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.  

What she said

Anne Curzan thinks that two parties within us struggle to prevail over how we understand and use the English language. 

One party she calls the grammando (think "stickler" or "pedant"), avid to enforce The Rules (even when some of them are bogus). The other she calls the wordie, whose response to encountering a new word or usage is "Wow, that looks interesting." 

In Says Who? (Crown, $29) she looks to strike a balance. 

The formidably titled Geneva Smitherman Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, Linguistics, and Education and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan writes with authority, but in an easy, conversational style. If she drops in the occasional technical term like "metathesis," she is quick to explain that it means the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, as in ask/aks. But mostly she writes as if she were sitting across the table from you talking about language and how we use it.

And she covers the territory: the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, terminal prepositions, singular they, who/whom, true and false passives, the instability of the apostrophe, and dozens more. (I agree with her on every point, so we can see that she is a genuine authority.)

Her subtitle, A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words, indicates what she is about. The grammando will have to unlearn some rules that are not actual rules and loosen up about words and usages outside formal written contexts ("funner"), and the wordie will have to curb their enthusiasm when formal contexts merit formal precision. She is "comparing what speakers and writers actually do and what we're told we're 'supposed to do' in formal contexts, in order to come up with our own, informed decisions about what effective usage is, based on context." 

The project, then, is not to bring The Rules to bear inflexibly, or decide that Anything Goes, but to "weigh the the benefits and drawbacks of our language choices, given what we know about the usage rules, the judgments others may make based on our adherence to those rules, our own preferences and purposes, our knowledge of our audience, and our understanding of how the language may be changing." 

This is a book by a savvy, approachable authority who aims to equip you to make those informed decisions about how you speak and write. It is worth your time. 

Secrets of editing revealed

The secret to editing is to ask questions so obvious as to make you appear slow-witted. 

These are the questions to ask when you are doing structural editing or macro-editing. The micro-editing (fact checking, spelling, punctuation, grammar, English usage, house style) is on hold until the big questions have been addressed. 

What's it about?

This is the focus question. The story, no matter how many subsidiary points it contains, must have one single, identifiable main point. If you can't state that main point in a single sentence, then there isn't one, and it's time to go back and rethink what the story is. 

Where's the point?

This is related to the focus. The story needs to get to the point quickly, without throat-clearing and background baggage, if the reader can be expected to engage further. That means you have two or three sentences to get there. (Think how long you read something before deciding to move on.) 

What happened yesterday? 

This is the chronology question. Typically, in a news story, the most recent event appears first, with the background filled in subsequently. But it includes the larger point of organization. Is the sequence of events clear? If the story shifts from the past to the present, or back and forth, does it provide transitions to keep the reader oriented? 

How do we know this?

This is the source question. How many sources are there in this story? Just one? Uh-oh. More? Who or what are they? Where do they come from? How reliable are they? What do they stand to gain or lose? Are there other sources that should be consulted? 

Who benefits?

Chances are good that someone in the story will wind up looking good and someone else will wind up looking less than good. Have both the parties been treated fairly (their positions explained, with an opportunity to respond)? Or is there a thumb on the scales to favor someone?

What do you mean here?

When you come across a sentence so muddy as to defy comprehension, it is time to turn to the writer and say, "I'm not quite clear what you mean here? Can you tell me what you meant to say?" The writer will typically utter a sentence that makes sense, and you say, "Oh, let's just write that."

Who's the reader?

Your source(s) should not be the reader, unless you are just currying favor. Is there specialized information or jargon that must be explained? How much background information is the reader likely to need? What level of sophistication in language (vocabulary, sentence structure) is appropriate? 

Why is this a story?

A story is written and published to have a consequence. Does this one have one? If it is about an event, what is the actual or potential consequence? If it is a profile, is the subject significant in some way? If it is meant simply to entertain, is it entertaining? 

Have you kept your balance?

As an editor, you are at the intersection of the interests of a number of parties: the writer, the publication, the reader. And there is [cough] your own personal and professional integrity. Have you dealt fairly with all the parties?

Are you sure you want to do this?

Mike Waller, former publisher of The Baltimore Sun, said that this is the most important question an editor can ever raise. This is the question that might spare you a libel suit. This question might spare you publication of a defective story (plagiarized? fabricated?) that will stain your reputation. And it has a secondary question:

Are you really sure?

 

It's a grand day for grammar

 In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck. 

Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists. 

Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time. 

He will expect you to learn some new terms for categories, such as determinative, a class that includes the definite and indefinite articles; this and that, sometimes called demonstratives; words such as all, any, both, each, either, every, few, many, no, several, and some; and all the numbers, a category he calls "gigantic." A determinative generally precedes a noun, but sometimes can stand alone, as in "Some like it hot."

He says our understanding of prepositions is muddled because grammarians understood prepositions to be only pre-positioned, standing directly in front of a noun. But words like down and up, traditionally identified as adverbs, actually function as prepositions. Adverbs, he explains, can precede verbs, but you can't revise "My horse fell down" to "My horse down fell." 

The section on mythical grammar errors, dear to my heart, includes the split infinitive, the hopefully superstition, stranded prepositions (what they were looking at), singular they, and more. Read the section on passive clauses and you will be immune to the error that any construction including a form of to be or an auxiliary verb (yes, some people think that) is a passive construction. 

His thoroughgoing treatment of nouns and noun phrases, of the various classes of verbs, and of clauses, is more intricately detailed than I can expect to treat effectively in the space of a blog post; there is a lot of meat there. There are useful sections on spelling and punctuation, and he offers succinct advice on prose style that you will find much more helpful than Strunk and White.

It is sixty years since Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Craig instructed me, and now I clearly have more to learn. Maybe you too?

Ink-stained wretch has just about had enough

 

On this date in 1986 I took my seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun.

