Wednesday, October 2, 2024

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. 

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

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?

 

Thursday, September 5, 2024

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?

Monday, September 2, 2024

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. 


Monday, August 26, 2024

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.

Saturday, August 17, 2024

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. 

Sunday, July 21, 2024

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. 


Thursday, July 18, 2024

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. 



Monday, July 8, 2024

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. 

 

Sunday, June 23, 2024

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.  

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

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. 

Sunday, June 9, 2024

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. 



 

Friday, May 31, 2024

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. 




Sunday, May 26, 2024

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. 

 


Saturday, May 25, 2024

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. 

Monday, May 13, 2024

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?

Saturday, May 11, 2024

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. 


Saturday, May 4, 2024

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. 

Saturday, April 27, 2024

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. 



Monday, April 22, 2024

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. 

Monday, April 15, 2024

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. 

Wednesday, April 3, 2024

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. 

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

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. 


 

Monday, March 4, 2024

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. 


Sunday, February 25, 2024

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.  

Saturday, February 24, 2024

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. 

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

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.


Saturday, February 17, 2024

Cookies, you need cookies

 Today Kathleen baked sour cream cookies from my grandmother's recipe. They were the great treat of my childhood, the batter alone tasting better than any other cookie batter I have sampled. I have shared the recipe before, and today I'm offering it to you again. 

Kathleen, who thinks they are cakey (de gustibus non est disputandum), likes to do a light lemon icing, and you, of course, are free to do that. 


Clara Rhodes Early’s Sour Cream Cookies

1 cup shortening

2 cups sugar

3 well-beaten eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup sour cream

5 cups sifted flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon soda

1 ½ cups nuts (optional)

Drop from teaspoon onto cookie sheet.

Press down.

Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees.



Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Um, about that anthem

Yesterday Armstrong Williams, co-owner of The Baltimore Sun, deplored the singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" at the Super Bowl: "It is an anthem created for one race, and one race only. Playing it at the Super Bowl epitomizes attempts to divide the nation at its core by race."

By contrast, he says, the "Star-Spangled Banner" "is not a white national anthem. It’s not a Black national anthem. It’s not a national anthem for any race. It is a national anthem for everyone, regardless of race."

Perhaps Mr. Armstrong has not had occasion to read Francis Scott Key's poem in its entirety. The third verse contains these interesting lines: "No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave." They refer to Britain's offer of freedom to any enslaved person agreeing to serve in the British army against the American. 

So you see, as is so often the case in this nation, race keeps cropping up all over the place. Luckily, we only ever sing the first verse. 

Mr. Armstrong might also take a moment to ponder the opening of what is colloquially called the Black national anthem: "Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty." It celebrates freedom, a freedom that was not acquired easily. 

It is small-minded for anyone celebrating "the land of the free" to begrudge another celebration of freedom. 


Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Nothing's more democratic than English

Language is the most democratic thing we have: Each English speaker gets one vote, and the language becomes what we collectively make of it over time. 

Some people do have influence, but it is limited. (You may think a big-time former newspaper editor is influential, but you would be mistaken.) Samuel Johnson set out to write a dictionary of English that would “fix” (in both senses, "repair" and "make permanent") the language, but on completion ruefully acknowledged that it goes its own way. 


Noah Webster’s dictionary got Americans to spell “honour” and “colour” without the “u,” but simplified spellings he promoted — “wimmen” for “women,” “soop” for “soup,” “tung” for “tongue” — went nowhere. 


Two and a half centuries of grammarians and schoolteachers have hammered away that it is incorrect to use “they” as a third-person singular pronoun, all in vain. We have been using “they” as a singular since King Alfred burned the cakes, and today even the “Associated Press Stylebook” and “Chicago Manual of Style” have grudgingly accepted it. 


(You may not be comfortable with it, but you’re already OK with using “you” as either a singular or plural, so you can get used to things.) 


The same generations have labored to maintain the “lie” and “lay” distinction, that “lay” is the past tense of “to lie,” not “laid.” But I taught editing to undergraduates for 24 years, and let me tell you, it’s not going to happen. You can try to hold on to it in formal prose, but over time even formal prose yields to the the way people actually speak. 


H.L. Mencken, with characteristic bluntness, summed it up in “The American Language”: “The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and without much insight.”


Jonathan Swift proposed establishment of an English Academy that would, like the French version, establish and legislate the correctness of the language. But we English speakers are a stubborn and unruly lot. We made a mongrel language out of a mishmash of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. We take things freely from other languages and do as we please with them. (Imagine a francophone’s wince at the way we pronounce “lingerie.”) It’s our language, we do as we please with it, and we have always done so. 


