The house across the street sits within a grove of trees. Two of the most prominent, a sweet gum and a tulip poplar, are beginning to change color, the former to scarlet, the latter to gold. Another neighbor has a yard of mature oaks. He harvests a hundred or more bags of leaves every fall, in addition to what the wind generously deposits on our property. But until yesterday I did not think that we were leafy.
Yesterday’s Sun ran an article about a man who was shot as he tried to rob an off-duty police officer in the “leafy Glenham-Belford neighborhood.” Now I know from long experience that the leafy neighborhoods (sometimes tree-shaded) in Baltimore are Guilford, Roland Park, and Homeland.* Leafy is a code word in journalism for well-off and respectable, often paired with suburban. It provides a contrast to the gritty neighborhoods where the shabby people shoot one another to no one’s surprise.**
I’d have to go down to Calvert Street and be shepherded through the tight security to the newsroom to look at the city map of neighborhoods with names that no one who lives in them uses, but I’m fairly sure that Glenham-Belford, wherever it is, is a humble middle-class neighborhood much like mine. And if I’m leafy now, does that mean that the city is going to raise my property tax assessment?
Perhaps applying leafy to Glenham-Belford was simply a mistake, a writing or editing error. After all, yesterday was also the day that The Sun published this headline: Vote comes / on heals / of ACORN / scandals.
One additional item: In the current Best of Baltimore issue, the City Paper has named me “Best Laid Off Sun Staffer.” Too kind.
(It would be ungenerous to point out the omitted hyphen in the compound adjective.)
*For non-Baltimoreans readers, those are the neighborhoods where the quality live.
**I’m not quite sure where the grit in those neighborhoods comes from, now that there is no longer any industry in Baltimore.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Treason!
Last week the editor of the Maryland Gazette published a justification for using the construction may have laid down in the road on purpose. He published the sentence in that form because it was, he thought, clearer to his readers than have lain would have been. I referred briefly to authorities on the tangled history of lie and lay and said it was a defensible decision.
It turns out that I have turned my coat, betrayed the faith, gone over to the dark side. This from a reader:
John, this is too much.
First you said it's really OK to say "hopefully," and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said it's really OK to say "none were," and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said the AP Stylebook is not a very good guide, and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said Strunk & White is a poor guide, and I really didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
But now an editor writes "have laid" instead of "have lain," and you say it's a defensible decision?
No. I'm sorry. I can't accept that. Stop retreating. Defend the goddamn language already. It's your job.
--A former copy editor
Hopefully was used as a sentence adverb for generations until, about thirty years ago, it flared up as a vogue usage and drew the misplaced scorn of people who object reflexively to anything that comes into vogue. None has been used in both singular and plural sentences as long as there has been English, as the Oxford English Dictionary, any reputable language authority, and even the Associated Press Stylebook (!) will tell you. AP style is useful for regularizing capitalizations and abbreviations, but its advice on language is erratic and occasionally downright erroneous. Strunk and White is dated and inadequate; any serious student or writer would be better advised to buy and ponder Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
Now, as to lie and lay: I maintain the distinction between the two verbs in my own writing, I teach that distinction to my students each semester, and I would not have made the decision that the editor of the Maryland Gazette did. But when one takes the trouble to examine actual usage, discovering that even the über-prescriptivist Bryan Garner holds that the battle is almost certainly lost, and noting that Mr. Hutzell of the Gazette sought language that would be familiar and comfortable to his readers, one can reasonably conclude that the decision was defensible, without endorsing it.
If you would turn your attention for a moment to the text of the story, consider these points:
That opening sentence of thirty-five words — An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week — could have been rendered less wordy by omitting who knew him, which is established two paragraphs later in direct quotation, and this week, which, given the publication date of the paper, should be obvious.
The second sentence states that the homeless man was hit by an Ocean City man driving a van filled with his family members, but the detail about passengers, which would seem significant because of its placement high is the story, is not referred to subsequently. And the sentence says that the homeless man was killed after the van ran over him; I suspect that he may have died when the van ran over him.
The middle of the article is given over to a digression about homeless people hanging around a liquor store near the site of the accident, delaying further details of the accident for six paragraphs.
And the owner of the liquor store is granted anonymity for his comments. Why?
Letting have laid stet, along with She said she and several other homeless people in the area saw him lay in the road for several minutes before being hit, can certainly be challenged, but other elements in the story ought not be ignored. Editing should be more than quarreling about a disputable usage. It should involve curbing wordiness and inaccuracy, and organizing articles in a structure that makes sense to the reader. This article is not particularly bad; a reader can extract the information from it. But it is shoddier than it could be, and that shoddiness is representative of the decay of editing that I have been carrying on about for most of the span of this blog.
It turns out that I have turned my coat, betrayed the faith, gone over to the dark side. This from a reader:
John, this is too much.
First you said it's really OK to say "hopefully," and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said it's really OK to say "none were," and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said the AP Stylebook is not a very good guide, and I didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
Then you said Strunk & White is a poor guide, and I really didn't like that, but I accepted it, because I respected your knowledge.