I had been a copy editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer for six and a half years and had tried out at The New York Times, which told me to get a job at a paper that took editing seriously and call again in two years. I had done the first part, and the second proved unnecessary. 

In thirty-four years at The Sun, nearly half my life, I saw serious journalism and became head of the copy desk as it developed a national reputation for effective editing, so much so that The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and others poached one editor after another. 

A reverse arc was also occurring, as feckless corporate gits at the Tribune Company steadily reduced the staff through buyouts and dropped content while charging readers more, because the newspaper industry failed to adapt to changing conditions. The company we worked for was for a time even called tronc, which sounds like an unimpressive video game. 

Finally, in 2021, when vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired a diminished Tribune, I took a buyout and retired. And now since the purchase of the newspaper earlier this year by David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting and Armstrong Williams, I read the paper with the same fascination that leads drivers to slow down and gawk at smashups on the highway. 

Ignoring Williams’s otiose maundering on the op-ed page is easy. I was used to disregarding The Enquirer’s editorial page, which was also dominated by right-wing cranks. Once in the mid-1980s, The Enquirer editorialized about the spread of AIDS, saying that the disease was painful and incurable, combined with a social stigma. Nevertheless, the editorial concluded, “if apprehension of contracting AIDS should lead people to forgo promiscuous sexual intercourse, then the disease will have served a useful social purpose.” 

Appalling as they are, not even Smith and Williams have yet endorsed a disease. 

Now each morning, fortified by two cups of strong coffee, I am greeted with shoddy coverage from FOX45 and Sinclair. As one of a rapidly dwindling handful of seven-day-a-week print subscribers, I wonder why I subject myself to this (though masochism cannot be ruled out). 

There are still people at The Sun attempting to do responsible journalism under adverse circumstances, and I salute them, and pray for their deliverance. For that reason, the day to call and cancel is not here, though it may not be far off. 

ADDENDUM: Fellow copy editor David Benson has corrected my misremembering about that Cincinnati Enquirer editorial. It ran on Monday, June 21, 1982, and concerned herpes, not HIV. The final sentence: "But to the extent the threat promotes abstinence in any age group may it serve a useful purpose, sparing individuals and society enormous costs."

Note that in recasting it from memory, I sharpened the editorial board's writing. 

Whiter than white

I've been brooding over a suggestive phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me: "people who think they are white."

Part of that thinking of reflects the centuries during which slaveholders and their male relatives freely raped the women under their control, producing mixed-race children. Mary Chesnut tartly remarks in her diary: "The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds." 

We think that Thomas Jefferson was drawn to Sally Hemings because of her strong resemblance to his deceased wife--who was also her half-sister. 

The One Drop legislation in Southern states, on the premise that one drop of Black blood made one Black, established categories, such as Mulatto (half-Negro), Quadroon (quarter-Negro), Octoroon (eighth-Negro), to establish the legal status of white and not-quite-white. It's reasonable to suspect that many "people who think they are white" today could be disconcerted by the results of a DNA test. 

But going beyond that, we have to realize that "whiteness" is as much a cultural matter as a biological one, perhaps more so. 

Though I have not resorted to Ancestry.com or a DNA test, it's pretty sure that my people were Scotch Irish and English, settled in Appalachia for a century and a half or more. Importantly, they were Protestant. White and Protestant was the badge of the True American from the beginning. 

Anyone not white and Protestant was suspect. Benjamin Franklin worried about all those Germans settling in the Pennsylvania Colony. In the mid-nineteenth century all those immigrating Irish Catholics were widely discriminated against, and after them the darker-skinned Italians and Eastern Europeans. But all of them discovered over time as they acculturated that in American you can earn whiteness. It is even possible for Jews to become honorary whites. (Henry Kissinger springs to mind.) 

The consequence is that we see opposition to immigration coming from people who think they are white, descended from immigrants who were thought not to be white, or at least not quite white like the True Americans.

There is an odd corollary that to be a True American you must be white and also live in the Heartland, the place where The New York Times sends reporters to talk to people in diners. The reason is that the True Americans long ago bought into the Jeffersonian fantasy that cities, at least large, multicultural cities, are places of corruption and that virtue resides among the farmers and small towns distant from those cities. 

The places where the people who think they are white live.

Punctuation ain't grammar

The Harris and Walz nominations have generated a flurry of back-and-forth arguments online, not about their political views, but rather how to make their names plural and possessive. 

Here is orthodoxy:

Singular: Harris, Walz

Singlar possessive: Harris's, Walz's

Plural: Harrises, Walzes

Plural possessive: Harrises', Walzes'

Punctuation is a matter of convention, not grammar. In the eighteenth century, for example, it was common to put a comma between the subject and verb of a sentence, but we no longer do that. And it is not unusual for different conventions to continue in use. 

For example, Associated Press style advises that because Harris is a proper noun, Harris' is an appropriate singular possessive. In its majestic inconsistency, the AP also advises that common nouns should take the 's, viz., boss's. *

One long-standing tradition is to make classical and biblical names possessive with the apostrophe: Socrates', Jesus', but the Chicago Manual of Style advises to use 's. If Jesus's makes you twitch, do not use it. 

Some people assert that words ending in z should be made possessive with an apostrophe only. You do you. 

Some people use 's to make names plural: the Smith's. That is right out. People will know you were not paying attention in English class. 

If you are writing for a publication that has a house style on punctuation, follow it. If you are writing for a publication that does not have a house style on punctuation, may God have mercy on your soul. If you are writing for yourself, pick a style, follow it consistently, and stop arguing with people online about which style is right. 

* The Associated Press is responsible for many quirks in journalistic writing. Newspaper reporters overuse the em dash (—) to set off parenthetical material rather than parentheses, because they use parentheses instead of square brackets to set off information added to quoted material. The AP doesn't use square brackets ([ ]) because it cannot transmit that punctuation to all the clients. That is also why AP uses quotation marks for titles and other material rather than italics. Keep in mind that when you shift from a book to a newspaper, you are code-switching punctuation. 

