A holiday weekend bonus post: People need to shut up.
Last night Kathleen and I went to Oregon Ridge Park for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Fourth of July concert and fireworks display.* No one would expect people sitting on folding chairs or lying on blankets on a hillside to observe the same decorum as in a concert hall, but still. . . .
There was the woman who conducted a conversation on her cell phone throughout the performance of Charles Ives’s variations on “America.” (She also continued to smoke after the announcement requesting the audience not to.)
There was this penetrating exchange directly behind us:
Voice 1: “I didn’t know you liked popcorn.”
Voice 2: “Love it.”
Voice 3: “You didn’t know that?”
I’m not certain, but it seems likely that Voice 3 was also the source of some impressive percussive effects with chewing gum.**
Of course, people are conducting banal conversations in the concert hall, at the movies, loudly, over cell phones, in the street. And at church.
There used to be a convention that people entering a church before a service would sit down quietly, to pray, to listen to an organ prelude, or simply to settle themselves calmly. No more. I’ve attended services in recent years in Episcopal churches that were noisier than hotel lobbies. And it is by no means the heedless young who are chattering away; the heedless young don’t go to church.
The prospect that someday someone in authority will authorize the use of cell phones on airplane flights leaves me sweaty with fear.
The social and cultural changes that have produced this incessant chin-wagging are probably irreversible, and certainly not by the comments of a lone blogger.
But still, you few who read this, give it a rest. Sit quietly. Listen to the music. Follow the progression of your thoughts inside your own head for a while. Declare your independence from the noisy.
*And on Friday night we had dinner with friends. After spending most Friday and Saturday nights since 1980 producing newspapers, I’m becoming a gadabout.
**I’m aware that the musical content of these concerts is negligible. There were some nice touches: a thirteen-year-old delivering a stunning rendition of the national anthem, the Ives, a couple of Sousa marches. Apart from that, a medley from Carousel, a schlocky arrangement of “America the Beautiful,” and the “1812 Overture” — a work despised by its composer that commemorates the defeat of a totalitarian despotism (Napoleonic France) by a monarchical despotism (czarist Russia) and which has become an American holiday favorite simply because it was written to be accompanied by explosions.
Actually, we enjoyed the concert. I even managed the struggle to get off the grassy field where we and thousands of others parked with greater equanimity and less swearing than you would expect.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Shine on
You’d think that these jaded old copy editor eyes would have seen it all, given the monotonous repetition over the years of the set of errors to which journalists are prone. But the inventiveness of writers should not be underestimated.
This morning’s reading of The Baltimore Sun brought a bright new malapropism. In an article on a lightning strike and fire in the steeple of Bethel A.M.E. Church, this sentence was nestled:
City workers picked up stray shingles Thursday morning and that afternoon the sun shown through the damaged steeple to a newly cleaned sidewalk.
Shown for shone may not be original, but it is my first encounter with the error.
(The omission of the comma after morning to indicate a compound sentence, however, comes out of the set of common errors.)
This morning’s reading of The Baltimore Sun brought a bright new malapropism. In an article on a lightning strike and fire in the steeple of Bethel A.M.E. Church, this sentence was nestled:
City workers picked up stray shingles Thursday morning and that afternoon the sun shown through the damaged steeple to a newly cleaned sidewalk.
Shown for shone may not be original, but it is my first encounter with the error.
(The omission of the comma after morning to indicate a compound sentence, however, comes out of the set of common errors.)
Murder must wait
The editing function does not shut off easily.
Cruising through yesterday’s front-porch reading, Susan Hill’s The Pure in Heart, I stopped short at a reference to a doctor who was to fill in for another doctor about to give birth as a “temporary locum.”
British writers and readers are more enamored of Latinisms than American, and locum tenens, familiarly shortened to locum, is one that crops up regularly. A locum tenens — locum, place; tenens, holding — is most commonly a priest or physician who is holding another’s place, filling in, substituting. So being a locum is inherently a short-term arrangement; “temporary locum” is redundant.
And now, back to our story.
Cruising through yesterday’s front-porch reading, Susan Hill’s The Pure in Heart, I stopped short at a reference to a doctor who was to fill in for another doctor about to give birth as a “temporary locum.”
British writers and readers are more enamored of Latinisms than American, and locum tenens, familiarly shortened to locum, is one that crops up regularly. A locum tenens — locum, place; tenens, holding — is most commonly a priest or physician who is holding another’s place, filling in, substituting. So being a locum is inherently a short-term arrangement; “temporary locum” is redundant.
