Ordinary time

Braced for the tide from Washington about to sweep over us, here on Plymouth Road in Baltimore we are sustaining as much of a humane life as we can manage. 

Serene in retirement, I get up every morning to make the strong coffee, feed the cat, growl at The Baltimore Sun, read The Baltimore Banner, and catch up on news and personal contacts on social media.  A few domestic tasks with making the bed, taking out the trash, unloading the dishwasher, etc. 

After a couple of weeks of bronchitis, Kathleen and I are resuming daily walks, gradually extending the distances. Yesterday down the hill at Herring Run, we saw a blue heron splashing around in the creek, and the day before that a couple of ducks. The sunlight and relatively mild temperatures have been encouraging; we'll see how our resolve holds up when it gets colder. 

Yesterday I engaged the people of Keil Tree Experts to do some long-delayed work on the property, topping the star magnolias that were growing into the roof and removing some diseased and dead trees. They were reasonable, professional, and efficient, and it buoyed me to see the property in better shape. 

Today I finished re-reading D.B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon's excellent Rayburn: A Biography. It reminded me that the coalition of conservative Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats (who subsequently morphed into conservative Southern Republicans) that arose in the mid-1930s has been the principal obstacle to progressive national legislation ever since. Always worth opposing.

Today at the Hamilton branch of the Pratt Library I picked up Ben Yagoda's history of The New Yorker, About Town, and a Bruno Chief of Police mystery, one of the recommendations from a commentator on yesterday's post on detective stories. 

A couple of days ago I posted a set of links to my blog posts on editing. It's not all I know about the obscure craft, but it's a chunk, and I offer it to you free, to assist in your own editing or self-editing, or to use in classes if you happen to teach editing and find the material useful. Do with it what you will. 

The Banner engages me for occasional freelance copy editing, so I keep my hand in. 

It's also time to take the checkbook out of the desk drawer and make the annual contributions to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and a set of Baltimore charities (including the Pratt and The Banner). I stopped contributing to most non-local operations after concluding that the flood of fundraising appeals they churn throughout the year was costing them more than I was paying them.  

Off this afternoon to our afternoon drinking group at Zen West cantina at Belvedere Square. Often presided over by Fred Rasmussen, The Sun's genial obituary writer, it's an eclectic group, including members from newspaper work, social work, nursing, library science, information technology, children's books, sex therapy (yes), funeral direction (yes), law (can't keep the lawyers out), and other fields. The days and hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 3:00 to 4:30 or so; not everyone shows up every day, but Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday tend to draw the most participation. We kept together as a tight group taking precautions through the pandemic, relying on our little social network. Not everyone drinks, the conversation is always genial, and guests are welcome. 

Church tomorrow: Memorial Episcopal in Bolton Hill, where we have been members for thirty-six years. Another sustaining community. 

Murder most fair

 Edmund Wilson famously, and crankily, asked who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. But I, over forty years of working with professional journalists, returned home late at night to a comfortable chair, a good light, a strong drink, and a book in which disagreeable people meet violent death. 

I got through Conan Doyle as a child and from high school on went through Rex Stout's entire Nero Wolfe canon, which showed me how detective stories work.

They are comedies: We begin in an ordered world, a disruption occurs, the detective penetrates to the source of disorder, and a form of order is restored. Nero Wolfe sits at his desk reading, eats gourmet meals, tends to his rooftop orchids. A client appears, and Wolfe sends his sidekick, Archie Goodwin, out to investigate. (The contrasting Wolfe-Goodwin personalities add variety and humor to the plot.) Wolfe exposes the murderer with his analytical mind, and we leave him and Goodwin in his brownstone back to his books, his orchids, and his fancy dishes. 

Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret stories are similar. Maigret smokes his pipes in his office, goes to the brasserie for a drink, talks to people, penetrates the psychology of the crime, returns to his pipes and beers. Amid disorder, routines persist and are sustained. 

