Stop it. Just stop it.

You may recall Tom Lehrer's catchy Christmas song: "Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, / Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens, / Even though the prospect sickens, / Brother, here we go again."

And so again we go, because you have been reminded before, and you don't pay attention. 

To encourage you not to allow prefabricated phrases to overpower the unsteady hand, here are the holiday proscriptions. 

“ 'Tis the season”: Not in copy, not in headlines, not at all. Never, never, never, never, never. You cannot make this fresh. Do not attempt it.

“ 'Twas the night before” anything: 'Twasing is no more defensible than 'tising. (And if you must refer to the Rev. Mr. Moore’s poem, if indeed he wrote it, the proper title is “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”)

“Jolly old elf”: Please, no. And if you must use Kriss Kringle, and you need not, remember the double s.

Any “Christmas came early” construction. You own a calendar. 

“Yes, Virginia” allusions: No.

“Grinch steals”: When someone vandalizes holiday decorations, steals a child’s toys from under the tree, lists holiday cliches to eschew, or otherwise dampens holiday cheer, this construction may be almost irresistible. Resist it.

Give Dickens a rest. No ghosts of anything past, present or future. Delete bah and humbug from your working vocabulary. Treat Scrooge as you would the Grinch, i.e., by ignoring him.

“Turkey and all the trimmings”: If you can’t define trimmings without looking up the word, you shouldn’t be using it.

“White stuff” for snow: We should have higher standards of usage than do television weather forecasters. Also avoid the tautologies favored by these types: winter season, weather conditions, winter weather conditions, snow event and snow precipitation. While you're at it, the tautologies favored in advertising: free gift, extra bonus and extra added bonus.

Old Man Winter, Jack Frost and other moldy personifications can safely be omitted.

If the spirit of ecumenism and inclusion requires mention of Hanukkah in holiday articles, these points should be kept in mind. Hanukkah is a holiday more like Independence Day than Christmas, and it is only the coincidence of the calendar dates in a gentile culture that has caused the holiday to mimic Christian and secular elements. The holidays are coincidental; they are not twins. Do not confuse one with the other. 

Pray do not ring out or ring in an old year, a new year, or anything else.

Parodies of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” are, if possible, even more tedious than the original, and the lyrics typically do not scan. (Incidentally, though the playing of Christmas music began on All Saints' Day, if not before, the twelve days of Christmas begin on Christmas Day and end when Christmastide concludes with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. I am aware that no one is paying attention.)

The cost of "The Twelve Days of Christmas": Every year some penitent is assigned to compile these nebulous calculations (Given the state of the British aristocracy, how much are leaping lords discounted this year?). And every year newspapers credulously publish it. If by chance you are in a position of authority to kill it, do not stay your hand. 

Some readers (and, sadly, some writers) lap up this swill. It is familiar, and the complete lack of originality is a comfort to them. It is for such people that television exists.

For "whom," the bell tolls

 A colleague wrote to inquire about a construction in a George Will column in The Washington Post: "whomever wins." I did not read the column, which my colleague called "thoroughly nasty" (Surprise!), but I can tell you a little bit about whomever.

"Whoever wins" would be grammatical, because the pronoun is plainly the subject of the verb. My guess is that "whomever wins" in the column was a noun phrase that was the object of a preposition, e.g., "The spoils go to whoever wins the election." "Whoever wins" is the object of the preposition "to." Once you go beyond a single clause, you have to start paying attention to the mechanics.  

In over forty years as a newspaper copy editor, one of the most frequent questions I was asked by college-educated professional journalists was "Should this be who or whom?" And my experience over the same span is that the professional journalists who used whom in the publications I edited and in others could be relied upon to get it wrong about half the time. 

The fate of whom lies in the hands of three diverse groups. 

Members of the first and dwindling group of whom-users, the line-in-the-sand, die-on-the-last-hill purists, say they know what they are doing, are going to continue doing it until the eschaton, and damn your eyes, you pathetic illiterate. 

Members of the second group of whom-users like to parade their literacy, as George Will does, but cannot be counted on to pay attention and get it quite right, viz., the journalists who continue to use it. 

Member of a third and increasingly numerous group, the who-users, who may not have been paying close attention in English class--or might never have been taught the distinction--view the use of whom as an affectation and scorn whom-users as intolerably pretentious. 

