Honor the desk

 Three and a half years ago Kimi Yoshino came to Baltimore from Los Angeles to become the first and founding editor-in-chief of The Baltimore Banner, that is, to build a local news organization from scratch. 

Within the past few months The Banner has won a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize. But I knew three and a half years ago that The Banner was going to be a serious news organization, because Kimi was determined to establish a copy desk. She hired three copy editors and engaged me as a freelance copy editor. 

Nobody does that any longer. Many publications have eliminated copy desks altogether as a costly, time-consuming frill. Some years ago The New York Times dismantled one of the nation's foremost copy desks, buying some editors out and assigning the remnant to various desks around the newsroom. Today I see a report of a memo at The Washington Post offering a buyout to copy editors and announcing that the remaining copy editors will work in a reconfigured operation. 

I know from reconfigured. When The Baltimore Sun eliminated its vestigial copy desk (there were two of us), I became a "content editor." My duties were to make sure that stories were properly formatted for online publication, to find and assign photos, to add links within the text to related stories, to publicize the publication of the stories on Facebook and Twitter, to send out alerts of publication of stories, &c., &c. And if I wanted to do a little copy editing after performing all the other tasks, and could fit it in without wasting too much time, they were OK with that. 

The thing that the cheeseparers who run these outfits don't understand, or perhaps don't just care about, is that dissolving the copy desk and redistributing the editors sacrifices an essential independence. 

The classic copy desk was not a part of the metro desk, the national desk, the business desk, or the features desk. It was a freestanding unit, allowed to cast a cold--and often skeptical--eye on the productions of other desks without being subservient to their editors. We had the duty, as Sun publisher Mike Waller once said, of being the people who can and must ask, "Are you sure you want to do this? Are you really sure?"A classic example: One day The Sun's John Scholtz returned from a prolonged tussle with the editors on the business desk to announce, "They have forgiven me for being right." 

Now Kimi is leaving The Banner to become a senior editor at The Post. I wish her well with her new challenges, and I will miss her. She understands what is important. And I am enduringly grateful to her for permitting me in retirement to continue in this obscure craft a little longer. 

One last touch. Three and a half years ago I spoke with Kimi over Zoom about taking on this freelance role. Because it was essentially a job interview, I dressed in a jacket and bow tie. My sources at The Banner told me that the next day she asked some of the Sun veterans on the staff, "Does he always dress like that?"

"Oh yes," they said. "Oh yes."

All right, all right, One More Time

 Yesterday I made a snarky post about people who think that "who" refers only to human beings and that "that" can only refer to animals and inanimate objects. Today I get a wait, wait!: How are we supposed to teach this? 

Let's go together down this well-traveled road. 

First, we have to dispose of a venerable superstition. Many people think that to use "that" referring to a person is dehumanizing, reducing that person to an inanimate object or animal. But Bryan Garner points out that speakers of English have been using "that" to refer to people for thirteen centuries (we're about to see how and when). If using "that" to refer to people is not to your taste, don't use it. But you do not get to impose your personal preference on the rest of the language. 

"Who's" on first. "Who" refers to people (and yes, Associated Press Stylebook, named animals). But its possessive form "whose" can refer to people, to objects ("a tree whose leaves turn red in autumn"), and to abstractions ("an idea whose time has come"). 

Now take "that": In contemporary usage, Garner points out, "that" refers to things in 90 percent of uses, but to persons in the remaining 10 percent. "That" is perfectly acceptable in standard English in contexts that refer to a group of people or to a person whose identity is unknown. 

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" you may have sung in Handel's Messiah. For a more recent example than the KJV, there are Irving Berlin's "The Girl That I Marry," Mark Twain's "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," Ira Gershwin's "The Man That Got Away." 

The teachers and usage authorities that endorse the superstition, unfortunately, outnumber the editors that attempt to uphold informed usage. 

Listen up, people

 I tell you this with utter assurance: Every time you see peoples' it will be wrong.

