Say yes to books

 On the first day of my editing class at Loyola University Maryland, I asked the students to provide some basic information--class year, hometown, phone number where you can be reached. (I once woke a student with a call in early afternoon to inform that the final examination had started fifteen minutes previously. She showed up and passed.) And, out of idle curiosity, I asked them to give the title of the most recent book they had read that was not assigned in a class. The results were seldom inspiring. 

I have been out of the classroom for seven years, and today I would probably be advised that that last question is irrelevant. No one reads. The schools, after all, have been emphasizing STEM to the exclusion of all other subjects, teaching to state-administered tests rather than exploring texts. The universities, reduced to sports facilities with attached trade schools, are eliminating humanities courses and whole departments. And we are barraged with articles informing us that the era of reading is over. 

I have been an omnivorous reader since childhood. When I worked at newspapers I read a lot of murder mysteries, because they were easy to get through at night after a day of editing (and showed disagreeable people meeting violent death). The leisure of five years of retirement has opened the possibility of engaging more challenging stuff. 

In previous posts I have occasionally mentioned books that I have read and enjoyed, always wondering if doing so was merely showing off what a great reader I am. No more of that. Now that the era of reading is over, I take writing about books I've read to be an act of defiance. 

So, in the hospital being treated for a violent attack of vertigo, I was able to finish reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad. I liked that she chose iambic pentameter, which feels right for English, and made for straightforward reading. I thought the narrative powerful. Some of the word choices struck me as prosaic, but I have no Greek and therefore no authority. I chose to read straight through to get the effect, rather than consult her formidable apparatus of notes, but when I occasionally looked at a note, her choices looked reasonable. 

One of April's books was Ian McEwan's What We Can Know, a sophisticated look at our time from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic future, combined with a witty perspective on literary research. This month I got hold of The Keeper, the third in Tana French's Irish mysteries, following The Searcher and The Hunter. All three are solidly plotted works, with characters who have depth and  showing a literate command of the language. Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach entertained, but I sensed somewhat less oomph than in previous novels. Right-wing nuts may be a challenge even to his imagination. 

Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America appealed because I am from Appalachia and have long been accustomed to the looks I get when I say that I am from Kentucky. What I had not realized is how much of the early settlers of the United States were "waste people"--vagrants, drunks, prostitutes, bankrupts, all manner of people whom the English upper classes explicitly labeled as useless and determined to expel. The larger recognition is how much our current society is built on the assumption that there are whole categories of people who are worthless or at best marginally exploitable. 

David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens describes how the Parthenon was built, in the context of the political situation in which Athens presented itself as the foremost of the Greek city states. Its combination of art history and political context is deftly managed. 

And Stephen Budiansky's Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas presented a rounded picture of Holmes's life, but I found it a little thin on the Supreme Court opinions that are the basis of his fame. So I'll look next for a biography heavier on the law than the life. 

If you are a reader--and it is only that as a reader you are following these dispatches--I urge you not only to continue reading but to proclaim what you have read that you found useful or gratifying. Stand against the tide. 

In which our hero comes to feel his age

 Note to the reader: This post is entirely personal; you may well choose to skip it. Subsequent posts will return to issues of grammar, usage, editing, and journalism.

A year ago, traveling with my wife, her sibs, and their spouses through Central Europe, I put in 18,000 steps or more a day in Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, enjoying the pilsner and feeling no ill effects. Later in the summer, my annual physical indicated that I was in fine health for a septuagenarian. 

This year, as I turned seventy-five, everything went awry at once. 

My urologist, after years of recording steadily climbing PSA numbers, identified cancer in my prostate, of a variety likely to become aggressive. An MRI indicated that the cancer had not spread, and in February a surgeon removed the prostate. A follow-up PSA test three weeks later indicated nothing, and a further PSA test at the beginning of July registered 0.04, which my surgeon says amounts to zero. Out of the wilderness. 

But pain in my right knee, which an orthopedist diagnosed as an arthritis flareup, grew steadily worse, to a point at which I could barely limp to the end of the block and back. Further testing, including an MRI, indicated necrotic bone tissue in my right hip. A surgeon recommended replacing the hip, and surgery was accordingly scheduled. 