I've read a great many of these series over the years and am looking for something new. Let me list some of the detective authors and characters I've most enjoyed, and perhaps you can suggest something along the same lines. 

P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh, Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Robert B. Parker's Spenser (though the series thinned out toward the end), Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Stewart Kaminsky's Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, Reginald Hill's Andrew Dalziel, Andrew Vachss's Burke, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, Jan Willem van der Wetering's Grijpstra and de Gier, Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti, Jane Haddam's Gregor Demarkian, John Sandford's Lucas Davenport, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. (It may look as if I have read nothing else, but I assure my reading logs show otherwise.)

I never cottoned much to Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. (Sorry.) I read Elizabeth George until she became ponderous and Patricia Cornwell until she turned into a self-parody.  I loved Ed McBain's 87th Precinct procedurals, and I like the literary better than the thriller.

Now it's your turn. Which detective series give you pleasure, and, if it's not too much to ask, why? 

And yes, I am aware of Louise Penny.

 

What I know that you can know

 Over the years, first blogging at The Baltimore Sun and now here, I've presented much of what I know about editing. Perhaps you would find some key posts useful. 

How to edit yourself.

The key macro-editing questions you need to ask to deal with the big issues.

Plurals and possessives with "s" and "z."

Geoffrey Pullum's book on applying linguists to the traditional schoolroom grammar. 

Why you need to understand conscious style.

Commas, of course. 

Mind your crotchets.

Yes to terminal prepositions.

Just use "said."

Please drop the "not alone" gimmick.

It's probably not iconic.

Random but useful points.

Pay attention to Garner.

English is doing OK.

Just for the hell of it, something about leadership.  

The craft, not the owner

 For journalists, at least the good ones, the commitment has been to the craft, the truth-telling, not to the ownership. 

For forty years, I worked on the copy desks at Gannett and Tribune papers, and our commitment was always to getting the stories factually accurate and clear for the reader. We lived in tension with our masters, cynical about the self-serving pronouncements of corporate apparatchiks. (God help me, I once worked for Sam Zell!) You did the best job you could to follow your principles under the circumstances. 

This year's presidential election has posed problems not just for journalists but for readers, and readers as consumers and customers. 

Some weeks ago I canceled my subscription to The New York Times after decades as a reader (I once applied for a job there). It covered President Joe Biden with ceaseless questioning about his age and capacity while covering Donald Trump as if we were in the South, murmuring, "Well, that's just his way." The editor's mealy-mouthed defense of this blatant disproportion fails to persuade. 

When it came out that Jeff Bezos had sandbagged his editorial staff's endorsement of Harris, several members of the staff resigned in protest and a quarter of a million readers canceled their subscriptions in disgust. I doubt that Bezos's bootlicking congratulations to Trump on his election will draw many back. 

Several voices have been raised urging readers to continue to support these papers, for the sake of the journalists still there struggling to do good work. I am sympathetic. 

After thirty-six years, I remain a seven-day-a-week print subscriber to The Baltimore Sun, where I worked for thirty-four years as an editor, even though the publication has been taken over by David Smith, who imagines that he can run a newspaper, and Armstrong Williams, who imagines that he can write. They have filled the news pages with low-grade pigswill from Sinclair and FOX45 and driven off some of their best people. (One is almost nostalgic for Sam Zell.) 

I continue to subscribe in support of the remaining staff, members of the News Guild struggling to negotiate a contract that will protect their ethical and journalistic standards. They are the Resistance operating at the Vichy Sun. But every morning I think, "How much more of this can I take?"

For you, the reader, the consumer, the customer, the question comes down to this. Your subscription supports the remaining journalists struggling to do professional work in troubling circumstances. It also supports the ownership and the ownership's decisions about what to cover and how. It's not clear-cut, but you have to look at what you are getting. What do you find good in it, and is the good worth what you pay for it? What do you find bad in it, and do you want your money to support that? 

For me, I have subscribed to The Guardian. 

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.