Oh, all right, not every time. Just nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand. 

People on nearly every occasion will be a noun singular in form with plural meaning: multiple human beings. 

One of Wilson Follett's crotchets in Modern American Usage may be recalled by older members of the assembly. He comes down hard on the distinction between people and persons, saying that "when we say persons we are thinking, or ought to be, of ones--individuals with identities; whereas when we say people we should mean a large group, an indefinite and anonymous mass." 

That distinction, what we ought to be thinking, was badly eroded sixty years ago and today is virtually gone. Bryan Garner, of course, recalls the distinction, but he is fully aware that it is pedantic and would produce sentences that sound strained to our ears. He says, "Twelve persons on the jury seems stuffy to many readers, and most native speakers of English (since about the mid-1970s) would say twelve people on the jury," which "has come to be viewed as the more natural phrasing." 

But there remains that thousandth instance in which peoples is a noun plural in form and plural in meaning: "a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship though not necessarily by consanguinity or by racial or political ties and that typically have common language, institutions, and beliefs" (thank you, Merriam-Webster). The United Nations is a place where the peoples of the planet are represented, and it is only in that context that you are ever likely to see the plural possessive peoples' used correctly. 

And the people said ... 

In the Kentucky Diaspora

The locust trees burst into bloom in Baltimore today, and I know that on the other side of the Appalachians they are perfuming the countryside. It is the smell of home. 

I left home, Elizaville, the crossroads town in Fleming County where I grew up, in 1973 to go to graduate school in Syracuse, and from there to newspapering in Cincinnati and Baltimore. But, after nearly four decades in Maryland, I am neither a Marylander or a Baltimorean. I am a Kentuckian in self-chosen exile. 

People are mildly taken aback when they learn that. They see that I wear shoes and am not a gallus-snapping pappy, and they usually limit themselves to saying, "You don't sound like someone from Kentucky." And I don't, though my wife observed that my accent broadened slightly in the summers when we visited my mother. "Why, John Early, you sound just like somebody from up North," the mother of a classmate once told me. 

My people were there for a long time. My father's father, who died before I was born, ran a general store in Elizaville. His people were from Hilltop, a suburb of Elizaville. My father took over management, but he was soft-hearted and gave credit to impoverished farmers who were never able to pay him back. Ultimately, his mother and brother, who inherited equal shares of the store, turned him out into the street. It's a complicated heritage. In time he became an engineer with the state highway department, and I have driven on roads he helped make. 

My mother was postmaster in Elizaville for twenty-four years and from her vantage point at the crossroads observed everybody's comings and goings. When someone drove through town, she knew where he was going, what he would do there, and when he would be back. And if she didn't know that, she worked the phones until she did. The Soviet Union did not have surveillance to match that of a small town in Kentucky. 

My mother's father owned a farm that had been in the Early family since the middle of the nineteenth century. I have a property tax receipt indicating what my great-great-grandfather paid for his two hundred acres, his four horses or mules, and his six human beings. As I said, it's complicated. 

I don't know whether they realize the complication when those well-fed gentlemen in their ice-cream suits and their ladies with the architectural millinery rise at the Derby to sing "My Old Kentucky Home" -- a song about the sadness of  Black family in the Kentucky Diaspora after having been sold down the river. 

My parents and grandparents were honest, generous, unassuming people, and they were good progressive Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy Democrats. If they were with us today, they would like what Andy Beshear has done as governor.  (And I raised two Democrats, having done my duty.) My teachers were dedicated people who saw something promising in me and encouraged it. In high school, Lowell and Jean Denton, who operated a local newspaper, the Flemingsburg Gazette, hired me for what proved to be six summers of a practical education in local journalism. These people shaped who I am, or at least the better part of me. 

 The old Kentucky home has been sold, but I keep a canister of dirt from the farm on my desk, which I suppose makes me a landowner. Though it is far, far away, I am still, at seventy-four, part of it.