Bookworm's progress

Earlier this month I wrote about my interest in history in the third grade, an interest that has continued, as you'll see from this list of books I read in 2024 and recommend to you. 

Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (How we started to get where we are now) 

Geoffrey Pullum, The Truth About English Grammar 

Ron Chernow: Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

Seamus Heaney, Poems, 1965-1975

Karen Yin, The Conscious Style Guide

Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Tana French, The Searcher, The Hunter (Two cracking good yarns)

Cathleen Schine, They May Not Mean to But They Do (Delightful novel on the complexities of parents and children)

Matthew Crenson, Baltimore: A Political History (How we started and how we got where we are now, locally) 

Anne Curzan, Says Who? 

Edward J. Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

Ben Yagoda, About the Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made

Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

And so far in 2025:

Jon Meachem, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

Most recently, 500 pages of David and Jeanne Heidler, Henry Clay: The Essential American

Currently, 500 pages of Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of The New York Post, 1976-2024

And pending: 500 pages of J.H. Plumb on Sir Robert Walpole

Dash it all

 There's some kind of mild uproar online over the use of the em dash, which is supposedly prevalent in AI texts, and it has produced inevitable crank commentary on punctuation. I can't speak to to AI prose, because my time is occupied dealing with substandard human intelligence prose, but I do know about dashes. 

The mnemonic is that hyphens join and dashes separate. That is, hyphens join compounds while dashes separate syntactic elements, representing a break in continuity. Good judgment suggests that the em dash,* like the exclamation point, should be used with restraint, to avoid cheapening the effect. 

The tell about overuse of dashes is in U.S. journalism. Reporters are dash-happy, and the reason, oddly, is the mechanics of the Associated Press. 

Attend. Journalists do not use dashes to express a break in continuity; they use them to set off parenthetical information. They cannot use parentheses for this purpose, because they use parentheses instead of square brackets to indicate interpolated explanatory material. They do not use square brackets because AP can't transmit them to all its members (which is also why AP does not transmit diacritical marks).  

See? I just made a parenthetical addition to the previous sentence, not a break in what I was saying. 

* Unless you are involved in book publishing, you probably have little occasion to deal with the en dash, which joins some, but not all, compounds.  

Sweet Old Bob

About this time forty-five years ago I was apprenticing myself to the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer, in hopes of a permanent berth. One of the people weighing in on my prospects was the news editor, Bob Johnson. 

Sweet Old Bob (sometimes referred to by initials) was an old-school editor, irreverent, sometimes gruff but always fair, never deceived. His habitual response to a pitch for a story to be considered for Page One was "I don't buy on spec." 

He was given to pronouncements in pungent country expressions, as when he described one reporter's prose as "like a cow pissing on a flat rock." When he thought you were not pursuing a profitable course, he would say, "You're looking up a dead hog's ass," the sense being if looking up a hog's ass was not a productive endeavor, looking up a dead hog's ass was doubly nugatory. Or he would simply invoke the traditional pleasantry "Go shit in your hat." 

One night as deadline drew close and he was still waiting for a local story promised for the front page, he burst out, "Goddamn city desk! If they'd written the Bible, you wouldn't be able to fit it in a boxcar! And it wouldn't be done yet!"

Over time I began to master the craft and earn his respect. When the amiable Bill Trutner retired as copy desk slotman, Bob took me to dinner at the Cricket Tavern next door and explained the political reasons for which he could not name me Trutner's successor, instead making me co-slot with another editor. 

In due course Bob fell out of favor with the Gannettoids running the paper and was demoted, replaced as news editor by a stooge. It was when the stooge informed me that henceforth I would be evaluated half on performance and half on attitude that I began to send out resumes. 

We left The Enquirer the same summer, Bob a few weeks ahead of me. He was a gun enthusiast, and the parting retirement gift for him was a pistol. On his last night he amused himself by sitting at his desk and dry-firing the pistol, drawing nervous looks from the editor and managing editor. 

When I tell you that there were giants in the newsroom in those days, I have the proofs. 

A moment in history

 When I was in the third grade at Elizaville Elementary School, the third and fourth grades shared a classroom, and Mrs. Marian Gulley alternated teaching the two grades. 

One day, on a whim, Mrs. Gulley gave me a copy of the fourth grade's American history quiz. I had, of course, listened to her teaching the class, and, bored, I had read the fourth grade's history textbook, a collection of potted biographies of great Americans. 

I scored a 96 on the quiz, the highest grade. 

I proudly took it home, and my mother, from whom I received the gift of sarcasm, remarked, "I'm sure that made you popular with the fourth grade." 

But she kept the test. Forty years later, I found it among her effects.