There were giants on the copy desk ...

An anecdote from the time before I made my escape from Gannett's Cincinnati Enquirer.

The Enquirer featured a local columnist named Frank Weikel, a former police reporter who had been given a column on the strength of his supposed sources. It was a column after the manner of Walter Winchell, short items connected by asterisks and spit. For example, it had "Departments of." One of his "Department of Names That Match Their Occupations" items, a urologist named Leake, was killed by the managing editor. 

But to our narrative. 

One day Bill Trutner is in the copy desk slot (an actual slot in a u-shaped desk), busy on deadline, when the managing editor, Jim Schottelkotte, walks up, trailed by Weikel. "Bill, we have a problem," Schottelkotte says. 

Trutner, a mild-mannered bald man who had been a high school English teacher, answers without looking up from his terminal. "What is it, Jim?"

"We have a problem with the Weikel column."

"What's wrong?"

"It's gone. He filed it, but the system seems to have eaten it. We can't find it."

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Well," Schottelkotte says, with a little managing editor banter, "we thought we'd get you to have one of the copy editors write a Weikel column for tomorrow."

"Can't do it, Jim."

"Why not?"

"We don't have anybody dumb enough."

Weikel turns on his heel and stalks away. 

The Old Editor gets cranky in the morning

I see some things in published journalism nearly every damned day. Just look. 

Too few people today have had any experience with horses, and it doesn't occur to them that horses are controlled with reins. To rein in a horse, the rider pulls back the reins to stop forward progress. To give free rein is to let go of the reins, allowing the horse to go where it will--in the dimly remembered metaphor, to surrender control. People who have neglected their homonyms instead write free reign. Reign is the power or rule of a monarch, so free reign is meaningless, apart from flagging the writer's imperfect education. 

Because we are trapped in a presidential campaign year, figures on all sides are daily subjected to intense public criticism, often expressed as catching flak. Those of you who remember, or maybe read about, the Second World War, know that flak is a shortened form of the German fliegerabwehrkanone, or antiaircraft gun. Flak is a metaphor for criticism that is like sharp pieces of metal flying through the air at great velocity. You will often see it rendered as flack, but flack is a pejorative term for a public relations agent--a stooge. You do not want to catch a flack. 

I generally skip articles on home decor, partly out of distaste for gush and partly out of apprehension of  encountering references to tchotchkes on the mantle. That shelf above the fireplace is a mantel. A mantle is a cloak. Just as we're not much on horseback anymore, we're not often given to wearing cloaks. Mantle, when it is not used in various scientific senses, is a another of those metaphors worn smooth by overuse; it means authority. In 2 Kings, when the prophet Elijah is carried into heaven on a fiery chariot, he drops his mantle to his disciple Elisha. Elisha puts on the mantle of Elijah, assuming his authority as a prophet. 

And these come up before I've had my second cup of coffee. 

The Old Editor vents

Some random observations on writing and editing 

As an editor, do what you can

I have spent more than forty years in journalism, which prizes straightforward unpretentious writing (though I have had to cope with the occasional littérateuse). You try to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain, but there are limits to what you can accomplish, limits inherent in the text. Sometimes the most you can manage is to take up the defective and leave it merely mediocre. As Anthony Trollope wrote, "One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it."

Don't start at the beginning

The Iliad starts in the middle of things, in medias res, if you want to sound like a classicist: The hero Achilles is having a hissy fit, and everything is going straight to hell for the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. It's years since Paris abducted Helen, and Homer goes straight to the main thing. Write like Homer. Start with the immediate thing, the crucial thing. You can work in the backgrounds, the subplots, and the secondary characters later in the text.

And make it succinct. Skip the throat clearing. I advised my students at Loyola Maryland to visualize the reader as a middle-aged man in a recliner with a beer in one hand and the television remote control in the other. The amount of time you have to get his attention, get him to commit to reading further, is the amount of time between clicks. 

Curb your fetishes

We all have preferences in vocabulary and usage, and so does everybody else. Unless you are a managing editor or some other tinpot despot, you don't get to legislate yours, and going on about them can make you tiresome. 

Take the Oxford comma. You can use the final comma in a series or omit it. The Chicago Manual of Style likes it, and the Associated Press Stylebook does not (though even AP advises using it where it reduces ambiguity). There are people online who clamor about it as a mark of civilization and its omission as a mark of barbarity. The opposite party claims that it is effete. Do as you please, or as your house style pleases. It is a minor stylistic point. For Fowler's sake, just shut up about it. 

Unlearning is learning

I did a series of videos for The Sun on the theme "Rubbish you were taught" and incorporated some of the material into my little book, Bad Advice. Yes, this is a plug. I take as my text for this item the word of two authorities: Henry David Thoreau, who said, "Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it," and Will Rogers, who said, "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you--it's what you know that ain't so." 

Much of the schoolroom grammar and usage I spent years laboriously acquiring, along with much of the Associated Press style I had to absorb as a journalist (and much of which I taught my charges during my first years at Loyola) turns out to be rules that ain't so. I discovered in talking about these things at professional conferences that not all of my colleagues found this welcome news, but to me it was liberating. It freed me to concentrate on what was meaningful in texts rather than wasting time on obsolete dicta of no consequence to readers apart from the occasional fussbudget. It also freed me to be a nuisance to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, whom I nagged for years until they heaved the dated baggage--such as "over/more than" and "split verb"--overboard.

You too can unlearn, and there are many linguists and lexicographers who can assist you. 

 

Thoughts on an Invitation to Apply to Johns Hopkins University's Police Force

Campus is crawling with undergraduates, half of them scurrying to the Eisenhower Library, the other half sashaying off to Charles Village bars. Scattered among them are union goons from the Ph.D. program. I have my eye on them, all of them.

