False precision

The 1986 edition of The Associated Press Stylebook from my first year on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun remains on my shelves as an historical artifact.* As I opened it the other day, my eye fell on the gauntlet/gantlet entry. 

A gauntlet is a glove, figuratively thrown down or taken up in a challenge. A gantlet is a flogging ordeal, in which the victim runs between two lines of men with clubs who beat him as he passes. It's possible that unless you are of my vintage you were blissfully unaware of such a distinction. But some of us enforced it for decades. 

It is a waste of time. 

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage pointed out thirty years ago that the two words are merely spelling variants. Bryan A. Garner, who upheld the distinction in 2009, writes in 2022 that "run the gauntlet outdistances run the gantlet by a 16-to-1 margin and has consistently done so since about 1800. The usage 'battle' was lost before it began." (The AP Stylebook retains the distinction, one more barnacle on the hull.) 

The whole life of editing lies in upholding useful distinctions of meaning and usage. But our teachers, editors, and manuals have a regrettable tendency to accumulate spurious distinctions and shibboleths.** Part of our responsibility as writers and editors is to sort out faulty instruction and determine how the language is actually used, for clarity and the reader's sake. 

So I put it to you today that distinctions you used to uphold as writers and editors you have subsequently abandoned as you learned better. Will you share them? Be clear: This is not an invitation to proclaim the hill you will die on. It may be the hill on which you uphold the masculine default or the one on which literally has no figurative sense, BUT I DON'T CARE. 

You used to make some change that you thought at the time was meaningful but which you now realize is a time-waster. So fess up in a comment here, and sin no more. 

* Yes, "an" historical, dammit.  

** I published a little book, Bad Advice, on some of the rubbish we've all been taught. 

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.