In our language, we are a free and unfettered people. 

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

The editor's hand

The reputation of editors, particularly copy editors, has not been enviable. There is a long tradition of writers affecting to believe that if we were only rid of these petty, pedantic, literal-minded, comma-chopping drones, we would experience an efflorescence of English prose not seen since the reign of the first Elizabeth. But all parties should grasp that writers, editors and copy editors alike work toward a common goal: accuracy, clarity, and precision of expression  perhaps even elegance. It is essentially a communal and collaborative activity.

Christopher Ricks, reviewing Johnson on the English Language for The New Criterion in 2005, said: "The meaning of a word is neither a matter of opinion, nor a matter of fact, neither subjective nor objective, but an exercise of communal judgment. ... A language is a body of agreements (not opinion or facts but agreements, judgments that are at once personal and impersonal, individual and social), agreements not only between people who are alive but also between those who are alive and those who are dead, It is by courtesy of the dead that we are able to communicate at all, and this is one of the many reasons why those of us who are (for now) alive should treat with courtesy the dead." 

Mutual respect among the parties —  the editor for the writer’s primacy of imagination and invention, the writer for the editor’s sharpness of eye and sense of precision, the respect of both for the language we have inherited and of which we are custodians — is necessary for the formation of reliable judgments. For the writer, understanding the editor’s role and methods will sharpen perceptions during the first crucial editing, the writer's self-editing of the text. For the editor, improving the techniques of editing will better serve for the writer — and the reader. D'you remember there's a reader?

The reader’s interests transcend the preoccupations and vanities of both writer and editor. All readers demand clarity and order, and when they do not find it, they turn aside without compunction. Particularly the informed reader, the literate reader offers the greatest promise for appreciation of the writer’s effort; for them, precision in the use of words shows that the writer is to be honored for having mastered the craft.

Though the perspectives and skills, not to speak of the temperament, of writing and editing are distinct, what they have in common is what John Updike said of The New Yorker’s Katherine White in an essay reprinted in Odd Jobs: “To the born editor, it must be, the mass of manuscripts looms as nature and experience do to the writer — as a superabundance to be selected from and refined, and made shapely and meaningful.”

Let us be clear: Writing is a primary function, editing a secondary one, and no one should pretend otherwise. Editors must also realize that their task is to bring out and clarify what is inherent in the text, to make it shapely and meaningful, but they cannot go beyond what they are given. As Anthony Trollope said, “One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it.” 

The personal element, always present, cannot be ignored. However much writers tell themselves that they are professionals, that the text they have written is an artifact rather than an extension of themselves, that criticism of the text is not a reflection on their selves, very few really believe that. No one enjoys being edited. This is what editing looks like to the writer: After the vividly recalled circumstances of the conception of the article, the prolonged gestation, the sweat and pain of the labor that brought it forth into the world, the writer murmurs, “This is my child.” And then: “Here comes some editor, saying, " 'Mmmm-MMMMPH, that is one ugly baby.' "

Disarming the writer’s psychological reaction is an editor's crucial responsibility if anything useful is to be accomplished. When a discussion of editing issues turns instead into a struggle over who will prevail, on who has say-so, editing turns into a battle. The loser leaves the field smarting from defeat and vowing to be a victor in the next round, guaranteeing a continual cycle of conflict in which the reader is the ultimate loser.  

A writer might consider a different metaphor. Imagine that you, the writer, are about to receive an award at a formal banquet. You are wearing your best clothes and have taken trouble with your grooming. Just as you are about to walk into the bright light to claim the plaque or the trophy and savor the applause, a person standing beside you points out that you have a foot-long streamer of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe. You do not want to hear that. You feel foolish and embarrassed — but not nearly as much as you would have been had you walked out before an entire audience with a length of toilet paper flapping at your foot. The person who warned you is a friend who has performed a useful service for you. An editor is, or can be, that kind of friend, who spares you public embarrassment.   

You as a writer are, of course, perfectly free to ignore your editor, just as you are free to check out of the hospital against medical advice. But do you want to take the chance? 

Learning on your own, without an editor’s advice, is learning the hard way. Russell Baker describes the method in The Good Times, explaining the relationship between reporter and copy editor (copyreader) at The Sun in Baltimore more than half a century ago: "The Sun believed in learning by doing. … Copyreaders rarely changed anything you wrote, no matter how dreadful it might be. Once promoted to the big time, you were given a lot of rope. A reporter could also learn by making a fool of himself. So went the theory, and the Sun dared to live by it until it became obvious the offender would never learn anything, in which case he was tucked away in an inconspicuous niche where he could no longer embarrass the paper."

