Dark imaginings on the right

Curious attitudes keep surfacing on the right.

Last week Carl Paladino got himself into hot water by making remarks to an online publication. He said that he hopes President Obama “catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford [sic]” and that he would like for Michelle Obama to “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

Amid the ensuing uproar he released a craven statement apologizing to “the minority community,” saying that he meant to circulate the remarks among friends instead of for publication, and insisting “I certainly am not a racist.”

Two things are immediately apparent: (1) Mr. Paladino does not understand how bovine spongiform encephalopathy is transmitted, and (2) he is in fact a racist. His apology merely illustrates how deeply political correctness has penetrated society; even people who make blatantly racist remarks do not want to be called racists.

The sorts of things Mr. Paladino said keep cropping up in recesses of the internet and have for the past eight years of the Obama administration. “Obama is gay, Michelle is trans,” &c., &c. But Carl Paladino is not some sweaty troll in a basement surrounded by canned goods and a private arsenal as he awaits the black insurrection. Six years ago Carl Paladino was the Republican nominee for governor of New York.

I don’t see people on the left speculating on what Donald Trump does between the sheets—perhaps the mind revolts at the image. I see people on the left attacking Donald Trump for remarks that appear to support racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes. Those are attacks on political grounds, and they mirror the attacks from the right on President Obama’s political actions.

But in the darker regions of the right this peculiar fascination with race and sexual behavior is a kind of chronic delirium. I’m an English major and a journalist, not a psychologist, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that remarks like Mr. Paladino’s are both politically and personally morbid.

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The late Mr. Saunders

We said goodbye to Saunders this morning.

A trip to the veterinarian on Wednesday yielded this information: He was suffering from a fever, he was seriously anemic, he had feline leukemia, and the prognosis was not good.

Kathleen and I made the painful decision that we did not want to prolong his suffering. So we brought him home and spent the day yesterday giving him treats, stroking him, speaking to him with affection, indulging his wishes, and saying farewell. This morning we took him to the Aardmore Veterinary Hospital, where he was gently put beyond the reach of pain.

You may recall from earlier posts that he showed up two years ago, an abandoned, hungry stray who immediately sized us up as easy marks. We fed him, we took him in, we got him treated by the vet, and we made him part of the household.

He remained determinedly indoor-outdoor, patrolling the neighborhood as if he were its mayor, paying visits to other households and depositing the occasional mouse (and sometimes a young rat) on our front sidewalk. He went out in the rain and the cold, and he gamboled in his first snowfall.

He was a handsome orange cat, quickly growing into those big paws we noticed on his arrival. And he was ever an affectionate cat, the sweetest-tempered cat, who purred loudly every time I picked him up. His presence in the bay window comforted and calmed us, and, like a dog, he came to greet me when I arrived home at night after work.

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But now he is gone, and I will think of him always as serenely dozing on his chair on the porch, savoring the sunlight and the fragrant breeze, the sweet, sweet stray who for two all-too-short years with us had food, shelter, love.

Time goes by

It was on October 23-25, 1997, that the American Copy Editors Society conducted its first national conference, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was there.

These photos, which recently surfaced in a folder deep in a file cabinet, were from the workshop I conducted there at the invitation of Pam Robinson.

"Getting Back to the Word," on issues of English usage, used material I had developed for staff workshops at The Baltimore Sun and from our in-house newsletter on writing and editing, Publish and Be Damned.

My participation in ACES had been encouraged by The Sun's publisher, Mike Waller, himself a former copy editor, and by John Carroll, the editor. When demand came for me to present this workshop, and others on writing and editing, their encouragement continued. I have presented "Getting Back to the Word" at other national ACES conferences and at publications around the United States.

Over the nineteen years since, as I have come to examine the things about English usage that I had been taught, looking at evidence in Bryan Garner's four edition of his usage manual, at the evidence presented by lexicographers and linguists about usage, and at the evidence of my own eyes,  the advice in that workshop has undergone revision.

My bully is dead

Though I allowed my subscription to the Flemingsburg Gazette, the paper I worked for in high school and college, to lapse, I still occasionally check the Independent-Ledger in Maysville. Given that I have been away for more than forty years, I mainly scan the obituaries. 

A few weeks ago, there he was, the bane of my life in the third and fourth grades, my principal bully. I was a skinny bookworm and teacher's pet. He was bigger, more muscular, a halting student at best, and he was seldom at his best. He enjoyed tormenting me. 

Now he is dead, an old guy, like me, apparently mourned by his daughters. 

I don't visualize him as an adult with children. He is fixed in my head as he was then. The subsequent fifty-five years don't signify. (I will not describe him further, because he has children who mourn him.) 

There is the problem. He is fixed in my head. 

He, and the subordinate bullies who sometimes chimed in, established in my mind that I am someone to be bullied, someone who lacks power, someone with no recourse. My parents and teachers knew that I felt bullied, but they were at a loss to do anything beyond allowing the children to work it out on their own. 

My bully, to my astonishment, metamorphosed into adult for whom someone could bear affection. I, in turn, metamorphosed into an adult with a family, a profession, a reputation, a standing. 

But I am also someone who typically shies away from conflict and confrontation, because I was thoroughly programmed early on to see myself as unable to prevail in such circumstances.

Sixty-five years old, and I could still use some work. 

As you make your plans for this weekend ...

please recall that The Old Editor plans to be at Ryan's Daughter in Belvedere Square around five o'clock Sunday afternoon for a pint or two of Smithwick's and conversation with any readers of the blog (or viewers of the videos) who care to show up. 

Surely you don't think that it's wholesome for him to drink alone. 

The Old Editor's thirst

It appears that I will be dangerously at loose ends a week from today, Sunday, October 2. If any of my readers fancy a pint with The Old Editor, I plan to be at Ryan's Daughter, 600 East Belvedere Avenue in Belvedere Square, around five o'clock. I will be the gray-haired gentleman nursing a glass of Smithwick's at the bar. You will be a reader looking for a quiet interval to chat at leisure. 

Make sure your bright-eyed scholar is properly outfitted

With the imminent start of the school year, you have been supplying your young charges with all the kit they will need: a full spectrum of gel pens, notebooks full of inviting blank pages, dozens of apps for laptops, tablets, and iPads.

And if your bright-eyed scholar aspires to be a writer, you may also have thrown in a copy of Strunk and White.

Well, mistakes are made. But they can be corrected. 

At Amazon.com you can find, for an exceedingly modest price, The Old Editor Says, a pithy compilation of invaluable advice about writing and editing. Grammar Girl loved it, and your embryo Scott Fitzgerald or Max Perkins will benefit enormously.

Operators are standing by. 

Advice for an election year

From The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661) by the Rev. Joseph Glanvill:

"They that have never peep't beyond the common belief in which their easier understandings were at first indoctrinated, are indubitabely assur'd of the Truth, and comparative excellence of their receptions, while the larger Souls, that have travail'd the divers Climates of Opinions, are more cautious in their resolves, and more sparing to determine."

Here comes the sun

This morning, after weeks of inquiry, estimates, inspections, construction, further inspections, paperwork, and appointments, Kathleen and I threw the switches to turn on the solar panels that Solar City has installed on our roof. 

This afternoon, as the sun heats up Baltimore to a muggy ninety-five degrees, it will also be running the fan on our air conditioner. 

Summer is for porch sitting

I long to imitate the fine example that Mr. Saunders has set for us all.

Workaday world

Last week, in a spasm of vanity, I posted photographs of my desks at home. Today, to complete the circle, my office and cubicle at The Baltimore Sun:





The office I have occupied since 2000 (one year excepted).





My cubicle at the news desk/copy desk. I regret that the monitor blocks half of the rubber chicken and that I carelessly cut of the top of the Guy Noir statuette at upper left.

Working at home

When fifty or so hours a week at a desk at The Sun is not enough, there is always an opportunity to work at home, perhaps at the iMac on which I write most of the posts for You Don't Say ...






or at the desk. The swivel chair is the one my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, used in his general store in Elizaville, Kentucky.

Smugly sedentary

The end of the semester approaches, and you can begin to smell the fear. I'll be on campus this afternoon to see students who are fretting about what their grade in the editing class will be. I myself have only gone grade-begging once. 

It was my freshman year at Michigan State, and I approached a couple of my teachers to urge them to assign me the highest grade they could justify, because if I got a sufficiently high grade point average at the end of the term, I would be admitted to the Honors College and exempted from the physical education requirement. 

They did; I was. 

At Ewing Elementary School, when I was in the seventh and eighth grades, our physical education classes consisted of a series of calisthenics to a recording ("Go, you chicken fats, go!"), followed by dodge ball. The instructor, who I think had been a physical education major at Morehead State, played dodgeball gleefully, with full adult male velocity and power. He particularly delighted in nailing the bookworm, but he had to work at it. I was surprisingly nimble then. 

In my sophomore year at Fleming County High School, the teacher had it in mind that the students should learn something about anatomy and physiology in the classroom. (He didn't last.) I, of course, got grades on tests that wrecked the curve for the rest of the class and was hopeless in the gym or outdoors. Class consisted of running laps followed by miscellaneous sports, with little or no direction. It was, I think, assumed that boys all knew that stuff. 

Little or no direction also marked my one term of phys ed at Michigan State, where the graduate teaching assistant passively observed us in miscellaneous activities. We had, I recall, one day of splashing around randomly in the pool. It was at eight o'clock in the morning, too, which made the exemption from further phys ed classes the more welcome.

There was no mention of anything like a fitness program, nothing to connect whatever it was we were supposed to be doing in class to the rest of our lives. It would by nice to think that physical education classes today are a little better developed, but I haven't gone looking. 

And, as you may well imagine, these various classes did little to mitigate my lifelong distaste for jockery. 

Today, at sixty-five, I am ten to fifteen pounds overweight and mildly troubled by arthritis in my feet and knees. But my blood pressure and cholesterol levels are normal. I am on no medications. Unless my body is harboring some as yet unknown pending disaster, I should have several more good years ahead. 

I can't say that I owe that to my phys ed classes. 

Flaunting good judgment, flouting bad advice

Experienced, precise editors maintain distinctions in English usage. That is the badge of our professionalism. But not all distinctions merit our time and attention.

Did you, as I did, spend years pointlessly changing over to more than? 

Do you wince when someone says "begs the question" to mean "raises the question"?  

Are you running the gantlet or gauntlet when a writer peppers your with challenges to your edits?

On Wednesday, April 13, I will be conducting an audio course for Copyediting, "Evaluating Language Nuances: Which to Enforce and Which to Let Go." We'll go over more than two dozen traditional distinctions of usage (and you'll have an opportunity to argue with me) to sort out what the authorities say and what actual usage shows. 

By the end, you will have enough grounding to make assured and informed judgments about which distinctions to uphold and which to let go of. 

Clicking on the link above will direct you to information on signing up. I'm eager, but perhaps not anxious,  to talk with you.