And now, back to our story.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Independence of thought, too
On this date in 1776, the Continental Congress effectively chose independence. July 4 as the date on which the assembly formally adopted Jefferson’s great Declaration got to be the holiday. But it was on July 2, which John Adams thought at the time would be the commemorated date, that delegates voted approval of Richard Henry Lee’s resolution:
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Not to pull you away from your barbecue and the fireworks, but I have a suggestion for your commemoration of our national independence. Take some steps toward intellectual independence.
Presumably in response to my post “The Republic of Moronia,” Mike Pope has recommended a look at Politifact.com, a Web site that examines the accuracy of statements by officials and other public figures. If you want to check on how well President Obama has kept his many promises, or the peculiar statements to which Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota is given, PolitiFact will provide many moments of satisfaction.
You are not subject to a remote and unsympathetic sovereign, nor to an unrepresentative legislative body (unless you live in the District of Columbia). Neither should you be subject in the formation of your political opinions — indeed, your view of reality — to the half-truths and outright falsehoods with which you are bombarded daily. It is your job as a citizen not to be gulled by the self-serving misrepresentations of elected officials or the distortions and fantasies retailed by charlatans on the air, in print, and over the Internet.
Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Hamilton, however vigorously they disagreed on other matters, were united on this point: They wanted you to be an informed and independent thinker, because on your ability to make informed and responsible choices rests the fate of the republic they created. As Mr. Franklin said at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, you have a republic — if you can keep it.
Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
Not to pull you away from your barbecue and the fireworks, but I have a suggestion for your commemoration of our national independence. Take some steps toward intellectual independence.
Presumably in response to my post “The Republic of Moronia,” Mike Pope has recommended a look at Politifact.com, a Web site that examines the accuracy of statements by officials and other public figures. If you want to check on how well President Obama has kept his many promises, or the peculiar statements to which Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota is given, PolitiFact will provide many moments of satisfaction.
You are not subject to a remote and unsympathetic sovereign, nor to an unrepresentative legislative body (unless you live in the District of Columbia). Neither should you be subject in the formation of your political opinions — indeed, your view of reality — to the half-truths and outright falsehoods with which you are bombarded daily. It is your job as a citizen not to be gulled by the self-serving misrepresentations of elected officials or the distortions and fantasies retailed by charlatans on the air, in print, and over the Internet.
Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Hamilton, however vigorously they disagreed on other matters, were united on this point: They wanted you to be an informed and independent thinker, because on your ability to make informed and responsible choices rests the fate of the republic they created. As Mr. Franklin said at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, you have a republic — if you can keep it.
Pointing the finger
Please click over to Regret the Error, where you will find a short article, “You Don’t Say: Fixing the Blame,” about the issue of assigning responsibility for errors in articles. It explains why I find a writer’s “It’s not my mistake, but it’s got my byline on it” less than compelling.
Besides, it’s not polite to point.
Besides, it’s not polite to point.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Possessive pregnancy
A construction keeps turning up in the newspaper that I don’t usually see elsewhere, and it leaves me wondering what the apostrophe has to do with pregnancy. It goes like this: The driver was six months’ pregnant.
What was meant was clear when I was told that my severance package would include five months’ wages — that it would be the pay of five months. But six months pregnant would tell me that a woman has been enceinte for that span of time, and omission of the apostrophe seems just fine. So what degree of meaning is conveyed by making the term possessive?
I’m away from my books at the moment, filling out interminable and maddeningly duplicative electronic job applications, so I leave you this time with a question rather than an answer. Feel free to speculate.
What was meant was clear when I was told that my severance package would include five months’ wages — that it would be the pay of five months. But six months pregnant would tell me that a woman has been enceinte for that span of time, and omission of the apostrophe seems just fine. So what degree of meaning is conveyed by making the term possessive?
I’m away from my books at the moment, filling out interminable and maddeningly duplicative electronic job applications, so I leave you this time with a question rather than an answer. Feel free to speculate.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Pedantic, but pragmatic
The Times of London introduces a column on language written by Oliver Kamm.
Mr. Kamm, whose column is called “The Pedant,” announces that he hopes to rescue pedantry, “an obsession with linguistic precision” that “prizes form over style” from its negative connotations. His sense of pedantry is “an insistence on reasonable accuracy,” a pragmatic pedantry.
To do this he is willing to heave over the side such dubious cargo as the prohibitions against splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. It is a promising start. He will bear watching.
Mr. Kamm, whose column is called “The Pedant,” announces that he hopes to rescue pedantry, “an obsession with linguistic precision” that “prizes form over style” from its negative connotations. His sense of pedantry is “an insistence on reasonable accuracy,” a pragmatic pedantry.
To do this he is willing to heave over the side such dubious cargo as the prohibitions against splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. It is a promising start. He will bear watching.