My name is McIntyre. I carry a badge. And an espantoon. 

When Hopkins invited me in LinkedIn to apply for their new police force, they knew that they were getting more than an arthritic septuagenarian.

They knew I'd walked a beat for six and a half years in Cincy, patrolling the dark underbelly of Gannett.

They knew I'd done serve-and-correct duty in Baltimore for thirty-four years, even though the mossbacks in management refused to allow me to issue sidearms to copy editors. 

They knew I'd never had a complaint that was sustained: never Tasered a reporter over lie/lay, never told a copy editor to assume the position for calling something "iconic" in a headline. They said I once edited a man in Reno just to watch him cry, but the D.A. dropped all charges. 

So now I walk these mean groves, collaring kids who have not read the syllabus, watching for graduate students using AI to generate impenetrable academic lingo, pretending that deans do something important. 

And I tell you, it's a soft berth after the paragraph game.  

Learning how to talk

I was a graduate student fifty years ago when I first heard a faculty member speak of being "politically correct," a little self-consciously, a little ironically, a little redolent of liberal smugness. And it was not long before "politically correct" became a slur in our endless culture wars. 

Acceptance of changes in language, particularly changes in the way that people are identified, comes slowly. I remember the resistance in newspapers to using Ms. as an honorific for women, and the bewailing when gay became acceptable for homosexual over "the loss of that fine old word." 

And yet the world is as it is, and so are the people in it, particularly those who have long been marginalized or ignored and who have come to insist on their place in the sun, even if some are not comfortable with acknowledging them.

Charting a course to navigate in such a world makes Karen Yin's The Conscious Style Guide (Little, Brown Spark, $32) a book for our times. Ms. Yin, an experienced writer and editor, maintains the website ConsciousStyleGuide.com, from which some of the material in her book is taken, and that website has been a forum for exploring how we should talk to and about other people. 

The key to conscious style is paying attention. Language keeps changing, as do the preferences of individuals and groups. Gender identity is complex and fluid, so sussing out people's personal pronouns becomes advisable. The terms Native, Native American, American Indian, and Indigenous American are all current, so the person's or group's preference should be consulted. Offensive terms for Blacks, Asians, women, gays, and people with disabilities are to be avoided, but some words previously thought to be slurs can become acceptable. (Ms. Yin writes, "As someone named, Karen, I fully support the use of the Karen archetype" of bigot. It is a slur, but "right now, it does more good than harm." 

So this is not a rule book. It is a book asking you to think and make informed judgments. She says you must consider the content of a word or sentence or article, its basic meaning; its context, the surrounding historical and cultural circumstances that influence meaning; its consequence, how it will be understood; its complexity, the possibility that, like Karen, it can be both insulting and useful; its compassion, its recognition of the humanity of a marginalized group. 

The core of the book is the section called "Practice," which considers dozens of categories for conscious language. You will find material on the thorny issues of sex and gender, racial identity and ethnicity, and all the other hot-button issues, shunning dogmatism and exploring nuances and sensitivities. 

One section rises from the casual and inappropriate use of medical terminology to suggest that serious mental illnesses are routine: Instead of OCD, consider exacting or meticulous. Instead of ADHD, consider distracted. instead of have PTSD, consider am distressed. ... Instead of crazy, nuts, hysterical, bonkers, psychotic, consider wild, unpredictable, confusing, scary." 

And she offers alternatives to climate change denier and anti-vaxxer, terms that just get people's backs up. There is a section on how to persuade people to adopt conscious language. 

But let me get to the heart of it. 

To adopt conscious style when we speak and write is to work to accord everyone, everyone, the dignity and respect that white men have considered their due. 

Tell me about your worst undergraduate course

It was half a century ago, at Michigan State University, and I had disregarded Jean Nicholas's advice to pick courses by the best professors rather than by subject. It was a Shakespeare course.* 

The professor, whose name mercifully fades from memory, was young. At the last time that nearly all male faculty wore suits and ties, he wore an open-collar shirt to class. 

His pedagogy included acting out scenes from the Bard in class, and you will perhaps not be surprised that when he took the role of Hamlet he chose a young blond woman in the class to be his Ophelia. 

In talking about the play, he said that he didn't mean to suggest that he followed a strict Freud-Jones interpretation of the play, to which a classmate murmured to me, "No, he means to dance around it for fifty minutes." 

I wrote a couple of papers for this class, the revelation of which would brand me with enduring shame, and the grades on which maintained my membership in the Honors College. 

In my defense, when I had to submit my transcript to my advisor for approval for graduation, he ran a practiced eye down the page and said, "You appear to have gotten yourself a liberal education. How did you do that here?"

*To be fair, the other other Shakespeare courses in the English department at that time were taught by the dullest professor in the department and the most notorious antisemite on campus, but I digress. 

 

That historic verdict

The conviction yesterday of former President Donald Trump in a New York state court on thirty-four felony counts was, everyone agrees, historic, the first such conviction of a former president of the United Sates. But I am not concerned here with the rightness or wrongness of the verdict; instead, I have been asked was it "a historical event" or "an historical event"? 

Kai Ryssdal insisted on Twitter that it should be "an historic," and David Hobby (who took the photograph at the top of this blog) flagged me to weigh in. 

We use the indefinite article "a" before words beginning with "h" when the "h" is aspirated: a hat, a home, a haven. We use the indefinite article "an" before words beginning with "h" when instead of an aspirated "h" there is a vowel sound: an hour, an honor.  

The dispute rises over which indefinite article to use when a word begins with an "h" that is weakly aspirated because the stress comes on the second syllable of the word; thus some speakers say and write an historic or an hotel. (I doubt that you would say "a HO-tel" unless you were content to sound like a rube, but that's on you.) 