So we can do it the easy way, or we can do it the hard way.


Wednesday, January 17, 2024

I subscribe to The Baltimore Sun. For now

 For more than thirty-seven years, thirty-three of them on the staff, I have been a daily subscriber to The Baltimore Sun. The announcement that the newspaper has been purchased by a conservative crank with no experience, and apparently no interest, in newspaper publishing has led a number of people in my orbit to announce that they have canceled or plan to cancel their subscriptions. 

But I have friends and colleagues who, stunned and dismayed, are still there, working as professionals, trying to provide readers with accurate, reliable news about the city and the region. I am loath to abandon them. 

The Sun has undergone a painful decline over the past two decades because of corporate management that has been alternately incompetent and avaricious. (Occasionally both.) Everyone on the staff during that time understands how hard we worked to produce a reputable publication with fewer people and resources. The remaining staff members today face the greatest challenge yet. 

So I am still here, reading the print edition each morning and watching online during the day, waiting to see what can be done to salvage the work against great odds. Very likely there will come a point at which it is unbearable to look at a paper to which I have given half my life. Should that point arrive, I will make the call to circulation, and mourn the loss. 


Thursday, January 11, 2024

The plot against the copy desk

 It was the 1990s. I was chief of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun.

One day a senior editor came into my office, closed the door, and sat down.

"What's up?" I asked. 

He said, "[Editor X] is compiling a list of the sins of the copy desk and inviting other editors to contribute."

"Ah," I said. 

"What do you want to do about it?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Nothing." 

"Nothing?"

"Nothing. They can't complain about our editing without showing what they send to the desk, and that stuff can't stand up under examination."

He got up, opened the door, and left without another word. 

Nothing further was ever heard about the sins of the copy desk. 

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Yeah, you probably need an editor

We know, because we have looked at the internet, that few people can write effectively, and we also know that all human beings are prone to error. Engaging an editor compensates for this state of affairs. 

First of all, your editor will catch lapses in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and English usage. Trivial details as they are, they give readers an opportunity to discount your competence and dismiss your message. Your editor works to make your text clean. 

Then, do you actually know what you are trying to say? When we write, we have an idea in our heads of the meaning and importance of what we are attempting to say, but what appears on the page may not correspond. Your editor will keep asking what you mean here and whether you meant to say that and how you think the reader will understand this. Your editor works to make your text clear. 

Do you know how to shut up? First-draft writing tends to be slack, and revision may not fix it. An editor will know how to tighten your prose, identify rambling, drop verbiage, make your point more direct. Your editor works to make your text concise. 

The main thing is that your editor will weigh what is appropriate. Is what you say appropriate to the subject? To the situation? To the occasion? To the publication? To the audience (the party frequently disregarded in these operations)? Your editor may have to be the person to tell you, tactfully, that you are not as funny as you think you are, as elegant, as impressive. 

Your editor, if they are competent and professional, does not want to demonstrate superiority over you, but to assist you in accomplishing your purpose, to collaborate to make your text more efficient and effective, to keep you from making an ass of yourself in public. 

Yes, you need to pay for this. Expertise as an editor is acquired by study and apprenticeship in the craft. Your friend who got a passing grade in English in high school is not an equivalent.  

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

Editor, control your crotchets

Editors are human beings, though you may have been told otherwise, as susceptible to idiosyncratic preferences about language as anyone else. Even the most scrupulous can be tempted to impose a crotchet on a text being edited. 

One of mine is to despise the term locals in writing about the members of a community. It is vaguely condescending, the eminent journalist looking from great height at the inhabitants going about their little lives. It echoes the expression local yokels. So I regularly change locals to local residents

But it is a slippery slope in choosing when to impose a personal preference, and, as usual, it is easier to spot a problem when someone else is doing it. We had a copy editor at The Sun who thought that the word how should not precede a clause. He would routinely change "how the copy editor approaches the text" to "the way the copy editor approaches the text." Where he got this notion I cannot say; it does not come up in any of the manuals I have consulted, nor does it achieve a significant gain in clarity. 

This is dangerous, principally because editors tend to find what they are looking for. If you have a set of arbitrary preferences in your head, you will find all that occur, at the hazard of missing something important. I wrote the other day about copy desk busywork, and the unreflective imposition of personal preferences is another example of time-wasting edits. 

So I try to examine my own preferences, consult with linguists, lexicographers, and usage experts to see whether there is justification. In the case of locals, I can explain my reasoning if challenged by the writer or another editor. In other cases, I can appeal to authority, such as Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins or Garner's Modern English Usage

You do not have enough time in editing to do everything that you need to do, much less everything that you would like to do. You need to examine very carefully how you are spending that time.