But now an editor writes "have laid" instead of "have lain," and you say it's a defensible decision?
No. I'm sorry. I can't accept that. Stop retreating. Defend the goddamn language already. It's your job.
--A former copy editor
Hopefully was used as a sentence adverb for generations until, about thirty years ago, it flared up as a vogue usage and drew the misplaced scorn of people who object reflexively to anything that comes into vogue. None has been used in both singular and plural sentences as long as there has been English, as the Oxford English Dictionary, any reputable language authority, and even the Associated Press Stylebook (!) will tell you. AP style is useful for regularizing capitalizations and abbreviations, but its advice on language is erratic and occasionally downright erroneous. Strunk and White is dated and inadequate; any serious student or writer would be better advised to buy and ponder Joseph Williams’s Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
Now, as to lie and lay: I maintain the distinction between the two verbs in my own writing, I teach that distinction to my students each semester, and I would not have made the decision that the editor of the Maryland Gazette did. But when one takes the trouble to examine actual usage, discovering that even the über-prescriptivist Bryan Garner holds that the battle is almost certainly lost, and noting that Mr. Hutzell of the Gazette sought language that would be familiar and comfortable to his readers, one can reasonably conclude that the decision was defensible, without endorsing it.
If you would turn your attention for a moment to the text of the story, consider these points:
That opening sentence of thirty-five words — An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week — could have been rendered less wordy by omitting who knew him, which is established two paragraphs later in direct quotation, and this week, which, given the publication date of the paper, should be obvious.
The second sentence states that the homeless man was hit by an Ocean City man driving a van filled with his family members, but the detail about passengers, which would seem significant because of its placement high is the story, is not referred to subsequently. And the sentence says that the homeless man was killed after the van ran over him; I suspect that he may have died when the van ran over him.
The middle of the article is given over to a digression about homeless people hanging around a liquor store near the site of the accident, delaying further details of the accident for six paragraphs.
And the owner of the liquor store is granted anonymity for his comments. Why?
Letting have laid stet, along with She said she and several other homeless people in the area saw him lay in the road for several minutes before being hit, can certainly be challenged, but other elements in the story ought not be ignored. Editing should be more than quarreling about a disputable usage. It should involve curbing wordiness and inaccuracy, and organizing articles in a structure that makes sense to the reader. This article is not particularly bad; a reader can extract the information from it. But it is shoddier than it could be, and that shoddiness is representative of the decay of editing that I have been carrying on about for most of the span of this blog.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
H.L.M.
On this date in 1880, Henry Louis Mencken was born. By the time of the stroke in 1948 that robbed him of the ability to read and write, he had produced an imposing oeuvre of reportage, essays, criticism, memoir, and linguistic research, and he had bestowed upon The Baltimore Sun a fame whose afterglow has not completely faded.
Quoting him is irresistible: “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
Writing on Warren Harding’s inaugural address, he said that the president “writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
He denounced chiropractic as quackery and then affected to worry that it might actually work, failing to “suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal.” Ever the stout libertarian, he continued: “If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.”
In a letter to William Saroyan, he wrote: “I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to Hell and learn from other editors how dreadful their job was on earth.”
In Newspaper Days, his memoir of the no-holds-barred journalism in Baltimore in the early years of the 20th century, he describes how he and two other reporters, assigned to cover the docks of South Baltimore, increased their efficiency by repairing to a saloon and agreeing on invented details for the stories they would file. Their managing editors, monitoring the competition closely, noted the correspondences and praised the three for their accuracy. Thus, he said, he “took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.”
It still isn’t.
Today is his birthday, and if you get a chance, lift a glass of pilsner to his shade.
Quoting him is irresistible: “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”
Writing on Warren Harding’s inaugural address, he said that the president “writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
He denounced chiropractic as quackery and then affected to worry that it might actually work, failing to “suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal.” Ever the stout libertarian, he continued: “If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven.”
In a letter to William Saroyan, he wrote: “I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to Hell and learn from other editors how dreadful their job was on earth.”
In Newspaper Days, his memoir of the no-holds-barred journalism in Baltimore in the early years of the 20th century, he describes how he and two other reporters, assigned to cover the docks of South Baltimore, increased their efficiency by repairing to a saloon and agreeing on invented details for the stories they would file. Their managing editors, monitoring the competition closely, noted the correspondences and praised the three for their accuracy. Thus, he said, he “took in the massive fact that journalism is not an exact science.”
It still isn’t.
Today is his birthday, and if you get a chance, lift a glass of pilsner to his shade.
Friday, September 11, 2009
A catholic taste
The mark of a mature taste is the ability to appreciate excellence in different forms — Carolina barbecue as well as steak au poivre. Thus, in proper appreciation of writing, one should be able to appreciate a writer who adheres to the most formal conventions of usage as well as one who writes colloquially with flair.