Bryan Garner, among other authorities, dismisses that argument, saying that everyone should "avoid pretense" and use "a" before all words beginning with "h," warning that practice to the contrary smells of affectation. 

Good people, this is America and English is your language, to wield it as it suits you, and I for one am sticking with an historic. People have been telling me that I "talk like a book" since the second Eisenhower administration, and I am not prepared to abandon the habits of a lifetime. 

The routine of work

 Preparations: Small pot of tea brewed, 

a chocolate bar unwrapped. 

Coffee comes later.

To the proof pages.

One comma flicked away, 

another plugged in.

Homonyms reversed, 

subject mated to verb, 

phrase reduced to a word, 

Merriam-Webster consulted,

prolixity excised.

Pencil both lances and stanches 

until the stack is done. 

Rising from the desk

for a stetwalk to look 

at trees in the distance. 

Soon the sluice will open, 

texts flowing this way, 

to be plucked, one by one, 

ordered, scraped, and dispatched

until the edition closes. 

Only then the book, 

the chair, the strong light,

the drink that closes the day. 

 

Buyer, beware

 The Kentucky Derby and the Preakness are past, the Belmont Stakes yet to be run. In Maryland we're all agog over the recently approved plans for Pimlico, spending $400 million in taxpayer funds to offer life support to a declining industry that kills horses. So the language of the track is all around us. 

And it is the track that give us a journalistic affection that annoys me almost above all others, reporting to the verb tout. 

We have it from late seventeenth-century Britain, where it means variously to get the secrets of the stable for betting purposes (to spy on) and to give a tip on a racehorse. The noun is for the person who exhibits such behavior. From that the senses extend to canvassing for customers, soliciting patronage, urging with annoying persistence, and soliciting importunately. 

Particularly in U.S. usage, it has come to mean to proclaim loudly or overly publicize. 

It owns its popularly in journalism to copy editors, always searching for a short word to fit into a tight count, and from the headline it descended into body copy. 

No doubt I am oversensitive from reading too many books, but whenever I see that some public official is touting a program, or some developer is touting a project for which, yes, again, taxpayers will bear the costs, the whole smarmy connotation from racing echoes in my mind. Boost, plug, and pitch, similarly, suggest that someone is enthusiastically offering dubious merchandise. 

Promote, publicize, and even proclaim do the job reporters want, without the seediness. They can always put their money on some other horse. 

Asked and answered

More in comments on "Ask me anything": We'll start with the semicolon.

1. What's an easy way to remember the proper times to use a semicolon versus a period?

2. When are sentences in parentheses in sentences appropriate?

You would use a semicolon to join two independent clauses that are closely related, viz., They ask me questions; I always answer them. 

But keep in mind that it is a judgment call to use the semicolon instead of writing two sentences. The semicolon is more common in formal writing and might look stiff in yours. Some people though, like the semicolon. Nicholson Baker not only pumps for the semicolon in "The History of Punctuation" (collected in The Size of Thoughts) but also applauds the Victorian custom of combining the semicolon with the em dash. (Admire if you like, but step back.) 

An alternative to the semicolon is the comma, found in the dreaded comma-splice run-on sentence: They ask me questions, I always answer them. You do not want to do this in formal writing, and you must not say that I gave you permission to do so. But if you are writing fiction, particularly dialogue, you will find yourself resorting to this comma, because people in speech string their clauses together loosely rather than composing them, and this construction will sound more natural. 

As to the second question, about parentheses, it is best to think of them as operating like an aside in drama. The parenthetical remark is a nugget of information that is not essential to the main line of thought but is tucked in to add a bit of context. 

But writing a parenthetical clause within a sentence can be dicey, distracting the reader, viz., Nicholson Baker not only pumps for the semicolon in "The History of Punctuation" (The essay is a review of a book on punctuation collected in his The Size of Thoughts) but also applauds the Victorian custom of combining the semicolon with the em dash. See?

Of course it was about commas

 When I invited readers earlier today to ask me any question they care to about writing, editing, or English usage, this was the first to arrive: "Commas before 'too,' 'as well,' 'either,' etc. at the ends of sentences: yea or nay, and why?"

Commas often precede "as well" and "either" but may not be necessary. I would need to see a context. Periods, not commas, come at the end of sentences (well, sometimes ellipses). Using a comma before "too" is entirely discretionary; it is not necessary but can be used to place a little additional oomph on the word. 

Some commas are required in formal English. Instances include preceding a coordinating conjunction when two independent clauses are joined, setting off appositives, and separating the items in a series.* Know those places. 

But some commas are discretionary, used like the rests in music to mimic the slight pauses in speech. It is perfectly all right to use them thus, but be wary of going overboard. There is a tendency, much remarked upon, to indulge, knowingly or carelessly, in discretionary commas to an extent that the writer, or more properly the writer's voice, comes to resemble that of, one hesitates to point out, Henry James. 

*Regarding the Oxford comma, the final comma in a series: If you are following a stylebook, use it or not as the stylebook dictates; if you are not following a stylebook, use it or not as your taste dictates; if you are arguing in public over whether or not to use it, you are annoying people with trifles. 

Ask me anything

It’s my own fault. 

When The New York Times called to ask for my views on the sale of The Baltimore Sun to David Smith and Armstrong Williams, I was less than enthusiastic.* When Mr. Williams disparaged the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at public events, I pointed to some deficiencies in his argument. 

So perhaps I should not have been surprised when, looking for some past post, I clicked on the link to You Don’t Say at baltimoresun.com, I got “Oops! That page can’t be found.”

Now The Sun owns the blog posts I wrote as an employee and published on its website for more than fifteen years.** And if the management chooses to be petty and vindictive, it can do as it pleases with its property, including deleting it. 