So the who/whom choice for the writer navigating these shoals is complicated: Do I use whom to gratify the residue of sticklerdom? Do I use whom on the (50%, remember) chance of getting it wrong and looking like a fool? Do I use whom and see sneers from those who think me a prig? Or do I just say to hell with it and always use who? 

Making predictions about where English will go is a mug's game, but I see whom steadily losing ground, except in a few stock phrases and the places where it stands alone simply as the object of a preposition: "to whom," "for whom," "from whom." 

I've given you three groups in which you can choose membership. As for me, I will continue to use whom, because I know how to use it, because I too like to parade my learning, and because I write these posts for myself and you are not required to read them. 

I celebrate my multiple failures

 In 1969 I was full of youthful promise. 

I graduated from Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, an honor student and co-valedictorian, with admission to Michigan State University in my hand. 

At Michigan State I was enrolled as an English-education major, because my initial ambition was to become a high school English teacher like Lynda McKee, who had been my mentor. But word leaked out quickly about the appalling boredom of classes in Education,* and I imagined that I had it in me to be a writer. 

I took classes in creative writing as well as the academic subjects, and my senior thesis was an uncompleted chunk of a novel that ceased to hold my attention. It turned out that I lack the imagination to be a writer of fiction. But when Walter Sutton, then chairman of the English department at Syracuse University (which had rejected me for the creative-writing program), called to offer me a university fellowship (free tuition and $20,000 a year) in the academic program, I accepted instantly. 

At Syracuse I fell in love with eighteenth-century English after a course with the genial Arthur Hoffman and began to imagine that I could be an eighteenth-century man--even though in a seminar on Swift and Sterne I wrote an amateurish paper that the professor (since denied tenure and dead) eviscerated with four single-spaced pages of sarcasm. I loved reading books and talking about them, and teaching as a graduate assistant, but that first experience left a blight on writing academic papers. In six years, I wrote one paper that I enjoyed writing and that had merit. 

My first wife (yes, the first marriage proved to be another failure) landed a job as a librarian at the University of Cincinnati, and we moved there. I had, without acknowledging it, abandoned my dissertation on themes of decay in the poetry of the Earl of Rochester and Jonathan Swift (Don't even ask), and I needed work. 

By chance I landed a tryout on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer. (My hiring as a minority employee is a tale for another day.) Discovering quickly that smart and irreverent copy editors were good company, I also found that I had a gift for editing. 

Working for Gannett's satraps palled after a few years, and I was encouraged to accept Andy Faith's offer to work on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. When I was hired in 1986, local ownership of The Sun had just passed to Times Mirror, and the glory days of the 1990s were ahead. Under John S. Carroll as editor and then Bill Marimow, I was made head of the copy desk and encouraged to hire, train, and mentor the smartest young copy editors I could find, and we developed a national reputation for editing. My hires were eventually picked off by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and others. 

But the purchase of The Sun by Tribune in 2000 led to the steady deterioration of editing, among other declines. By 2019, the last copy editor left The Sun. Two years later, after vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired the paper, I accepted a buyout and retired. Now The Sun is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting's David Smith, who is systematically destroying what integrity the paper has left. What passes for editing there can be imagined. 

Now in retirement I work as a freelance copy editor for The Baltimore Banner, an online local-news organ. It has made a promising start and has an interval in which to attract enough support to become self-sufficient. I am rooting for its success, devoutly hoping never to include it among my roster of personal failures. 

* Pray forgive me, those of you who endured that curriculum to qualify for the profession. I mean you no harm. 

Everyone their own editor

Editing comes with two problems: It takes time, and it costs money. And copy editing, which piles editing on editing, doubles the problem. Many publications and publishers have reduced or even eliminated editing or copy editing. Chances are excellent that when you write you will be working without a net. 

You may think that your writing is so good that you don't need editing; I'm not licensed to treat the delusional. You may think that the internet proves that readers will accept anything, no matter how sloppy; I tell you, you have your reward. But if you think you might try to edit yourself, I can advise you. Sit down. 

The first thing is to get something in writing. Under no circumstances should you attempt to write and edit simultaneously. Yes, I know you can rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time--you're a phenomenon. But writing and editing, though allied, involve different skills, different focus. Don't paralyze yourself. When you're done with a text, or think you're done, that's the time to start editing. 

