A newsroom taxonomy

 Among those who labor on holidays are writers and editors at daily newspapers. To celebrate them on Labor Day, I repost my classifications of the various types to be found there: managers, writers, and copy editors. Those of you old enough to recall when newspapers had copy desks will recognize those species. 

THE MANAGERS

The Fonctionnaire

The French understand the nature of the inevitable gray civil servant who will endure until the universe winds down in entropy. Stars burst into novas and burn out, corporate owners come and go, and management fads succeed fads, but The Fonctionnaire endures. Cunningly, The Functionnaire, unobserved, occupies some obscure office with a nebulous title and obscure duties, biding his time until the more talented colleagues flame out, and then occupies the chair of authority because no one else is left. To sit in a meeting with him is to perceive the processes of a wasting disease.

Great Is Caesar

Great Is is an empire builder. He knows exactly the splendid things he wants to accomplish, and he is ruthless in their pursuit, though not openly so. Superficially magnanimous and agreeable to those who can be useful to accomplish his aims, he sets his face against those who obstruct him — and they wither and perish. He does, in fact, accomplish great things, and his empire expands. But, like Julius and Augustus, he leaves no worthy successor. He will be followed in time by The Fonctionnaire.

Pharaoh

Pharaoh, like Great Is Caesar, has grand designs. Unlike Great Is, he is clueless about how to accomplish them. So instead he is dictatorial. He hardens his heart. His voice is the only voice that booms out in meetings, and lesser folk are misguided if they imagine that his invitations to discussion are open invitations; they are opportunities to agree with him. When the plagues rain down, he will not know what to do about them, except to bluster.

The Regular Guy

He’d like to drink a beer with you (domestic, light). He might bestow a nickname on you. He wants to be your pal. He won’t ask that much of you. He has, like Richard Nixon, read the manual on how to be a Regular Fellow, and he follows its specifications to the letter. Anything you do is fine with him, just fine. Keep in mind that when your interests get in the way of his, you will find yourself out at the curb.

I Know Better

I Know exists to demonstrate his superiority over his subordinates. (He therefore prefers and promotes subordinates over whom superiority can easily be demonstrated.) When any story or proposal is put before him, he instantly identifies its defects, and he orders it to be worked over again. I Know’s criticisms are typically delivered before an audience, the better for the common people to experience a proper awe of his acuity. I Know’s advantage over Pharaoh is that he actually has some judgment, not that that will endear him to his frazzled subordinates.

Out Of His Depth

Out Of got promoted because there is no possibility in the known universe that he would ever be a threat to anyone above him. Understanding at some dim, reptilian level that the job is beyond his limited abilities, he is fiercely loyal to his protector, his only hope. Out Of would inspire pathos if it were not for his unaccountable vanity about his position; his feeble pronouncements, like Pharaoh’s and I Know’s, are not to be challenged.

Eager Beaver

Eager, out to prove himself to the High Command, will put in fourteen-hour days. Sixteen-hour days. Eager will take on any assignment, absorb any feckless twit into the staff, meet any deadline, bear any burden. Eager will produce the story dictated to him at ten o’clock in the morning, learn three o’clock that it is not what was wanted, reassign it as the shadows of evening gather, and edit and rewrite it himself to meet the most recent diktat. He will show up early the next morning to repeat the process.

Tee Time

Tee Time doesn’t really have any interest in the operation. He would rather be on the golf course, or playing darts in a saloon, or intriguing for a position higher up in the corporation than overseeing the paper. So he leaves Out Of His Depth in charge. When he has collected enough coupons, he will move on to a higher sphere of endeavor.

OCD

OCD cannot let go of anything. The story needs to have corrections and updates and refinements and tweeks — oh, and the photographs don’t match the story, and the graphics have to be redone. Maybe this should have been seen to a couple of weeks ago, but there was all this stuff in the story that had to be recast and reorganized and — no, it has to be taken back from the copy desk now because the writer wants to make some changes; you’ll have it back in five minutes. Maybe ten. And are those the headlines you put on it? They’re all wrong; here are some suggestions. How soon do you have to have it for tomorrow? There are fixes and changes in it that you have to make? Can I have it back for just a minute?

The Graduate

Ever so smarter than you, he has read more books than you, uses bigger words than you, and loses no opportunity to parade his learning before you. You will be expected to nod in silent assent as he unfolds his endless anecdotes and observations, all of which you have heard at least twice, as you beg for merciful death to overtake you. But once you have acceded to his superior learning and sophistication, and endured his endless anecdotes, he is generally content to leave you alone. Because learning is not held in any particular regard in journalism, his prospects for advancement are extremely limited.