But not all is gone; a search on the website, for example, turned up a handful of posts from 2019, and there may be more. Some posts that were picked up by Google News can still be found on search, but that search is also spotty.

Those posts enabled me to say nearly everything I know about writing and editing, and the tens of thousands of page views they got indicated that some readers found them of value. To my knowledge, two or three people actually subscribed to The Sun to be able to read them. 

So now I make this offer: Bring to me any question you have about writing, editing, or English usage, and if I think I can offer a useful answer, I will give one. Never mind that it may be something that I already wrote about. 

I have never been shy about repeating myself. 

*”I think it will mean disaster.”

**The blog you’re currently reading I created in 2009-2010 when I was laid off and have maintained since. 

Prosy verse

 Fifty years ago I imagined that I might be a poet, but when Syracuse University turned me down for the creative writing program, then called to offer me a fellowship in the academic program in English in the graduate school, I accepted the verdict. 

But the impulse occasionally flickers, especially when a memory is triggered. This I felt impelled to write today, and you may think what you like of it. 

Bedtime

My grandmother kneels at the hearth, 

banking the coals in the fireplace,

while I lie under the quilt she made,

turning from the cold wall toward the glow, 

beloved, safe, and sleepy. 

She is gone, and the farm is sold. 

Nothing physical remains. 

But still at night I lie in bed

on the side that turns toward the glow. 

Bemoan, bemoan, bemoan

My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to teaching Remedial English in college."

Let's unpack some of what is in this. 

First, a century ago, many fewer young people went to college at all, and they usually came from schools with curriculum designed to prepare for a college education.  And, mind you, even then, scholarship was not necessarily pronounced. In the Ivy League colleges, the "gentleman's C" was entirely satisfactory, because valuable connections and networking easily compensated for a mediocre education.  

It is a mistake to equate the students of that era with the great surge after the Second World War of students seeking college educations for the first time in their families, a much wider range of students coming from public schools generally rather than selective academies. So this "gone from teaching" oversimplification ignores complex social and educational developments of the past seventy years. It is less an analysis than a slogan, a sneer at current students that overlooks the possibility that they might be at school to learn something.*

But at bottom the Sobran complaint is the tired conservative trope, repeated generation from generation, that there was a time in the past when people were smarter and more capable, compared to the degenerate present. Cicero complained that people were no longer speaking good Latin. Egbert of Liege bemoaned that "scholarly effort is in decline everywhere as never before" in the eleventh century. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1712 that people had so corrupted the English language that the Crown should establish an academy to regulate it. It was always better in the past, for those of us who recall it. 

Posting the Sobran sneer does not make one a brave voice crying in the wilderness. It is rather, and merely, a badge of smugness. 

*Perhaps it is worth saying that when I graduated from a public high school in Appalachia in 1969 (having in fact have taken two years of Latin), I was competent to write at the high school level. I had to learn, at college, how to write at the college level. I assumed that that was what it was for. 

Not unusual

 It has been the custom of the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook to announce their annual revisions at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, presumably because those are the people who care what is in the AP Stylebook. 

These updates regularly have something to raise the hair on the back of a stickler's neck. This year it is the entry on unique: "The stylebook is changing its guidance on the word 'unique.' The revised entry now says: 'The word can mean one of a kind, unparalleled, having no equal, etc.; or highly unusual, extraordinary, rare, etc. If used in the sense of one of a kind, don’t use modifiers such as very, rather, etc.' "

One can still hear keening over the abandonment of the unfounded over/more than distinction or the heaving over the side of the "split verb" rule, which held against all evidence than one cannot insert an adverb between an auxiliary and the main verb (and which I take some pride in having campaigned against for years).

The editors of the AP Stylebook are not wild-eyed Jacobins; they endorse changes in usage only after those changes have been in wide use for years. 

Regarding unique: Jeremy Butterfield in Fowler 4 comments on the sense of "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual," remarking, "All modern monolingual dictionaries recognize this meaning, usually with a warning."

American Heritage in 2011 upheld the absolute sense of the word but conceded, "In fact, the nontraditional modification of unique may be found in the work of many reputable writers and has certainly been put to effective use."

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994) explains, "Words that are in widespread use have a natural tendency to take on extended meanings. In the case of unique, it was natural that a word used to describe something that was unlike anything else should also come to be used more broadly to describe something that was, simply, unusual or rare," the latter use having been common for more than a century.

Bryan Garner clucks that the looser usage is in his Stage 3 of language change: "Widespread, but ..."

Unique we lifted from the French, who had it from the Latin unicus, "one." I suspect that insistence on the absolute meaning rises in part from the etymological fallacy, the belief that the meaning of a word must be restricted to its original sense. You may know people who insist that decimate must refer for the destruction of a tenth rather than substantial damage. I used to teach my students at Loyola that dilemma had to mean two unsatisfactory choices, like Odysseus having to decide between Scylla and Charybdis, because the Greek root di- means "two." I have no way to get back to them now to say that it can simply mean "a difficult situation." 

English is on the move, and has been since we and the French destroyed Anglo-Saxon. And though it will likely lead to by expulsion from the Stickler Sodality, I recommend judgement instead of rigid adherence to rules of dodgy provenance. Figure out what will make sense to the reader. 

Not during the reign of Edward Longshanks

A fellow editor writes to ask if I, as a resident of Baltimore, can attest that there has been a Roman Catholic presence in the city since the latter part of the 13th century. 

He refers to an article on a proposal to close several parishes that says the closures would "reflect more than 730 years of the city's Catholic life," and asks, "You know more about Charm City than I do, but was there *really* a Catholic presence in Baltimore circa 1291 A.D.?"

My best guess is that the number 730 refers to the aggregate ages of the affected parishes. The oldest in continuous operation, St. Vincent de Paul, dates from 1841, the same article informs us. 