But in late June, as the date of the surgery approached, I experienced a severe attack of vertigo. Rising from bed at 8:00, I felt the room circling rapidly around me and staggered to the bathroom. Unable to sit up, I lay on the floor waiting for the vertigo to pass. Five hours later, when it had not, my wife called for an ambulance. Hospitalized for ten days, I received physical and occupational therapy and was released to go home. 

One of the therapists at Good Samaritan Hospital clapped goggles over my eyes to record eye movements. She concluded that the little calcium carbonate crystals had not gone astray in the inner ear but that the problem was with my eyes. Accordingly, after release I saw a specialist at Johns Hopkins' Neuro-Visual and Vestibular Disorders Center. He had a couple of technicians put the goggles on me and smartly jerk my head about. The conclusion from the recording: inflammation of a nerve in my right eye. The vertigo should pass in time, with certain exercises and therapies helpful. 

I am now at home, able to maneuver with a cane instead of a walker, but the dizziness, though reduced, has not passed, and hip surgery is indefinitely delayed until the vertigo has passed completely and the risk of a fall is reduced. 

In addition to my wobbly gait, the pain in my right leg enhancing the effect of the dizziness, my vision has limited how long I can read before the text starts to blur--though I was able to finish reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad while in the hospital. (Three hours of therapy a day leave twenty-one hours of leisure.) And in addition to drafting this post I am cautiously signing on to copy edit the occasional story at The Banner. 

By the time my next annual physical rolls around I expect to be, cancer-free and smoothly mobile on a new hip, in decent shape for a man of my age.

A thought for the Fourth

 Let us acknowledge things about our national anthem. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is mediocre verse set to the tune of an old drinking song that is difficult to sing. Its author, Francis Scott Key, does not have a clean record on the slavery issue (though should we apply our virtues retroactively, who would 'scape whipping?). The third verse is not happy about British efforts to enlist enslaved people in the battles of the War of 1812. Let's admit that it is problematic. 

Now let me offer a modest defense. We're going to read out that third verse, because no one pays any attention to it. Patriotic Americans sing only the first verse, and there lie the grounds for a defense. When you sing only the first verse, it is not a triumphant anthem like the "Marseillaise." It ends instead with a question. Will that banner continue to fly over the land of the free and the home of the brave? In short, will we continue to live up to our founding principles? Are we up to the struggle to uphold and expand freedom? How are we going at the job? 

So here in Baltimore, home of the Orioles, continue to shout that "O!" Nothing amiss in a little local pride. But don't forget that you are singing a question that is not easy or comfortable to answer. 

And for the Fourth,. to see what can be done with that anthem, take a listen to Dudley Buck's "Festival Overture on the American National Air."

People still read books, you say?

 During the fair weather this week I have been reading The Iliad in Emily Wilson's translation on the front porch. 

My interest in Wilson's translation was piqued by ill-informed criticism of her work online and further stimulated by reading David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, part art history and part political and cultural history. 

So to Wilson's Iliad: Fifty pages of introduction (much of it familiar), an explanation of her approach as translator, a formidable apparatus of informative endnotes, and 600 pages of iambic pentameter verse. It is a surprisingly fluid read. (Some years ago I started Robert Fitzgerald's translation but ground to a halt.) Though the occasional word choice sounds prosaic, the extended metaphors and repeated titles and phrasing keep the music. The violence and brutality come through with impact. I am half a dozen books in and eager for more. 

Each translation of Homer fits its time--think of Alexander Pope rendering The Iliad in rhymed couplets--and Wilson's seems to match ours. 

So why, at seventy-five, am I finally picking up Homer? 

First, do not be deceived by the way people talk in English department graduate lounges; nobody has read all the great books, and everybody is faking it. We pick up allusions and quotations in other works, acquiring an acquaintance that is no more than a shallow literacy. 

But the great books are there, to be picked up and savored whenever it occurs to us to look into them.

And at seventy-five: Franklin Roosevelt paid a courtesy call on Oliver Wendell Holmes and found the ninety-two-year-old reading Plato. "Why are you reading Plato, Mr. Justice?" he asked. "To improve my mind, Mr. President," Holmes answered. I am largely on the shelf, retired, doing a little occasional copy editing for The Baltimore Banner, but no longer teaching, no longer conducting workshops on editing, no longer hiring and supervising other editors--past it, as the British say. Even so, my mind remains, still subject to improvement, and my curiosity is not extinguished. 

You're a copy editor? Uh ...

  It took many conversations, but my wife, Kathleen Capcara, finally perfected a response. 

