come to the store to shop and socialize. My older sister remembers that my father and Eugene Wood, who owned the general store across the street, would compete for customers by hiring musicians on Saturday nights. 

All that is gone. When U.S. 68 between Maysville and Lexington was built, much of the automobile traffic dried up. The early supermarkets in Flemingsburg, the county seat, had a broader array of stock that drew away the customers. Today both general stores in Elizaville have been closed for years, though in the past year a Dollar Store opened in town. 

I am reminded of this lost era by the furor on over Cracker Barrel's rebranded logo. 

Cracker Barrel is a chain of restaurants trafficking in manufactured nostalgia. Customers enter and leave the restaurant through a shop brimming with tacky tchotchkes. The menu in the restaurant evokes the plain country cooking of the remembered (and imagined) past. Once, years ago, I got a perfectly good slice of country ham with my eggs. Two years ago when I ate at another Cracker Barrel, country ham was no longer on the menu and I had to wonder why anyone would patronize a restaurant that could not competently bake a potato. 

The old logo included a man in a chair leaning on a barrel; the revised logo simply displays the words "Cracker Barrel," and there lies the source of the outrage. 

The person leaning on the barrel in the old logo is an older white man, and his removal feeds into white people's apprehension of being overtaken by non-whites, their dominant culture diminished and supplanted. 

And so it goes. The demographics are clear: White people are well on the way to becoming a minority in the U.S. population, and it is a fantasy that the Trump administration can deport enough non-whites and right-wing influencers can gin up enough of a white population boom to counter these trends. Establishing some kind of apartheid might be attempted, but South Africa already tried that and we know how it came out. The current administration is addicted to performative stunts to intimidate non-whites and prop up white people's shaky sense of self, but stunts wear off fast and new ones have to be concocted. 

White people have been leaving the country for the cities over the past century, and our culture is coming out of the city rather than the farm. Black people have been here for five centuries and are not going away. Brown people are here doing the kinds of work that white people don't care to do, and won't do. A return to the white-dominant culture of the 1950s cannot be imposed from above and is not going to happen. 

If Cracker Barrel is the best you can come up with to exemplify and defend your values, you need to get out more. 

In case you missed it ...

 With all the claims on your time, along with your wide reading, it seems possible that you have not been assiduous in following this blog. Always seeking to be helpful, I have assembled a set of links to previous posts that you may find merit a look. 

Despite everything you have been told, life on the copy desk was good. 

The principles copy editors follow.

The twenty-year decline of The Baltimore Sun.

Unlearning is part of the job. 

The journalists' superstition that refuses to die. 

I know people hate that. Here is one reason not to. 

If you can indulge me, I reflect on the destruction of the family farmhouse.