Had I been engaged to edit the article, hoping to avoid misunderstanding, I would have confirmed my surmise and made it read, "The combined ages of the sites that would be lost reflect more than 730 years of the city's Catholic life." 

But that's just me, a meddlesome editor. 

Once a bookworm, always a bookworm

An old friend asked me on Facebook if I could recommend some nonfiction books, so I put together a list of the ones I've liked most in two and a half years of retirement:  

Isabel Wilkinson, Caste; Ron Chernow, Grant; Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages; Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile; Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project; Baynard Woods, Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness; Jess McHugh, Americanon; Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams; Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice; Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America; Kevin Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America; Joel Richard Paul: Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism; Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed; Joel Richard Paul, Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times; Timothy Egan, A Fever in the Heartland; Joseph Ellis, American Dialogue; Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

I was tempted to recommend The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis, but at roughly a thousand pages, 900 text and 100 apparatus, it is something to take on.

Maybe you would like some fiction recommendations. 

In the beginning was a word

Imagine a collection of short detective stories in which no case is solved. 

I was four pages into Anatoly Liberman’s discussion of the origin of the word finger — including multiple Germanic words, along with Goth, Greek, and Latin — when I reached this sentence: “It seems that we are exactly where we were at the beginning, and the impression is correct.”   

Professor Liberman, who has entertained word nerds for years with the blog OUP Etymologist, has now sifted through some eight hundred posts, selecting, revising, and updating to produce Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology (Oxford University Press, 344 pages, $29.99). 

“Origin unknown” is the signal in a dictionary that lexicographers have thrown up their hands and confessed that they cannot tell you where that word came from. Very old words were long in speech before they were ever recorded in a text, as is slang. Words change meanings and pronunciations. They alter when they encounter other languages. They are shape-shifters. 

Curiosity about word origins leads people to “fanciful and clever conjectures,” which must be sorted out. And the internet is littered with folk etymologies. (Yes, we all heard “Fornication Under Command of the King” as teenagers, but no.) Professor Liberman advises: “In semantics, no river is so broad that it cannot be crossed by an ingeniously built bridge. The bridges look safe, but one should think twice before crossing them.”

Certainty is not a ready commodity in etymology, which is why Professor Liberman describes his work in this book as an effort to “throw some light on obscurity.” 

He has an interesting conjecture on honeymoon, which Samuel Johnson defined as “the first month after marriage, when there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure,” adding a comment that the moon will wane. So we see that the early sense of the word was pejorative, bearing the sense that love will not last. Professor Liberman suggests that over time, users of the word focused on the sweetness of the honey component rather than the transitory moon, eventually arriving at the sense of harmony with which we use it. 

Honeymoon is a reminder that words can undergo amelioration and deterioration, moving from negative to positive, or positive to negative. You have to watch them. 

I took a personal interest in his entry on curmudgeon, which Johnson described as “an avaricious churlish fellow,” and the sense in Britain has remained that a curmudgeon is a miser. But in the mid-twentieth century in the United States, Webster’s Third labeled the “avaricious” sense as archaic, defining the word as “a crusty, ill-tempered, or difficult and often elderly person.” (It’s a fair cop.) The etymologist Walter W. Skeat traced the origins to the Scottish murgeon, “mock, grumble,” and mudgeon, “grimace.” 

This book is an exploratory expedition through the Englishes, Old, Middle, and Modern, and the other languages that they have— or may have — brushed up against. 

 

The practice of lexis can lead to tsuris

 Once you hang up the green eyeshade, nobody pays you any longer for finding fault and you have to think up other things to do. Sometimes, on afternoons before the bar opens, you go to the library, pick up a book at random, read a few pages, mutter “I’d’ve caught that,” and put it down. 

I was on my way out when my passage was blocked by a stocky librarian looking as determined as a managing editor denying an expense account filing. 

“Ma’am, I’d like to go out,” I said. 

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, I’m only thirty-five,” she said. “And if I let you out the door you’d be trapped in the middle of the demonstration.” 

“A demonstration? At the library?”

“They’re protesting Merriam-Webster.” 

“Who?”

"Don’t you see all the Make Grammar Great Again caps?”

“Ah, I only saw as I came in the guy with the petition to restore the default masculine.”

“Oh, him, he's been around forever. But Merriam-Webster recently posted on social media that there’s nothing wrong in English with ending a sentence with a preposition, and it’s been all hell ever since.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Demonstrations like that out front.  They petitioned us to remove all the Merriam-Webster dictionaries from the shelves and cancel the online subscription. Some people tried to take the dictionaries out of the building, and we had to tell them reference books are non-circulating. Moms for Literacy got a city councilman to threaten our funding.”

“Can I just take a look at what they’re doing?”

“All right, but you’re not going out.”

It was wild out there, like the rush for the newsroom pizzas on election night. 

Two guys in black robes were crossing back and forth with a Webster’s Second open on a gurney as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. Marchers waved placards proclaiming “UP WITH THIS WE WILL NOT PUT.” One sign said “LEXICOGRAPHY IS PORNOGRAPHY.” To one side, a knot of protesters was chanting “Not over, more than!” An older woman with a bullhorn was shouting, “Kids are goats! Kids are goats!”

I asked the librarian, “They ever violent?”

“Nah,” she said. “They did get hold of a copy of McIntyre’s Bad Advice and burned it on the front steps, but that’s as ugly as it got.” 

“How’d they get onto some obscure copy editor nerd?”

“He’s some kind of pompous ass on social media all the time, and they ferreted him out there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just wait. I called the police.”

In a little while, for sure, a patrol car pulled up and an officer got out. He went from person to person, holding up a document, and one by one they turned and left, like the staff laid off by a hedge fund.

“What’s that he’s got?” I asked.

“Huddleston and Pullum on stranded prepositions. He tells them if they don’t go home, they have to read it. Works every time.”

I said, “I’m going to buy a lexicographer a drink,” and stepped out the door. 