The Republic of Moronia
James Madison believed that a literate, educated populace was indispensable for a representative democracy, that the intrusion of religion into politics produced toxic effects, and that the Constitution he helped design contained enough safety valves to check and correct the excesses of popular enthusiasms. He is the hero of Charles P. Pierce’s Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (Doubleday, 293 pages, $26).
The brio of his opening denunciation of the imbecilities that mark our public life charmed me in a previous post, but his book is more complex and more serious than those early passages suggest. I want to tease out a few strands.
Item: Mr. Madison, mentioned prominently in each chapter, is the standard, the measure of how far our public life has strayed from what it was intended to be.
Item: Using the 19th-century crackpot Ignatius Donnelly (father of the modern fantasy of the Lost Continent of Atlantis, diligent searcher for cryptograms in the work of Shakespeare proving that Francis Bacon was the author) as his standard, he sets out a theory of the role of the crank in American culture. America, he argues, is particularly hospitable to cranks — which is a good thing, since they explore ideas at or beyond the edge of the mainstream. The problem comes when crank ideas are carelessly incorporated into the mainstream.
Item: The means by which crackpot ideas overwhelm mainstream discourse are his “Three Great Premises”: (1) “Any theory is valid if it moves units.” That is, it is valid if it can be successfully marketed. (2) “Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.” (3) “Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.”* A consequence is what Mr. Pierce calls “the war on expertise.” Thus talk radio. Thus the scientific “controversy” over evolution and intelligent design. Thus Justice Antonin Scalia saying publicly that the United States should model its anti-terrorism policy on Jack Bauer, the hero of 24 (a show Mr. Pierce characterizes as “torture porn”).**
Item: This corruption of discourse comes about not merely because of the slack standards of talk radio or the willingness of politicians to pander. It comes about because all the news media fail in their responsibilities to the truth and to the public. The news media publish and broadcast questionable statements that they do not question and palpably false statements that they do not challenge — and we, Mr. Madison’s informed public, passively tolerate it.
There is historical continuity between Mr. Pierce’s assessment of the Republic and H.L. Mencken’s view of his native land, which he occasionally referred to as Moronia:
And here [in the United States], more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.
*We even have a word for this phenomenon, truthiness, coined by that accomplished satirist Stephen Colbert. Truthiness is what one believes by internal conviction or gut feeling to be true, regardless of available facts or logic.
**The crackpot views Mr. Pierce anatomizes are mainly those of contemporary conservatives. He argues that that is a proper focus because it is conservative positions of dubious validity that have held sway over the country for the past few decades. I think that he could have given space to zanies of the left, such as Cynthia McKinney, the former Democratic congresswoman from Georgia and Green Party presidential candidate, but I take his point.
The brio of his opening denunciation of the imbecilities that mark our public life charmed me in a previous post, but his book is more complex and more serious than those early passages suggest. I want to tease out a few strands.
Item: Mr. Madison, mentioned prominently in each chapter, is the standard, the measure of how far our public life has strayed from what it was intended to be.
Item: Using the 19th-century crackpot Ignatius Donnelly (father of the modern fantasy of the Lost Continent of Atlantis, diligent searcher for cryptograms in the work of Shakespeare proving that Francis Bacon was the author) as his standard, he sets out a theory of the role of the crank in American culture. America, he argues, is particularly hospitable to cranks — which is a good thing, since they explore ideas at or beyond the edge of the mainstream. The problem comes when crank ideas are carelessly incorporated into the mainstream.
Item: The means by which crackpot ideas overwhelm mainstream discourse are his “Three Great Premises”: (1) “Any theory is valid if it moves units.” That is, it is valid if it can be successfully marketed. (2) “Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.” (3) “Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.”* A consequence is what Mr. Pierce calls “the war on expertise.” Thus talk radio. Thus the scientific “controversy” over evolution and intelligent design. Thus Justice Antonin Scalia saying publicly that the United States should model its anti-terrorism policy on Jack Bauer, the hero of 24 (a show Mr. Pierce characterizes as “torture porn”).**
Item: This corruption of discourse comes about not merely because of the slack standards of talk radio or the willingness of politicians to pander. It comes about because all the news media fail in their responsibilities to the truth and to the public. The news media publish and broadcast questionable statements that they do not question and palpably false statements that they do not challenge — and we, Mr. Madison’s informed public, passively tolerate it.
There is historical continuity between Mr. Pierce’s assessment of the Republic and H.L. Mencken’s view of his native land, which he occasionally referred to as Moronia:
And here [in the United States], more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.
*We even have a word for this phenomenon, truthiness, coined by that accomplished satirist Stephen Colbert. Truthiness is what one believes by internal conviction or gut feeling to be true, regardless of available facts or logic.