You'll need to deal with the small change of editing: punctuation, grammar, usage. Garner's Modern English Usage, now in its fifth edition, is authoritative. If Garner's appears forbidding, Mignon Fogarty's Grammar Girl posts are conversational and sensible. And [cough] there is always my Bad Advice, on rubbish you were taught about grammar and usage. Be cautious of the claims of sites like Grammarly. Every professional editor I have seen opine on Grammarly says that it will suggest some good changes and a great many inadvisable ones.  

You'll think me an old fogy (and I am one) when I tell you that factual accuracy will benefit your text. One useful task is to mark each statement of fact in your text, making sure of where you found it and how you know it to be true. If you are casual about the facts or, worse, deliberately inaccurate, you are simply giving some other writer the opportunity to expose you. And let me remind you here that you have known the basic ethics of writing since you were in elementary school: Don't copy. Don't tell lies. 

Getting analytical, you will examine how your text is put together, its structure and organization. If you have not read my previous post "Secrets of editing revealed," now would be an excellent time to put that set of questions to your work. It might benefit you to make a rough outline of your text: the main point and the subsidiary points. Are like things together? If there is a chronology, is it in order? Are the points in an order that the reader will be able to follow?

Then smoke 'em if you got 'em. Take a break. If you can put it aside for a day, you will return to it for an unpleasant discovery that it was not as good as you thought it was. If you can't spare that much time, step away from it for a while. Take a walk. Drink a cup of tea or a martini. Talk to the cat. Then go back and fix what you now see needs to be fixed. 

Read the thing aloud. When you have to give that kind of attention to every word, you will spot typos that your eye slid over. Also, when you read aloud, infelicities such as clotted syntax and unconscious repetition of words reveal themselves. Reading it aloud allows you to determine whether it sounds like something written by a human being. 

Spellcheck is the last thing, but be cautious. It will highlight typographical errors but pass over the wrong homonym undetected. And be careful about the auto-replace function, remembering the classic example of the website that wanted the word "gay" replaced with "homosexual" in all instances and wound up changing an Associated Press story about Tyson Gay to identify the sprinter as Tyson Homosexual.

Then, once it's gone, prepare yourself to take correction graciously. You will have done your best, but something will be wrong, likely minor but still embarrassing. I have no editor for this blog. Some people point out my errors in a polite note; others proclaim them publicly with glee. I accept them all, with thanks. So should you. 

Words for editors

Today's offering is selections from my commonplace book, some of which you may want to post above your desk or, if you do cross stitch, work into a sampler. 

"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it."  Henry David Thoreau

"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." Will Rogers 

"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it."  George Bernard Shaw 

"Try to preserve an author's style, if he is an author and has a style."  Wolcott Gibbs 

"You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing's vile hard reading."  Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest"

"The copy desk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new."  Mary Norris, Greek to Me

"Copy editors are meant to be gnomes working invisibly below deck to ensure that the engine of prose runs smoothly."  Geoff Nunberg, Language Log

"Editing raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."  Rafael Alvarez, Baltimore Sun

"Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true."  Samuel Johnson 

"Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage."  Thomas Jefferson to John Adams 

Languages certainly do follow rules, but they don't follow orders."  Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster

"When a grammarian notes that something is wrong, it means that many people are already doing it."  Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

"The public conversation about language is dominated by a kind of middlebrow irascibility, rather than by patient examination of language facts and their consequences."  Lane Greene, Talk on the Wild Side

"The history of prescriptivism about English .. is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance."  Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars

"The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach 'correct' English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive."  H.L. Mencken, The American Language

Take that

 Yes, I said it, on social media, under my own name as an editor: "Half my editing is inserting 'that' where journalists have left it out."

Yes, a jocular exaggeration, but it smoked out the that-cutters, the writers, journalists, and, Fowler save us, editors who see it as their duty to excise that wherever it appears as a conjunction.* Some of the that-cutters profess their fealty to the Associated Press. So let me show you what the Associated Press Stylebook actually says: 

Use the conjunction that to introduce a dependent clause if the sentence sounds or looks awkward without it. There are no hard-and-fast rules, but in general:

–That usually may be omitted when a dependent clause immediately follows a form of the verb to say: The president said he had signed the bill.

–That should be used when a time element intervenes between the verb and the dependent clause: The president said Monday that he had signed the bill.

–That usually is necessary after some verbs. They include: advocate, assert, contend, declare, estimate, make clear, point out, propose and state.

–That is required before subordinate clauses beginning with conjunctions such as, after, although, because, before, in addition to, until and while: Haldeman said that after he learned of Nixon's intention to resign, he sought pardons for all connected with Watergate.

When in doubt, include that. Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.

Got that?

To enlarge on that a little. Omitting that is common and acceptable when there are a couple of short clauses, as in She told him it was over. But you really ought to use that when you have more than one clause in the predicate, as an act of simple, decent respect for the reader: She told him that it was over and that she would call the police if she ever heard from him again. 

* That post also smoked out those people who think that that as a relative pronoun cannot refer to human beings. Their lack of awareness of that use of the pronoun regularly in English for the past 13 centuries is regrettable, but I can address the point if you need help.  

What she said

Anne Curzan thinks that two parties within us struggle to prevail over how we understand and use the English language. 

One party she calls the grammando (think "stickler" or "pedant"), avid to enforce The Rules (even when some of them are bogus). The other she calls the wordie, whose response to encountering a new word or usage is "Wow, that looks interesting." 

In Says Who? (Crown, $29) she looks to strike a balance. 

The formidably titled Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan writes with authority, but in an easy, conversational style. If she drops in the occasional technical term like "metathesis," she is quick to explain that it means the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, as in ask/aks. But mostly she writes as if she were sitting across the table from you talking about language and how we use it.

And she covers the territory: the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, terminal prepositions, singular they, who/whom, true and false passives, the instability of the apostrophe, and dozens more. (I agree with her on every point, so we can see that she is a genuine authority.)

Her subtitle, A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words, indicates what she is about. The grammando will have to unlearn some rules that are not actual rules and loosen up about words and usages outside formal written contexts ("funner"), and the wordie will have to curb their enthusiasm when formal contexts merit formal precision. She is "comparing what speakers and writers actually do and what we're told we're 'supposed to do' in formal contexts, in order to come up with our own, informed decisions about what effective usage is, based on context." 

The project, then, is not to bring The Rules to bear inflexibly, or decide that Anything Goes, but to "weigh the the benefits and drawbacks of our language choices, given what we know about the usage rules, the judgments others may make based on our adherence to those rules, our own preferences and purposes, our knowledge of our audience, and our understanding of how the language may be changing." 

This is a book by a savvy, approachable authority who aims to equip you to make those informed decisions about how you speak and write. It is worth your time. 

Secrets of editing revealed

The secret to editing is to ask questions so obvious as to make you appear slow-witted. 

These are the questions to ask when you are doing structural editing or macro-editing. The micro-editing (fact checking, spelling, punctuation, grammar, English usage, house style) is on hold until the big questions have been addressed. 

What's it about?

This is the focus question. The story, no matter how many subsidiary points it contains, must have one single, identifiable main point. If you can't state that main point in a single sentence, then there isn't one, and it's time to go back and rethink what the story is. 

Where's the point?

This is related to the focus. The story needs to get to the point quickly, without throat-clearing and background baggage, if the reader can be expected to engage further. That means you have two or three sentences to get there. (Think how long you read something before deciding to move on.) 

What happened yesterday? 

This is the chronology question. Typically, in a news story, the most recent event appears first, with the background filled in subsequently. But it includes the larger point of organization. Is the sequence of events clear? If the story shifts from the past to the present, or back and forth, does it provide transitions to keep the reader oriented? 

How do we know this?

This is the source question. How many sources are there in this story? Just one? Uh-oh. More? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? How reliable are they? What do they stand to gain or lose? Are there other sources that should be consulted? 

Who benefits?

Chances are good that someone in the story will wind up looking good and someone else will wind up looking less than good. Have both the parties been treated fairly (their positions explained, with an opportunity to respond)? Or is there a thumb on the scales to favor someone?

What do you mean here?

When you come across a sentence so muddy as to defy comprehension, it is time to turn to the writer and say, "I'm not quite clear what you mean here? Can you tell me what you meant to say?" The writer will typically utter a sentence that makes sense, and you say, "Oh, let's just write that."

Who's the reader?

Your source(s) should not be the reader, unless you are just currying favor. Is there specialized information or jargon that must be explained? How much background information is the reader likely to need? What level of sophistication in language (vocabulary, sentence structure) is appropriate? 

