Proper is as proper does

 Someone posted on Twitter recently that "'irregardless' is not a proper word." I want to look at what sort of word "proper" is, and who has custody of it, but first we have to sweep "irregardless" out of the way. 

"Irregardless" is--and take no backtalk--a word. It has a spelling, a pronunciation, a meaning, and a history, an entry in the dictionary. It means "regardless." The prefix "in-" means "not," as in "inflexible," converting to "ir-" to match the spelling of the root word; it's an intensifier, so "irregardless" means "really, really regardless." It has been around since 1795 or so and is regularly stigmatized as "nonstandard." Use it, and the people concerned about what is "proper" get their backs up. 

I know what "proper" is. In the fifth through eighth grades, two formidable women, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, drilled us in the traditional schoolroom grammar. They did not call it "standard English" or "standard written English"; it was English, and everything else, including the way people speak, was improper. I took it all in and became an insufferable prig. 

Later in life I became a tinpot despot, overseeing the copy desk at a major American newspaper and supervising more than four dozen copy editors. Occasionally another department head, known to be a martinet who terrified the staff cringing under him, would come to my door, tugging his forelock and craving a boon, to ask me a question about English usage. I would give him a ruling, and he would back away gratefully. 

But what I had learned since the eighth grade from linguists and lexicographers is that English is a broad tent, that there are in fact multiple Englishes, each valid in its own context, and that puts the word "proper" up for grabs. What is proper? For whom? For what occasions? And--here is the crucial point--who gets to decide?

Here's what I told my fellow copy editors at The Baltimore Sun and my students over twenty-four years at Loyola University Maryland: Don't think about what is proper; think about what is appropriate. Look at a word, an expression, a metaphor. Is it appropriate for the speaker/writer? For the subject? For the occasion? For the publication? For the reader? You're here to make judgments, I said, informed judgments rising from your reading and your knowledge of the various registers of the language. 

There are people, to judge from the peeving commonly found online, who have not got beyond the eighth grade understanding of grammar and usage, and there are, I fear, still people enforcing that stunted pedagogy on their helpless charges. What peeks out from their statements about what is "proper" is the class issue. "I know what is proper, and Those People, the Masses, the Unwashed, do not. I am their superior." 

That is the language of the prig, and prig as I once was, I have learned better. 

It's not just the crosswords

 Suzanne Loudermilk once posted on Facebook about the two things that most impressed students when I spoke at her Writing for the Media class at Towson University. One was about the crossword puzzle. (More later.)  

At one time, my office at The Baltimore Sun was adjacent to the reader editor's, so I often heard from Ed Hewitt about the things that concerned subscribers. 

The paper discontinued a column written by someone in features, and a couple of dozen readers asked about it. The editor, John Carroll, discontinued the local column by Roger Simon (now the late Roger Simon), and a couple of hundred readers asked what happened. The Sun dropped the London Times crossword puzzle, and four thousand readers complained. 

We were repeatedly reminded how much our core readership was devoted to crossword puzzles. When someone in production decided to print the generic crossword puzzle on one side of the page and the New York Times crossword puzzle on the reverse side, we learned that in many households one spouse worked the generic puzzle while the other did the Times puzzle, and they could not do it over the morning coffee when both were on the same sheet of newsprint. 

That is loyalty, and that is why I told Ms. Loudermilk's students that there are two bedrock principles of newspaper journalism.* The main one: Don't fuck with the crossword puzzle.

If you run a publication and are sensitive to your readers, you know their habits and their preferences. When you do not, disaster ensues. 

The Washington Post, under the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos, declared that its editorial page, normally center-left-to-liberal, should restrict itself to business-friendly, i.e., right-wing views. A migration of readers began. Then the Post management determined that sports coverage in the paper was superfluous and dismissed most of the sports staff. It turned out that Post readers are interested in sports, and they, too, left. The paper reversed course and tried to hire back the sports staff, many of whom had been snapped up by other publications. 

The Post in the last few years, has lost half a million subscribers, and good luck luring those readers back. 

So there appears to be a third bedrock newspaper journalism principle: Learn who your readers are. 

* Yes, you'll want to know the other, I suppose. It is that you will drink too much and you will marry twice. Someone commented online, "Only twice?" I answered, "To date."

"You could use artificial intelligence for that"

 A query last week suggested I might take part in an interview about artificial intelligence. I demurred. I do not consciously use AI, and I have reasons. 

1. The material that AI uses has been plagiarized from many sources without respect for copyright. 

2. Data centers that operate it are environmentally destructive and wasteful. 

3. Reports abound of people who used AI for various purposes, only to wind up with material that was corrupt or fictional. It can't be trusted to deliver accurate information. 

4. I am still waiting to see whether the whole hoopla is just another overextended bubble whose burst will turn the economy to tatters. 

5. Major figures promoting AI are remarkably unlikable, and their motives and designs are suspect. I wonder whether they are similar to the private equity types who acquire properties, degrade the product, and extract more money from customers without giving value. 

So I'm a mossback. 

I am aware of colleagues who make use of AI to a limited degree, and others who are studying it to see whether it can be made useful and reliable, though I have not investigated the specifics. 

I am in show-me mode. Show me that it actually works. Show me that it is fair. Show me that it is not harmful to the environment. Show me that it is reliable. Show me that it is not a scam. Show me that it is not harmful to people. 

Anyone of show-me capacity who would care to instruct an elderly mossback are welcome to do so in the comments. 

Insults and childish name-calling will, of course, be deleted.