"Kathleen, what does your husband do?"

"He's a copy editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer [or] The Baltimore Sun."

"Copy editor? What's that?"

"He's kind of an English teacher for the newsroom."

Thus she summed up the kinds of things that concern us, the kind of people drawn to this work, and the perception of us by the rest of the newsroom and the public.*

In the fifth through eighth grades I was schooled by two formidable teachers, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, in the standard schoolroom grammar and mastered it. In consequence, during my teens and, well, later, I was a proper little prig, correcting other people's speech silently--and sometimes aloud. We know such people. They turn up regularly online, preening themselves on identifying some inconsequential lapse, often wrongly. 

As an undergraduate and graduate student, encountering a wider range of what writers of English can do, I came to appreciate that the strictures of the traditional schoolroom grammar were too narrow, and in consequence became somewhat less priggish. I particularly remember my luck, while rummaging around the basement of the Economy Book Store on South Salina Street in Syracuse, in finding a used copy of Theodore M. Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. It was revelatory in exposing just how much rubbish people have been taught about grammar and usage, and how much they hold on to. The book has had a place on my shelves for fifty years and is even still in print, though not as cheap as what the Economy Book Store charged me. 

Writing this blog has been an education, as I have explored sources and authorities, always seeking to broaden my understanding of the Englishes. On the blog and at conferences of editors I've encountered lexicographers and linguists happy to talk and encourage me. For one of my earliest blog posts I was rapped on the knuckles by the formidable Geoffrey Pullum, with whom I have since had many cordial exchanges. And in these posts I've done my best to steer readers away from rubbish they've been taught and toward as less rigid understanding of what we can and should do in English. 

The best copy editors I have worked with were not martinets blinkered by unthinking application of what they understood The Associated Press Stylebook to require, and in overseeing those I hired and talking with others in conferences and workshops I have seen that broader understanding take root. We are not common scolds; we are careful observers of how sentences can be effectively put together, how they can be revised to become more effective. 

If only publications still believed in copy editing rather than eliminating or dismantling their copy desks. In retirement I turn my hand to some freelance editing for The Baltimore Banner, which actually believes in the value of copy editors. I wish there were more publications like it. 

*When in conversation you are inevitably asked what you do and you say that you are a copy editor, you may get this response: "Well, I guess I'd better watch my language." Responses I've pondered:

"You can't afford me."

'I don't do pro bono."

"Too late."

What did the graduate do?

A headline in The Guardian says that the son of a man who was deported is now "graduating high school." 

We've come a long way. 

Originally, Bryan Garner points out in Garner's Modern English Usage, graduating was something the school did to the student, and the idiomatic usage was that a student was graduated from the school. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idiom changed to focus on the student, who graduated from the school. Now, from the late twentieth century to our time, graduate college in colloquial speech is increasingly turning up in published texts, and Garner expects that the usage will gain ground. 

The Associated Press Stylebook, meanwhile, is standing fast, at least for the moment:

"Graduate is correctly used in the active voice: She graduated from the university.

"It is correct, but unnecessary, to use the passive voice: He was graduated from the university.

"Do not, however, drop from: John Adams graduated from Harvard. Not: John Adams graduated Harvard."

Also standing its ground is Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage: "The particularly American English transitive type he graduated Yale in 1984 is often criticized and is best avoided." Sniff. 

The current Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary allows "I graduated college" as standard English, though it cautions in a usage note that some may consider it incorrect. 

So "was graduated from college," "graduated from college," and "graduated college" are all out there in the wild, and your choice among them will likely depend on the degree of stuffiness with which you are comfortable. As always in English, you pays your money and you takes your chances. 

Beyond our control

 I had occasion to get in touch the with Comptroller of Maryland's office with an inquiry about a refund on our state income tax, and I was reminded of the oddity of that word in English. 

A comptroller is someone who controls, or supervises, accounts and expenditures. It came into English from the French contrerolleur and was originally in English conterroller, naturally morphing into controller. 

But wait. Sometime in the 15th century, people who saw Latin as a long-established and prestige language, and English as an ill-bred newcomer in need of shaping up, took hold of this word. They saw that French had the word compte, "count," that derived from Latin, and they made conterroler look more like Latin by spelling it comptroller, though it continued to be pronounced "controller." 