Language sneaks up on you

Making my way through the thousand pages of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and published by the Oxford University Press, I came up short against a word: snuck. 

Some of you, I suspect, will be as horrified by this as by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. But you, like the House of Palaiologos, will be on the wrong side of history. 

Snuck, a variant of sneaked, lived for decades in the United States as a regional colloquialism. But in the twentieth century, and particularly in the current one, it picked up speed. 

A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary says that 75% of its usage panel found snuck acceptable in 2008. 

Merriam-Webster notes that snuck "has risen to the status of standard and to approximate equality with sneaked." 

And Bryan Garner, in the fifth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage, writes that "with startling alacrity, it has become a casualism," perhaps because of "phonemic appeal." He continues: "In any event, the numbers don't lie: in AmE, snuck has become strongly predominant; in BrE, it has become about equal in frequency to sneaked." It crops up in legal opinions, and "the last year in which sneaked appeared more often in print than snuck was 2009."

Resistance remains. I don't care for snuck and do not recall ever having used it in speech or text. But resistance in language is usually futile. 

That's it. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.  

My life as a drudge

 February 8 marked forty-four years since I began work as a copy editor. 

The Cincinnati Enquirer took a risk in hiring a fugitive graduate student for the copy desk, where I absorbed the principles and customs of the work from colleagues like Phil Fisher, slotman Bill Trutner, and news editor Bob Johnson. My colleagues were, typically of copy desks, smart, competent, and irreverent. 

After six and a half years on the desk, I made good my escape from Gannett. The saloon where my colleagues gathered for the farewell to McIntyre party turned out to be the same saloon where the city editor had scheduled a good riddance to McIntyre party. Awkward. At least for those who came through the door and realized that a choice had to be made. 

Then thirty-four years as a disciple of Andy Faith on the desk at The Baltimore Sun, which when it was in funds gave me a free hand to hire, train, and mentor the smartest editors I could find. We had a grand time and a national reputation until the bottom fell out of the paragraph game. Tribune Publishing eliminated the copy desk in 2019, and I spent two years as a "content editor," viz., a processor of copy rather than an editor. 

Now in retirement, I mark two years this month as a freelance copy editor for the online nonprofit Baltimore Banner, where the work is as rewarding as it first was more than four decades ago. 

"Rewarding, huh?" you ask. "Weren't you just a comma jockey? You just called yourself a drudge." 

I have to concede that regularizing other people's erratic punctuation, though necessary, was not the most gratifying aspect of the job. Nor was correcting the spelling of names. (We had a reporter who once misspelled the name of the U.S. attorney for Maryland fourteen times, but because he misspelled it the same way fourteen times we took it as an advance in his technique.) 

 But untangling syntax, tightening loose prose, making sure the elements were in the proper order, clarifying murky points, and occasionally taking my hands off the keyboard (when something good required no further work) provided satisfactions way beyond commas. 

Every time I opened a story, my question was what is this writer trying to do, and how can I assist them in achieving their purpose while serving the readers' interests. And every time I shipped a story on to publication, I wanted to say it had been done shipshape and Bristol fashion. 

That's the job: leave it better than you found it. 

So you want to be an editor?

 The following text is an article on U.S. involvement in Kosovo during the Clinton administration, compiled by an editor at The Baltimore Sun from the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times, that was sent to the copy desk, in this form as God is my witness, for publication. I used it for some years in The Sun's brutal applicant test for copy editors. See what you can make of it in the comments. 

LONDON — NATO allies endorsed a last-ditch U.S. effort Friday to end the violence in Kosovo peacefully, even as Secretary of  State Madeleine K. Albright warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that “time is all but gone” for him to avoid airstrikes.

Albright declared that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was united and ready to authorize the bombing. “There was an attempt to divide us, and that has failed,” she said.

In Washington, President Clinton told senior senators in a letter what they could expect if force is used. He described a powerful first thrust, followed by a progressive expansion of intensity.

“There will be no ‘pinprick’ strikes,” he said.

As to NATO options that would involve U.S. and allied ground forces in hostile action, “I can assure you the United States would not support these options, and there currently is no sentiment in NATO for such a mission,” Clinton said. 

Albright met with the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, trying to shore up support for airstrikes. “If he was looking for rescue from any member of the Contact Group, he did not get it tonight,” British Foreign Minister Robin Cook said.

She also met with the foreign ministers of the other five nations that make up the Contact Group on former Yugoslavia: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, but failed to gain Moscow’s support for airtrikes against the Milosevic’s security forces.

“If he was looking for rescue from any member of the Contact Group, he did not get it tonight,” British Foreign Minister Robin Cook said.

But there was no word from Italy and Germany as to whether their disquiet over the threatened military operations had been eased. A statement issued by the foreign ministers called on Milosevic to meet conditions of U.N. resolutions and made no mention of military action.

Albright accused Milosevic of “cosmetic gestures” to meet international demands on Kosovo and said he has “but a few days” to reverse course and avoid NATO military action.

“One of the keys of good diplomacy is knowing when diplomacy has reached its limits. And we are rapidly reaching that point now,” she warned.

Albright said earlier yesterday that Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. mediator for the Balkans, would return to Belgrade for a fourth round of talks this week with Milosevic. The foreign ministers endorsed Holbrook’s mission to the Yugoslav capital. 

Albright declined to say categorically that Holbrooke’s visit would be the last peace mission before NATO airstrikes, but a British official, briefing reporters after the meeting, said, “Holbrooke’s trip is the last attempt.”

Despite the arguments, Russia did not relent its opposition to the use of force. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who chaired the Contact Group meeting, said Russia was not being “invited” to participate in NATO’s decisions.

Albright met with the foreign ministers of the Contact Group in London after conferring in Brussels, Belgium, with Holbrooke, Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, and NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana.