Thirteen ways of looking at an editor

 I

Comma jockey, fault-finder, rule-follower, drone

II

"Copy editors are a necessary evil."

III

They make it read as if they had written it.

IV

"Most editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

V

Texas chainsaw editor

VI

"I became an editor for the money and the glamor."

VII

Who let that through?

VIII

"Reading other people's raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."

IX

Take out the dumbest stuff first.

X

An ink-stained wretch's ink-stained wretch

XI

"Your manuscript is both good and original, but what is good is not original, and what is original is not good."

XII

Write drunk; edit sober.

XIII

"He made it say what I meant better than I did myself."

When you speak, are you wearing brown shoes with a blue suit?

 I have been a working editor for forty-five years, and throughout that time, to gauge from letters to publications and public diatribes, the English language has undergone a calamitous decline. There are no standards, grammar is a smoking ruin, the Young People are barbaric, and Civilization As We Knew It is gone. Just gone. Ask anyone. 

Let me suggest, if you are among those shouting, "The End is near!" at the front door, you have misunderstood fashion. 

You know, and understand, that the music of the 2020s, like it or not, is unlike the music of the 1920s. You have seen how fashions in clothes have shifted over the years, even though you might regret that it has become commonplace for men to wear light brown shoes with dark blue suits. Baltimore used to have a complement of German restaurants, but our tastes these days prefer Italian. Language is no different.

It has ever been so. Here's a passage from Jack Lynch's The Lexicographer's Dilemma: " 'It is not the business of grammar,' wrote the clergyman and educator George Campbell in 1776, 'as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give laws to the fashions which regulate our speech. On the contrary, from its conformity to these, and from that alone, it derives all its authority and value.' " Conformity to common use determines grammar.

David Crystal, writing in The Stories of English to urge respect for all the dialects in our Englishes, uses a wardrobe metaphor: "With clothing, a diverse wardrobe enables us to dress to suit the occasion; and so it is with language."

Even the grumbling purists dimly perceive this. Spelling (yes, it's not grammar, but ...) varies. We used to write "to-day" and "to-morrow," and now we don't. We realise/realize that British and U.S. spellings vary, without impairing our ability to comprehend. 

Punctuation, too (also not grammar), changes as it suits us. In the eighteenth century we liked to put a comma between the subject and verb of a sentence: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof. ..." We don't do that any longer. We don't care for it. Oxford comma partisans bleat that its use is essential, anti-Oxfordians bray that it is useless, and readers consume both species without blinking. 

Our very words themselves go in and out of favor. The nineteenth century liked to identify a widow as a "relict," as if she were the residual property of her deceased husband. Try that today. Jonathan Swift's "Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue" deplored the use of the vulgar term "mob," but here in Baltimore we take a perverse pleasure in having been known as "Mobtown." 

In the prefatory note to the 1980 anthology The State of the Language, Christopher Ricks writes that the meaning of a word is not a matter of fact or opinion, but "a human agreement, created within society but incapable of having meaning except to and through individuals."

So English, its spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and even grammar, is what we collectively make it over time, and just as our tastes in music, dress, and food mutate, so does language vary to mean what we are trying to say.  

Get over it

Some merry Andrew at the Associated Press Stylebook chose to stir up the animals, in Mencken's felicitous phrase, on Facebook by posting this earlier today: "We announced one of our most-discussed style changes of all time at the ACES conference about a decade ago: Both 'more than' and 'over' are acceptable in all uses to indicate greater numerical value. Salaries went up more than $20 a week. Salaries went up over $20 a week."

The usual suspects commenced to clamor, so let's be clear about it. The people who insist on this invented distinction, which does not exist in English outside the confines of U.S. journalism, are pegging their authority as experts in English usage on a chimera. 

The distinction was invented by nineteenth-century editors and persisted in the journalism curriculum until the present day. In Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins (1971), Theodore M. Bernstein of The New York Times punctured what he called "a bit of superstitious tinkering," and he had the receipts. He quoted William Cullen Bryant's "Index Expurgatorius" for its disdain for over as more than, with James Gordon Bennet's "Don't List' for The New York Herald, and Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right chiming in. 

The distinction, for civilians who are mystified, is that over may only indicate spatial relationships (higher than), while more than is restricted to greater quantities, because in English a word can mean Only One Thing. And this invented distinction has been drummed into the heads of generations of newspaper reporters and editors who are inherently resistant to correction. 

But the fact is that at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 2014 at which the stylebook editors announced this change, lexicographers from Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary who were present were amazed to learn of a distinction of meaning that had been theretofore invisible to them. 

In fact, any journalists who have access to a dictionary, and consult one, can find that the meanings of over and more than in reference to quantity are interchangeable. American Heritage comments that Bryant provided no rationale for his distinction and that those who followed him did so for reasons that are "dubious at best." Further, "over has been used as a synonym for more than since the 1300s."Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage concurs. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, with British hauteur, says that "there has been a strong tradition in American and 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.' "

Bryan A. Garner, the dean of informed prescriptivists, says in the fifth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage that "the charge that over is inferior to more than is a baseless crotchet." 

In the interest of full disclosure, I nagged repeatedly the Associated Press Stylebook to drop this entry, and in the fullness of time Paula Froke and her fellow editors were persuaded. 

I am not, of course, dictating to my fellow editors what they should and should not do in the fugitive moments that they are permitted to spend on texts. If they think that their limited time is best spent on maintaining a distinction that is invisible to readers who are not fellow U.S. journalists, who am I to tell them to forbear? 

May I suggest

Three years ago, when The Baltimore Banner was considering taking me on as a freelance copy editor, the editors sent me a series of articles to edit. The articles were in Google Docs, and I made edits as suggestions which the editors could keep or reject. They kept them, and, seeing that they could trust me, they shifted me to the regular editing system. 

Since then, I've corrected lapses in grammar and usage, fixed typos, changed a word to one more precise or appropriate, untangled syntax, tightened wordiness, and redressed factual errors. Of course, when I  identify substantive issues, I address them with the editors or writers. But if there have been complaints about my routine edits, I have not heard any. 

My edits are suggestions. You would be a fool to ignore some of them, but it is your text as the writer, or your text as the publication, and you have the discretion to overrule me. All edits are judgments and thus inherently prescriptive--I tell you should do this. Because judgments can be arbitrary and misguided, the best editorial prescriptivism is tempered with descriptivism. 

My purpose--keep this in mind, please--is to assist you, the writer, in achieving your purpose, not to demonstrate my superiority (though, dammit, if you didn't think that I knew more about some things than you do, why did you hire me?). So when I offer my expertise and experience to suggest how your text might work better, please pay attention. 

All the news that prints to fit, a Grammar Noir episode

 I was back at work, part-time, at the Clarion Bugle, just a few hours a week. Yeah, I quit the paragraph game, but it's bourbon money. I settled into the groove of routine, as fast as a reporter copying and pasting a press release. Then rumors began circulating that the Bugle was getting a new owner. 

Now, rumors in newsrooms remind you of the blockbuster story offered at the afternoon news meeting that turns out to be a brief in print. But this one seemed to have legs. Our new press baron was supposedly Chuck Gump, owner of a chain of funeral homes. (People said he made his fortune taking the pennies off dead men's eyes.) He'd run for mayor, state senator, and governor, never finishing with more than 3% of the votes in a primary. For an undertaker he was a flashy dresser, favoring striped suits and a homburg. 

Hell, I thought, I used to work for Sam Zell; I can endure anything. 

Well, the sale went through and a few days later the news staff was summoned to the big conference room to meet the great man. At the door to the room was a huge basket of lilies that carried the smell of death, and the walls had been decorated with inspirational quotations, several of them bogus, accompanied by odd misspellings (Albert Einstien?). We sat there and looked at each other blankly, like a copy desk wondering whether the city desk is ever going to move any copy. 

Finally Gump strode in, wearing a three-piece suit with stripes as wide as a pica pole and a garish tie, carrying a sheaf of papers with our names, titles, and photos. I figured he wasn't accompanied by an HR flunky, so how bad could it be? 

Then he barked at us from the front of the room: "The Bugle is going to be a different newspaper, and anybody that doesn't like that can get up and leave now." 

The managing editor asked, "Do you mean that there are going to be changes in our editing and ethical standards?"

Gump said, "They will be my standards. No story will run more than 600 words, you'll be paid according to the number of clicks your stories get online, anybody who's dead to me is dead to you, sports and cops, that 's it."

The M.E. spoke up. "Well, our practice has always been--"

"You're fired. Get out."

The group gasped. The executive editor gazed into the distance and said nothing. 

Gump pointed to the obituary writer and said, "You're fired too. If they can pay me to bury their loved ones, they can pay for a death notice." 

Then he pointed to me. "Copy editing takes too much time and costs too much money for too little. Newspaper readers are so dim they couldn't spot a grammatical error if you sent up a flare. Take your green eyeshade and get out." 

I lingered at the bar across the street and watched half the staff file out one by one, each carrying a cardboard box of personal belongings and office supplies. The publisher, too--at least he marched out rather than dismember the paper. 

That was eight months ago. Today I see that the Bugle's remaining assets have been acquired by a private equity firm.

Bookworm's progress

Earlier this month I wrote about my interest in history in the third grade, an interest that has continued, as you'll see from this list of books I read in 2024 and recommend to you. 

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (How we started to get where we are now) 

Geoffrey Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar 

Ron Chernow: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Seamus Heaney, Poems, 1965-1975

Karen Yin, The Conscious Style Guide

Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Tana French, The Searcher, The Hunter (Two cracking good yarns)

Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean to But They Do (Delightful novel on the complexities of parents and children)

Matthew Crenson, Baltimore: A Political History (How we started and how we got where we are now, locally) 

Anne Curzan, Says Who? 

Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

Ben Yagoda, About the Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

And so far in 2025:

Jon Meachem, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

Most recently, 500 pages of David and Jeanne Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American

Currently, 500 pages of Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of The New York Post, 1976-2024

And pending: 500 pages of J.H. Plumb on Sir Robert Walpole

Dash it all

 There's some kind of mild uproar online over the use of the em dash, which is supposedly prevalent in AI texts, and it has produced inevitable crank commentary on punctuation. I can't speak to to AI prose, because my time is occupied dealing with substandard human intelligence prose, but I do know about dashes. 

The mnemonic is that hyphens join and dashes separate. That is, hyphens join compounds while dashes separate syntactic elements, representing a break in continuity. Good judgment suggests that the em dash,* like the exclamation point, should be used with restraint, to avoid cheapening the effect. 

The tell about overuse of dashes is in U.S. journalism. Reporters are dash-happy, and the reason, oddly, is the mechanics of the Associated Press. 

Attend. Journalists do not use dashes to express a break in continuity; they use them to set off parenthetical information. They cannot use parentheses for this purpose, because they use parentheses instead of square brackets to indicate interpolated explanatory material. They do not use square brackets because AP can't transmit them to all its members (which is also why AP does not transmit diacritical marks).  

See? I just made a parenthetical addition to the previous sentence, not a break in what I was saying. 

* Unless you are involved in book publishing, you probably have little occasion to deal with the en dash, which joins some, but not all, compounds.  

Sweet Old Bob

About this time forty-five years ago I was apprenticing myself to the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer, in hopes of a permanent berth. One of the people weighing in on my prospects was the news editor, Bob Johnson. 

Sweet Old Bob (sometimes referred to by initials) was an old-school editor, irreverent, sometimes gruff but always fair, never deceived. His habitual response to a pitch for a story to be considered for Page One was "I don't buy on spec." 

He was given to pronouncements in pungent country expressions, as when he described one reporter's prose as "like a cow pissing on a flat rock." When he thought you were not pursuing a profitable course, he would say, "You're looking up a dead hog's ass," the sense being if looking up a hog's ass was not a productive endeavor, looking up a dead hog's ass was doubly nugatory. Or he would simply invoke the traditional pleasantry "Go shit in your hat." 

One night as deadline drew close and he was still waiting for a local story promised for the front page, he burst out, "Goddamn city desk! If they'd written the Bible, you wouldn't be able to fit it in a boxcar! And it wouldn't be done yet!"

Over time I began to master the craft and earn his respect. When the amiable Bill Trutner retired as copy desk slotman, Bob took me to dinner at the Cricket Tavern next door and explained the political reasons for which he could not name me Trutner's successor, instead making me co-slot with another editor. 

In due course Bob fell out of favor with the Gannettoids running the paper and was demoted, replaced as news editor by a stooge. It was when the stooge informed me that henceforth I would be evaluated half on performance and half on attitude that I began to send out resumes. 

We left The Enquirer the same summer, Bob a few weeks ahead of me. He was a gun enthusiast, and the parting retirement gift for him was a pistol. On his last night he amused himself by sitting at his desk and dry-firing the pistol, drawing nervous looks from the editor and managing editor. 

When I tell you that there were giants in the newsroom in those days, I have the proofs. 

A moment in history

 When I was in the third grade at Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades shared a classroom, and Mrs. Marian Gulley alternated teaching the two grades. 

One day, on a whim, Mrs. Gulley gave me a copy of the fourth grade's American history quiz. I had, of course, listened to her teaching the class, and, bored, I had read the fourth grade's history textbook, a collection of potted biographies of great Americans. 

I scored a 96 on the quiz, the highest grade. 

I proudly took it home, and my mother, from whom I received the gift of sarcasm, remarked, "I'm sure that made you popular with the fourth grade." 

But she kept the test. Forty years later, I found it among her effects. 

AP is not the boss of you

 Benjamin Dreyer levels his impressive scorn at the Associated Press for its decision to go along with Donald Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America--for its U.S. clients. And he quotes this posting from Bluesky: "I teach AP Style at the university level. Yesterday I informed my students they were free to ignore this change. First time in more than 30 years of teaching I've ever said that."

I don't want you blinking like the prisoners just released in Fidelio when tell you that you are not obligated, even if your publication generally follows the AP Stylebook, to observe every jot and tittle in it. 

All right, gasp and get it over with. 

Your publication is free to decide, out of tradition, readers' preferences, or sheer damn cussedness, to establish variances to AP guidelines. Follow the stylebook's online Q&A feature and you will discover that its editors openly acknowledge that the stylebook entries are advisory. On occasion they will even suggest that you disregard the stylebook in the interest of clarity for the reader. 

Now you can get in trouble by varying too much. In my first years at The Sun, the newspaper, aping The New York Times, used courtesy titles, including in wire service copy. So we had a team of copy editors who spent much of a shift determining if a woman was Miss, Mrs., or Ms., filling in military ranks and ecclesiastical titles, and the like. In the '90s a copy desk working group proposed a set of changes in policy, among them deleting the routine use of courtesy titles except in obituaries. The editor, John S. Carroll, pondered the matter for the blink of an eye and performed the misterectomy. 

Overall, the AP Stylebook generally follows common practices of U.S. journalism. The editors have been diligent about updating it (and heaving a quantity of rubbish over the side). You would be well advised to consider its recommendations, if you can remember that they are indeed recommendations, not diktats.