THE WRITERS 

The Crown Prince and/or The Princess Royal

The prize bull and prize heifer of the sacred cattle have typically won prizes — real prizes, sometimes with money attached, not the stuff that state press associations hand out like candy corn at Halloween. Consequently, they have been exempted from routine work. Production of a story, once or twice a year, by one of them is an Event in the newsroom.

Mute Inglorious Milton

Mute Inglorious Milton has the misfortune to work on a beat or a section largely ignored by the rest of the paper. He/she may be diligent and accurate, may even be able to write clearly, but there is no chance that he/she will ever be summoned from the suburbs to work downtown, much less ever become The Crown Prince or The Princess Royal.

The Supreme Pontificator

As a writer of analyses or reviews and a master of the Authoritative Tone, The Supreme Pontificator has no peer. He/she has never been wrong. Or at least has never acknowledged a misjudgment. Moreover, he/she speaks ex cathedra on any subject in any article. Read his/her articles to learn what God would think if God had the inside information.

The Supreme Pontificator is destined to become a distinguished member of the Columntern (See below).

Who Touched My Story

Who Touched My Story will demand an accounting of every keystroke during the editing of his/her story, often calling the copy desk on edition deadline with this inquiry. Who Touched will contest every attempt to untangle syntax or regularize a mixed metaphor. Corrections of errors of fact will not be met with gratitude.

Who Touched has become such a nuisance that assigning editors have given up the struggle. His/her copy is subjected to peristalsis rather than editing, and when a copy editor has the temerity to raise a question, Who Touched will answer, “My editor thought that this story was fine. Why are you questioning it?”

Mirror, Mirror

“Did you read my story? What did you think of my story? Did you like it better than yesterday’s story? What was your favorite passage? What’s the headline on my story going to say? Is it on Page One? Why isn’t it on Page One?”

Mirror, Mirror is apparently unaware that anyone else is writing or that the paper and its editors have any concerns apart from the burnishing of his/her article.

By the Word

By the Word believes that a 1,500-word story is, by definition, twice as good as a 750-word story. Accordingly, an article on some continuing story with three paragraphs of incremental developments will be padded out with a couple of dozen paragraphs taken from the archive. By the Word is particularly deadly when covering crime and courts, because a story on the third day of jury selection will require a recapitulation of the complete circumstances of the original crime, with context taking the reader back to the time Cain smacked Abel.

The Duckbilled Platitude

The Duckbilled Platitude never met a cliche he/she didn’t like. But he/she is as busy as a one-armed paperhanger. At the end of the day, racing against the clock, he gives 110 percent trying to find the smoking gun. And the next day he is back in the saddle again. Trying to get Duckbilled to give up cliches is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

Columnist Party Apparatchik

The members of the Columntern write about their children, their pets, their interminable waits queuing up with the rabble at the motor vehicle bureau. When whimsical, they write columns that Dave Barry might have been able to make funny. When channeling Walter Winchell, they produce little apercus and apothegms about life, held together with ellipses and spit.

When one Apparatchik achieves the status of Supreme Pontificator and takes one of his/her extended vacations, the paper reprints past columns.

The Columntern is not subject to editing, because, as Anthony Trollope said, “One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it.” Or more simply, as Don Hebb put it, “What’s not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

High Camp

High Camp has learned from colleagues, taking the Authoritative Tone from The Supreme Pontificator, adopting the self-absorption of Mirror, Mirror, appropriating the gift of unoriginality from The Duckbilled Platitude, and experimenting with the risible pretensions of Goodbye English Prose (See below), he/she confects a rococo prose unlike anything else on land or sea. Many writers talk about developing a voice; High Camp has Voice. The effect is very much like what P.G. Wodehouse or S.J. Perlman might have accomplished if they had taken no account of the actual meanings of words.

High Camp flowers in features sections.

Plain But Earnest

Plain But Earnest is diligent, so diligent that if he/she were any more productive it would sink the whole operation. Plain But files every day, sometimes more than once. Everything in Plain But’s notes goes into the story — stray details of no particular moment, meaningless quotes (“But he said it”). Plain But has no literary aspirations. In fact, the only structural principle Plain But has mastered in constructing an article is randomness.

Goodbye English Prose

Goodbye English Prose is a litterateur/litterateuse, all flair, all the time, operating under the misapprehension that he/she is creating for the newspaper what H.L. Mencken called “beautiful letters.” Goodbye English loves metaphors, no matter how strained or grotesquely inappropriate to the subject. Goodbye English will drag in the most obvious allusions or quotations from English literature to demonstrate that he/she is an educated/cultivated/sophisticated/sensitive artist.

An editor who questions Goodbye English’s fulsome effects will witness an instant metamorphosis into Who Touched My Story.

Disclosures and disclaimers

“Duckbilled platitude” is borrowed from a poem by E.E. Cummings (NOT e.e. cummings, dammit). “Goodbye English prose” was the headline suggested by an Australian journalist during a workshop featuring a particularly overripe specimen. And “mute inglorious Milton” is, of course, taken from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a poem once familiar to just about anyone who had made it all the way through high school, but now, sadly, no longer so.

THE COPY EDITORS 

The Pouncer

The Pouncer takes his motto from Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” When the Pouncer discovers an error in a story, he brandishes it aloft and proclaims it. The error is like the dead bird your cat deposits on your doorstep to show how hunting is done.

Because the Pouncer is smart, he is usually right. Unfortunately, he has to establish his own worth every night by showing the defects of others. So if nothing substantial presents itself, he will take a story and worry it like a terrier with a rat until he can make an issue of something.

By the Book

You can predict all the changes By the Book makes in copy. Since always becomes because, half an acre becomes a half-acre, and attorney becomes lawyer (or maybe the reverse). No sentence ends with a preposition, and neither does any line of a headline. Everything for By the Book is a 1 or a 0, right or wrong; there is always a correct way to do everything, and everything must be made correct. By the Book’s copy of the AP Stylebook (copyright 1982) has been annotated more comprehensively than the Talmud.

Thanks for Sharing

“Hey, this obituary has a funny line in it.”

“Did you see what Wall Street said about the company stock on Romenesko today?”

“Here’s a real cute picture of a cat wearing a bonnet.” (Why, on edition deadline, is he/she looking at internet images of cats?)

The big-hearted Thanks for Sharing can’t keep anything to himself/herself. If it’s unusual, or amusing, or heart-wrenching, you have to know about it because you might otherwise miss it. Never mind that you are — what do we call it? — working.

Mote Man

The devil is in the details, and Mote Man is on the lookout for the devil. He, like Gilbert’s Major-General Stanley “knows the kings of England, and he quotes the fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.” If the story says that the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, Mote Man knows that Constantine established a toleration of Christianity. If the story says that John F. Kennedy was the youngest man to become president of the United States, he knows that Theodore Roosevelt was younger when McKinley was assassinated. Kennedy was the youngest man to be elected president.

But since Mote Man’s attention is devoted entirely to recondite distinctions, he is capable of sending through a story about Iran bearing a 48-point headline that says Iraq.

Speed Demon

Speed Demon can turn a story around faster than anyone else on the desk. If you hand Speed Demon a page proof, it will be returned to you marked “OK” before you have been able to sit down again. Speed Demon handles twice as much copy as any other editor on the desk, and is quite proud of that.

Speed Demon also lets through twice as many errors as anyone else on the desk.

Stuck in First

Sitting near Speed Demon is Stuck in First. As one colleague once said of another, “He only has one gear.” (And don’t write in to tell me that that should read “has only one gear.” Sometimes it doesn’t matter all that much, and besides, IT’S A DIRECT QUOTE.) Every story that passes through Stuck in First’s hands is meticulously edited, clean and correct. And if you can pry two or three stories out of those slow-moving fingers by edition close, it is a good night.

The Correspondent

If you sit near the Correspondent, you hear busy fingers on the keyboard, tappity-tappity-tappity-TAP. And you think, that’s good. Busy at work. Should be able to close the edition early tonight. Then you notice that the Correspondent has been working for 45 minutes on a routine 12-column-inch wire service article on the discovery that it gets hot in the Midwest in the summertime. That’s when you realize that all that music of the keyboard has been Instant Messaging to friends, some of them probably also on the copy desk.

Team Player

Team Player designs dynamic pages, writes crisp headlines, and sets priorities under deadline pressure. A self-starter, Team Player acts proactively to take action, communicates effectively with stakeholders, and displays a positive attitude. Team Player has broad editing experience, excellent news judgment and leadership skills and a desire to innovate. Team Player understands and embraces the company’s core mission, values and goals.

Mythical.

Discosure

I am Pouncer, Speed Demon, Mote Man, Thanks for Sharing, Correspondent, By the Book and, sometimes, Stuck in First. I have at one time or another displayed all these behaviors. Learning humility is easy on a copy desk, because in identifying the faults and failings of others, one holds up a mirror to oneself.

How we talk now

If you are old enough, you were probably taught the "due to" crotchet.  

For the youngsters in the gallery, due was only ever supposed to be an adjective, typically following a linking verb and followed by a prepositional phrase: "An error is due to carelessness." What was utterly forbidden was to treat due to as a preposition: "Due to carelessness, an error was made." 

This is how due to is described in Follett's Modern American Usage (1966):"Can someone complain that due to worry he sleeps badly? The answer of everyone who cares about workmanship is a flat no. But to give that answer in the United States today is to commit oneself to fighting a rear-guard action. For the doctrine that any locution in wide use is right by virtue of its mere existence has validated the unanchored due to." Further, "the loose and lawless due to is still rare in writers other than those who take advantage of every latitude."

Wilson Follett's guide was edited and completed by Jacques Barzun. Collaborators included Carlos Baker, Frederick W. Dupree, Dudley Fitts, James D. Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling. Follett's Modern American Usage displays how we talked then about language and usage: Eminent authorities spoke ex cathedra about what was right, protecting the language in a desperate rear-guard action from the loose and lawless misuses of ill-educated barbarians who think anything goes in English. 

Here is what Bryan Garner says today about due to. The traditional restriction to adjectival uses following to be is something that a stylist may wish to avoid, since one authority calls it a "graceless phrase, even when used correctly." And today due to "is commonly used as a preposition or conjunctive adverb meaning because of, owing to, caused by, or on grounds of." In Garner's language-change index, due to used for because of or owing to is at Stage 4, "Ubiquitous but ..." rather than Stage 5, "Fully accepted." 

Garner's Modern American Usage (fifth edition, 2022) is representative of the way an authority talks about usage today. He doesn't sneer at people who speak and write the language. He makes use of corpus data to determine how widely and where particular usages occur. He pays attention to the findings of linguists and lexicographers. (Follett--or perhaps Barzun--grouses that those slippery lexicographers admitted prepositional due to into the sacred precincts of Webster's Second.) Neither his own tastes in usage, nor the tastes eight selected worthies, constitute an authority that is allowed to ignore evidence. 

Sneering does continue, though no longer with the elevated style favored by the late John Simon. It is more likely to manifest in online snark parroting some long-deceased English teacher. But we working editors do not go in for it. We understand that there are many Englishes, and that even the dialect of formal written English is not a monolith. We continue to consult dictionaries. We continue to consult authorities. We consult our own wide reading. And we strive to make balanced, informed judgments about what is most effective for the writers we edit, and for their readers. 

Two ways about it

 I used to teach my editing students at Loyola Maryland a nice little word, dilemma. It's ultimately from the Greek, di, "two," and lēmma, "assumption." In its strict sense, it means a choice between two equally disagreeable alternatives. Odysseus has to choose between Scylla and Charybdis; you have the devil and the deep blue sea, and neither is very nice. 

You notice I said the strict sense. That sense has been rubbed smooth for a long time, and today the increasingly prevalent loose sense of dilemma is "difficult choice," "disagreeable choice," or even "problem." This kind of drift happens a lot in language. Terrific has moved from "inspiring awe and fear" to "awful" or "frightful" to "astounding" or "tremendous" to just "swell."

Now the strict sense of dilemma is still there in the language, and you are free to use it. You can even try to insist on it, inveighing against anyone who has the temerity to use it in the loose sense. If you inveigh thus, people will call you a fussbudget, and you will be fine about that, because fussbudgets are proud of being fussbudgets. 

But if you are an ordinary person, or some byte-stained wretch editing for ordinary readers, you will have to develop your own sense of how strict or loose to be in any given situation, sensitive to both the language at large and to your specific context. Manuals like Garner's and Fowler's can inform you about distinctions as they exist, but they cannot advise you what to do in a specific instance. You have to develop judgment, case by case. 

So if you are confronted by a text that uses dilemma, you may yourself face a dilemma, a minor but difficult choice. 

Porch sitting

 The porch at our front door is small, holding a round table, a small side table, and four chairs. That's the capacity. When I worked, this is where my wife and I shared a bottle of Prosecco and a snack or light supper on my days off. In retirement, this is where I spend much of my time. 

This porch is where I discovered that the late afternoon light in the summer turns the oak leaves silver. This porch is where I exchange greetings with neighbors out for a walk or out being walked by their dogs. This porch is where I can spend hours enjoying a book and a drink (whiskey with Faulkner, gin with John le Carre, coffee with Robert Caro, tea with Barbara Pym). 

When I smoked a pipe, the porch was where I could indulge the vice without defiling the interior. The porch is where I can sit on a still summer day as the wind picks up suddenly, then watch as a storm rolls in. The porch is where I can savor the calm of the evening twilight until the mosquitoes chase me inside. 

Loafing comes naturally to me, perhaps hereditarily. My grandfather, Lucien Lundy Early, a lifelong inveterate loafer, used to spend time with other elderly loafers on the front bench of the general store in Elizaville, Kentucky. Growing up in Kentucky, I was enough of a Southerner to understand that the way to deal with the oppressive heat is to sit there and not move. A propensity for loafing (and reading) made sitting still an easy skill to acquire. 

It is a pity that so many houses have been built without front porches, or that people who have houses with porches do not take advantage of them. Yes, I know that many houses have decks, but decks are in the back, for family, for privacy. When you sit on your front porch, you are identifying yourself as a resident; you are making yourself visible and known; you are helping to people the neighborhood. 

So if you should be minded to come by sometime to sit on the porch with me, I am not averse to genial conversation. That is one of the things it is for. 

It's not over

This week someone on Twitter quoted a tweet from a fellow journalist: "Not to be dramatic, but the day @APStylebook made it okay to say 'over' when it should be 'more than' was humanity's worst day." 

Not to be dramatic, but, hearing the alarm, I reached for my musket to head for Lexington Common. 

We know where this comes from. An entry in the "Don't List" of James Gordon Bennett at The New York Herald reads: "Don't use 'over' in in the sense of 'more than.'" No explanation, just a fiat. A distinction with no foundation in English (we'll get to that) invented in nineteenth-century American journalism made its way eventually into the Associated Press Stylebook, to be taught as an article of faith in journalism schools and newsrooms. 

The usage note to "over" in The American Heritage Dictionary attributes the distinction to William Cullen Bryant, another nineteenth-century editor, and concurs that the distinction has been championed by American editors who offer no explanation. "Over" for "more than," American Heritage says, has been in English since the 1300s and is fully standard.

Now, mind you, there's a place in my heart for pedantry. All my sympathies are with anyone who deplores that "beg the question" has come to mean "prompt the question" rather than "you've made a dumbass fallacious argument." The traditional sense, as Bryan Garner reminds us, is to make a circular argument--"that is, to base a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself." If I see "beg the question" in someplace like The New York Review of Books, I see that someone is holding on to the traditional sense, and it would be nice to maintain it, but that train has left the station.   

But "over/more than," that "over" can only be used to indicate spatial relationships, has no such traditional footing. It's merely an arbitrary distinction arbitrarily maintained in newspaper journalism for decades. It is, in Arnold Zwicky's felicitous term, a "zombie rule." It has no life, it has been repeatedly debunked, and yet it walks among us. 

Jeremy Butterfield, in Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, refers to the "strong tradition in American newspapers 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.'" He advises, "It is useful for editors and writers of other varieties of English to be aware that the anxiety continues (and, to judge by some editorial forums, can almost induce nausea or hyperventilation)." 

Oh, Jeremy would be on my side at Lexington Common.   

That meaningless distinction is one of a number of bogus rules that I campaigned against for years, until finally, at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 2014, the editors of the AP Stylebook announced that the "over/more than" distinction was being dropped. There was a chorus of groans in the room, and, as we see on Twitter, the pissing and moaning about it has not died away. 

That ACES conference in Las Vegas in 2014 drew lexicographers from Merriam-Webster's and American Heritage, who told me they were amazed to learn that American editors had been championing a distinction that they had never seen in English. And if you trouble to look into dictionaries, you will find that they uniformly register "over" as a synonym of "more than." 

Yes, I woke up this morning and decided to swat a gnat with a ball peen hammer. But let me suggest that in all discussions like this there is an unspoken but important question lurking beneath the surface: Just what is the source of your expertise in these matters?

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."