Why is this a story?

A story is written and published to have a consequence. Does this one have one? If it is about an event, what is the actual or potential consequence? If it is a profile, is the subject significant in some way? If it is meant simply to entertain, is it entertaining? 

Have you kept your balance?

As an editor, you are at the intersection of the interests of a number of parties: the writer, the publication, the reader. And there is [cough] your own personal and professional integrity. Have you dealt fairly with all the parties?

Are you sure you want to do this?

Mike Waller, former publisher of The Baltimore Sun, said that this is the most important question an editor can ever raise. This is the question that might spare you a libel suit. This question might spare you publication of a defective story (plagiarized? fabricated?) that will stain your reputation. And it has a secondary question:

Are you really sure?

 

It's a grand day for grammar

 In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck. 

Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists. 

Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time. 

He will expect you to learn some new terms for categories, such as determinative, a class that includes the definite and indefinite articles; this and that, sometimes called demonstratives; words such as all, any, both, each, either, every, few, many, no, several, and some; and all the numbers, a category he calls "gigantic." A determinative generally precedes a noun, but sometimes can stand alone, as in "Some like it hot."

He says our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned, standing directly in front of a noun. But words like down and up, traditionally identified as adverbs, actually function as prepositions. Adverbs, he explains, can precede verbs, but you can't revise "My horse fell down" to "My horse down fell." 

The section on mythical grammar errors, dear to my heart, includes the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, stranded prepositions (what they were looking at), singular they, and more. Read the section on passive clauses and you will be immune to the error that any construction including a form of to be or an auxiliary verb (yes, some people think that) is a passive construction. 

His thoroughgoing treatment of nouns and noun phrases, of the various classes of verbs, and of clauses, is more intricately detailed than I can expect to treat effectively in the space of a blog post; there is a lot of meat there. There are useful sections on spelling and punctuation, and he offers succinct advice on prose style that you will find much more helpful than Strunk and White.

It is sixty years since Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Craig instructed me, and now I clearly have more to learn. Maybe you too?

Ink-stained wretch has just about had enough

 

On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun.

I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer for six and a half years and had tried out at The New York Times, which told me to get a job at a paper that took editing seriously and call again in two years. I had done the first part, and the second proved unnecessary. 

In thirty-four years at The Sun, nearly half my life, I saw serious journalism and became head of the copy desk as it developed a national reputation for effective editing, so much so that The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others poached one editor after another. 

A reverse arc was also occurring, as feckless corporate gits at the Tribune Company steadily reduced the staff through buyouts and dropped content while charging readers more, because the newspaper industry failed to adapt to changing conditions. The company we worked for was for a time even called tronc, which sounds like an unimpressive video game. 

Finally, in 2021, when vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired a diminished Tribune, I took a buyout and retired. And now since the purchase of the newspaper earlier this year by David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting and Armstrong Williams, I read the paper with the same fascination that leads drivers to slow down and gawk at smashups on the highway. 

Ignoring Williams’s otiose maundering on the op-ed page is easy. I was used to disregarding The Enquirer’s editorial page, which was also dominated by right-wing cranks. Once in the mid-1980s, The Enquirer editorialized about the spread of AIDS, saying that the disease was painful and incurable, combined with a social stigma. Nevertheless, the editorial concluded, “if apprehension of contracting AIDS should lead people to forgo promiscuous sexual intercourse, then the disease will have served a useful social purpose.” 

Appalling as they are, not even Smith and Williams have yet endorsed a disease. 

Now each morning, fortified by two cups of strong coffee, I am greeted with shoddy coverage from FOX45 and Sinclair. As one of a rapidly dwindling handful of seven-day-a-week print subscribers, I wonder why I subject myself to this (though masochism cannot be ruled out). 

There are still people at The Sun attempting to do responsible journalism under adverse circumstances, and I salute them, and pray for their deliverance. For that reason, the day to call and cancel is not here, though it may not be far off. 

ADDENDUM: Fellow copy editor David Benson has corrected my misremembering about that Cincinnati Enquirer editorial. It ran on Monday, June 21, 1982, and concerned herpes, not HIV. The final sentence: "But to the extent the threat promotes abstinence in any age group may it serve a useful purpose, sparing individuals and society enormous costs."

Note that in recasting it from memory, I sharpened the editorial board's writing.