There has been a fair amount of this jiggery-pokery with English. For example, we pronounce debt as "dett," as the word was spelled in Old French, but that b was inserted to acknowledge the Latin root debitum. 

In the comptroller entry in Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner points out that pronouncing the p in comptroller "has traditionally been viewed as semiliterate," but is inevitably widespread. That's how they say it in Maryland state government and journalism. 

Greek to them

 If you have not been on Twitter lately, and I know that many of you have left it in disgust, you will not have seen that the silly season is starting early. 

A handful of people have been fulminating over Emily Wilson's translations of Homer, particularly her Odyssey. They have not held back, freely using terms like "outrageous" and "evil." And they have provoked a backlash from classicists challenging their knowledge of Greek and their understanding of how translations work. 

Having no Greek myself, I am unable to weigh the merits of their arguments. But my reading of the emotional undertone of the posts suggests why these people have taken out against Emily Wilson. (1) She is a woman. (2) Her translation displays relatively straightforward English rather than the archaizing artificiality of some other translations. (3) Her work has gotten popular notice.

It would be well to remember that Homer has been through quite a lot, particularly over the Iliad. Keats enthused over Chapman's version. E.V. Rieu rendered it into prose. Alexander Pope turned it into rhyming couplets. The Lattimore and Fitzgerald 20th-century versions have their partisans. Dozens and dozens of translators over the past four centuries have Englished Homer, and the Iliad and Odyssey have survived them all. The Wilson translations will or will not stand depending on how deeply they satisfy before they too are superseded. 

In the meantime, bros, just leave Emily Wilson alone.  

My call is not important to you

 My doctor wants an MRI scan of my hip, and his office called and set up an appointment at a nearby location next week. 

In due time I received a text from a radiology company, asking me to register for the appointment. I tap through the categories at some length, entering miscellaneous pieces of information, coming at last to the discovery that the location for which I am scheduled is not listed. 

Sighing, I call the radiology company. "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." And then, helpfully, "You can register for your appointment at our website." 

Ultimately, a human being answers, and we go back and forth until it begins to emerge that maybe the doctor's office sent the order to this radiology company by mistake. I thank the human and move on.  

I then call the place where the doctor's office scheduled the appointment, and a human being answered and said yes, we have your order and the time of your appointment. Just show up. 

This is how it goes in U.S. medicine, a lumbering bureaucracy that offers you two choices: an electronic rigmarole that may or may not be of any use, or a lengthy wait on the phone because they will not hire enough people to handle the traffic. And while it is true that I am seventy-five years old and retired with few obligations, I am not keen to spend what time remains for me listening to inane hold music. 

This, plainly, is nothing more than a bitch session. Feel free to vent in the comments yourself. 

Letting down the side again

 Ever unable to help myself, I responded to an online post in which someone was carping about the use of loan as a verb. You may have been taught that loan is only a noun, lend the verb, and the Associated Press Stylebook, bless its heart, continues to prefer that distinction. But like many simple, clear distinctions, it's not so. 

Even the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler said in 1926 (a century ago, mind you) that lend had supplanted loan in southern England but that the verb loan remained in use elsewhere in Britain and in the United States. Notice, pray, that he did not deny that loan was a verb in English, and he would have been foolish to say so, because it has been an English verb for better than seven centuries. 

The lend/loan thing got propagated by self-appointed usage authorities after Richard Grant White invented the distinction in 1870. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that he based that distinction on etymology from Anglo-Saxon, which he got wrong owing to his inability to tell a verb from a noun in Old English. But it got into all the manuals. 

The current Fowler's, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, points out that in Britain today loan as a verb is in wide use when money and objects are involved. Bryan Garner says that to loan money is fully accepted usage and to loan a thing is very nearly there. The latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary agrees that loan is a standard verb, stipulating only that it should be limited to literal sense, not metaphorical ones. 

We have people who like to air their crotchets online (they used to write letters to newspapers), and we have editors who waste valuable time on gossamer distinctions of usage. But we have Garner, Merriam-Webster, four editions of Fowler's, MWDEU, even Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins, which in 1971 found nothing much to object to with loan. There is information out there. 

Even I [cough] published a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in 2020.* It includes a generous listing of bogus rules on which neither you nor anyone else should be wasting their time. 

Please don't comment that I, a traitor to my craft, am destroying what little remains left of literacy in English. I've heard it all before. 

*Do not publish a book amid a pandemic if you expect attention to be paid to it.