People still read books, you say?

 During the fair weather this week I have been reading The Iliad in Emily Wilson's translation on the front porch. 

My interest in Wilson's translation was piqued by ill-informed criticism of her work online and further stimulated by reading David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, part art history and part political and cultural history. 

So to Wilson's Iliad: Fifty pages of introduction (much of it familiar), an explanation of her approach as translator, a formidable apparatus of informative endnotes, and 600 pages of iambic pentameter verse. It is a surprisingly fluid read. (Some years ago I started Robert Fitzgerald's translation but ground to a halt.) Though the occasional word choice sounds prosaic, the extended metaphors and repeated titles and phrasing keep the music. The violence and brutality come through with impact. I am half a dozen books in and eager for more. 

Each translation of Homer fits its time--think of Alexander Pope rendering The Iliad in rhymed couplets--and Wilson's seems to match ours. 

So why, at seventy-five, am I finally picking up Homer? 

First, do not be deceived by the way people talk in English department graduate lounges; nobody has read all the great books, and everybody is faking it. We pick up allusions and quotations in other works, acquiring an acquaintance that is no more than a shallow literacy. 

But the great books are there, to be picked up and savored whenever it occurs to us to look into them.

And at seventy-five: Franklin Roosevelt paid a courtesy call on Oliver Wendell Holmes and found the ninety-two-year-old reading Plato. "Why are you reading Plato, Mr. Justice?" he asked. "To improve my mind, Mr. President," Holmes answered. I am largely on the shelf, retired, doing a little occasional copy editing for The Baltimore Banner, but no longer teaching, no longer conducting workshops on editing, no longer hiring and supervising other editors--past it, as the British say. Even so, my mind remains, still subject to improvement, and my curiosity is not extinguished. 

You're a copy editor? Uh ...

  It took many conversations, but my wife, Kathleen Capcara, finally perfected a response. 

"Kathleen, what does your husband do?"

"He's a copy editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer [or] The Baltimore Sun."

"Copy editor? What's that?"

"He's kind of an English teacher for the newsroom."

Thus she summed up the kinds of things that concern us, the kind of people drawn to this work, and the perception of us by the rest of the newsroom and the public.*

In the fifth through eighth grades I was schooled by two formidable teachers, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, in the standard schoolroom grammar and mastered it. In consequence, during my teens and, well, later, I was a proper little prig, correcting other people's speech silently--and sometimes aloud. We know such people. They turn up regularly online, preening themselves on identifying some inconsequential lapse, often wrongly. 

As an undergraduate and graduate student, encountering a wider range of what writers of English can do, I came to appreciate that the strictures of the traditional schoolroom grammar were too narrow, and in consequence became somewhat less priggish. I particularly remember my luck, while rummaging around the basement of the Economy Book Store on South Salina Street in Syracuse, in finding a used copy of Theodore M. Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage. It was revelatory in exposing just how much rubbish people have been taught about grammar and usage, and how much they hold on to. The book has had a place on my shelves for fifty years and is even still in print, though not as cheap as what the Economy Book Store charged me. 

Writing this blog has been an education, as I have explored sources and authorities, always seeking to broaden my understanding of the Englishes. On the blog and at conferences of editors I've encountered lexicographers and linguists happy to talk and encourage me. For one of my earliest blog posts I was rapped on the knuckles by the formidable Geoffrey Pullum, with whom I have since had many cordial exchanges. And in these posts I've done my best to steer readers away from rubbish they've been taught and toward as less rigid understanding of what we can and should do in English. 

The best copy editors I have worked with were not martinets blinkered by unthinking application of what they understood The Associated Press Stylebook to require, and in overseeing those I hired and talking with others in conferences and workshops I have seen that broader understanding take root. We are not common scolds; we are careful observers of how sentences can be effectively put together, how they can be revised to become more effective. 

If only publications still believed in copy editing rather than eliminating or dismantling their copy desks. In retirement I turn my hand to some freelance editing for The Baltimore Banner, which actually believes in the value of copy editors. I wish there were more publications like it. 

*When in conversation you are inevitably asked what you do and you say that you are a copy editor, you may get this response: "Well, I guess I'd better watch my language." Responses I've pondered:

"You can't afford me."

'I don't do pro bono."

"Too late."

What did the graduate do?

A headline in The Guardian says that the son of a man who was deported is now "graduating high school." 

We've come a long way. 

Originally, Bryan Garner points out in Garner's Modern English Usage, graduating was something the school did to the student, and the idiomatic usage was that a student was graduated from the school. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idiom changed to focus on the student, who graduated from the school. Now, from the late twentieth century to our time, graduate college in colloquial speech is increasingly turning up in published texts, and Garner expects that the usage will gain ground. 

The Associated Press Stylebook, meanwhile, is standing fast, at least for the moment:

"Graduate is correctly used in the active voice: She graduated from the university.

"It is correct, but unnecessary, to use the passive voice: He was graduated from the university.

"Do not, however, drop from: John Adams graduated from Harvard. Not: John Adams graduated Harvard."

Also standing its ground is Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage: "The particularly American English transitive type he graduated Yale in 1984 is often criticized and is best avoided." Sniff. 

The current Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary allows "I graduated college" as standard English, though it cautions in a usage note that some may consider it incorrect. 

So "was graduated from college," "graduated from college," and "graduated college" are all out there in the wild, and your choice among them will likely depend on the degree of stuffiness with which you are comfortable. As always in English, you pays your money and you takes your chances. 

Beyond our control

 I had occasion to get in touch the with Comptroller of Maryland's office with an inquiry about a refund on our state income tax, and I was reminded of the oddity of that word in English. 

A comptroller is someone who controls, or supervises, accounts and expenditures. It came into English from the French contrerolleur and was originally in English conterroller, naturally morphing into controller. 

But wait. Sometime in the 15th century, people who saw Latin as a long-established and prestige language, and English as an ill-bred newcomer in need of shaping up, took hold of this word. They saw that French had the word compte, "count," that derived from Latin, and they made conterroler look more like Latin by spelling it comptroller, though it continued to be pronounced "controller." 

There has been a fair amount of this jiggery-pokery with English. For example, we pronounce debt as "dett," as the word was spelled in Old French, but that b was inserted to acknowledge the Latin root debitum. 

In the comptroller entry in Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner points out that pronouncing the p in comptroller "has traditionally been viewed as semiliterate," but is inevitably widespread. That's how they say it in Maryland state government and journalism.