**The crackpot views Mr. Pierce anatomizes are mainly those of contemporary conservatives. He argues that that is a proper focus because it is conservative positions of dubious validity that have held sway over the country for the past few decades. I think that he could have given space to zanies of the left, such as Cynthia McKinney, the former Democratic congresswoman from Georgia and Green Party presidential candidate, but I take his point.
Monday, June 29, 2009
AP Stylebook celebrates nerdity
There are two stereotypes about copy editors.
The first is that they are a group of burnt-out hacks and office failures who were shipped to internal exile on the copy desk when their incompetence became intolerable everywhere else. (And it takes a goodly load of incompetence to become intolerable at an American newspaper.)
The second, which is hardly any kinder, is that copy editors are a bunch of nerds and dweebs and dorks, obsessive-compulsives preoccupied with minute distinctions invisible to normal human beings. It’s just as well that they work at nights, because no one would invite them to a party.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of my professional career — at two daily newspapers, in workshops around the country, in two terms as president of the American Copy Editors Society — struggling to establish that my colleagues are well-educated, well-informed professional editors whose abilities demand that they be taken seriously.
And now this on Twitter from @APStylebook:
APStylebook Tweet your favorite AP style rule, and why, by Friday. We will give a subscription to Stylebook Online to the best.
Golly. Where to start?
oasis, oases
Delaware Abbreviate Del. In datelines or stories. Postal code: DE
Only Rhode Island is smaller in area. See state names.
rock ’n’ roll But Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
hold up (v.) holdup (n. and adj.)
Entering this competition is like running for mayor of Dorkopolis.
Nothing personal, AP Stylebook, but I have a dear friend and valued colleague who chortles vigorously every time I bash you. You want me to leave you alone, you can drop the idiotic split verb entry.
The first is that they are a group of burnt-out hacks and office failures who were shipped to internal exile on the copy desk when their incompetence became intolerable everywhere else. (And it takes a goodly load of incompetence to become intolerable at an American newspaper.)
The second, which is hardly any kinder, is that copy editors are a bunch of nerds and dweebs and dorks, obsessive-compulsives preoccupied with minute distinctions invisible to normal human beings. It’s just as well that they work at nights, because no one would invite them to a party.
I’ve spent a fair chunk of my professional career — at two daily newspapers, in workshops around the country, in two terms as president of the American Copy Editors Society — struggling to establish that my colleagues are well-educated, well-informed professional editors whose abilities demand that they be taken seriously.
And now this on Twitter from @APStylebook:
APStylebook Tweet your favorite AP style rule, and why, by Friday. We will give a subscription to Stylebook Online to the best.
Golly. Where to start?
oasis, oases
Delaware Abbreviate Del. In datelines or stories. Postal code: DE
Only Rhode Island is smaller in area. See state names.
rock ’n’ roll But Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
hold up (v.) holdup (n. and adj.)
Entering this competition is like running for mayor of Dorkopolis.
Nothing personal, AP Stylebook, but I have a dear friend and valued colleague who chortles vigorously every time I bash you. You want me to leave you alone, you can drop the idiotic split verb entry.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
A limit to Anglican tolerance
Anglicans, taking one with another, are a broad-minded and tolerant sort — a colleague once congratulated me on our magnanimity in not resenting the pope and his followers for having broken away from the Church of England. But I cringed this morning on my way to church as I heard a news reader on NPR refer to reaction to a previous story about conservative “Episcopals.”
Please, dear people at NPR and journalists elsewhere, keep always in mind that if you report on religion you must master the lingo. And each branch you encounter will have its own distinctive nomenclature, fatally easy to get wrong.
For purposes of the U.S. Episcopal Church, one branch of the Anglican Communion:
Episcopal (adj.)
Episcopalian (n.)
Episcopalians are members of Episcopal congregations, NOT Episcopals are members of Episcopalian congregations. The Episcopal Church — not the Episcopalian Church — is an episcopal polity (with authority given to bishops).
Do say it over to yourselves two or three times.
Then go and sin no more.
Please, dear people at NPR and journalists elsewhere, keep always in mind that if you report on religion you must master the lingo. And each branch you encounter will have its own distinctive nomenclature, fatally easy to get wrong.
For purposes of the U.S. Episcopal Church, one branch of the Anglican Communion:
Episcopal (adj.)
Episcopalian (n.)
Episcopalians are members of Episcopal congregations, NOT Episcopals are members of Episcopalian congregations. The Episcopal Church — not the Episcopalian Church — is an episcopal polity (with authority given to bishops).
Do say it over to yourselves two or three times.
Then go and sin no more.
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