Here’s a parallel. I admire and appreciate the work that has been done in music with period instruments and period technique. I love the recordings that Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other musicians have done with the music of Bach, for example.
But once, more than thirty years ago, the formidable Lili Kraus came out on stage at one of the Mostly Mozrt concerts at Lincoln Center to play as an encore the Rondo Alla Turca from Mozart’s A-major piano sonata. She didn’t play it on some tinkly little reconstructed pianoforte; she banged out the bejeezus on a Steinway grand, and I can hear that glorious sound in my head to this day.
You have to be able to appreciate both.
Here’s a parallel. I admire and appreciate the work that has been done in music with period instruments and period technique. I love the recordings that Nikolaus Harnoncourt and other musicians have done with the music of Bach, for example.
But once, more than thirty years ago, the formidable Lili Kraus came out on stage at one of the Mostly Mozrt concerts at Lincoln Center to play as an encore the Rondo Alla Turca from Mozart’s A-major piano sonata. She didn’t play it on some tinkly little reconstructed pianoforte; she banged out the bejeezus on a Steinway grand, and I can hear that glorious sound in my head to this day.
You have to be able to appreciate both.
Congress has a lot to learn
There was a brief brouhaha this week after the gentleman from South Carolina blurted, “You lie!” during the president’s address to Congress, with much pious commentary about decorum. Defenders of the gentleman from South Carolina reminded us that Democrats had booed President George W. Bush on more than one occasion — a defense rather like “those other kids did it first.”
What has been lost in this largely pointless exchange — and distraction from the national issue of health care ostensibly under discussion — is the pathetic feebleness of Congressional invective. “Boo!” and “You lie!” in the legislative body where the puissant John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that a prominent figure “shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.” (It is thought that Mr. Randolph was referring to Henry Clay.)
At Language Log, they are celebrating the invective of Paul Keating, the former prime minister of Australia whose comments in Parliament identified his opponents as, among other things, harlots, blackguards, brain-damaged, dullards, fools and incompetents, perfumed gigolos, unrepresentative swill, and stunned mullets. A commenter added this picturesque item:
One of Paul Keating's best insults came when he was berating the leader of the Country Party, who came from a family of undertakers. He described him as a man who had ‘accrued his wealth by stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’*
When will the Republic elect legislators who can meet this lofty standard?
*Iambic hexameter. Classy.
What has been lost in this largely pointless exchange — and distraction from the national issue of health care ostensibly under discussion — is the pathetic feebleness of Congressional invective. “Boo!” and “You lie!” in the legislative body where the puissant John Randolph of Roanoke once commented that a prominent figure “shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.” (It is thought that Mr. Randolph was referring to Henry Clay.)
At Language Log, they are celebrating the invective of Paul Keating, the former prime minister of Australia whose comments in Parliament identified his opponents as, among other things, harlots, blackguards, brain-damaged, dullards, fools and incompetents, perfumed gigolos, unrepresentative swill, and stunned mullets. A commenter added this picturesque item:
One of Paul Keating's best insults came when he was berating the leader of the Country Party, who came from a family of undertakers. He described him as a man who had ‘accrued his wealth by stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’*
When will the Republic elect legislators who can meet this lofty standard?
*Iambic hexameter. Classy.
You lie, you lay, you have lain
Thanks to a dispatch from a reader of this blog, I learned that a reader of the Maryland Gazette complained about the grammar of the opening sentence in a recent article:
An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week.
The complaint, that laid should have been lain, prompted a defense from Rick Hutzell, the editor and, he says, “the ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling for the newspaper.”* In his defense, Mr. Hutzell wrote:
“... I made a conscious decision to use laid in the lead, or opening paragraph, and headline instead of the grammatically correct lain.
“While the transitive verb was called for, Strunk and White note in ‘The Elements of Style’ that laid can be used in colloquial or slang speech. Because lain is almost never used in common conversation, I felt its presence in the lead paragraph and headline would have been a stopper for most readers. I ran this by another editor, who agreed.”
Permit me to express regret that a fellow ultimate aribiter should use Strunk and White as a prop for his authority and, even more regrettably, confuse transitive and intransitive.
Perhaps if the revenues of the Maryland Gazette hold up, Mr. Hutzell could lay out $45 for the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage,** which would help him sort out transitive and intransitive and give him a little more support for his decision on laid and lain.
Bryan Garner explains that the nonstandard use of forms of lay in place of lie is very common in speech and that some commentators insist that it is not even an error. “But make no mistake,” he says, “using these verbs correctly is a mark of refinement.”***
On his new “language-change index” feature, Mr. Garner rates laid for a past tense of lie as “virtually universal” but “opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts.”
There you go, Mr. Hutzell, a defensible decision but a faulty explanation. It is never easy being an ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling.
And catching up ...
Did you miss me during the past week? Preoccupied with new class preps and a series of freelance editing gigs, I lacked the time to post.**** So:
Item: Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word is formally published. Maybe you say, “DILLIGAF,” a term you will find therein.
Item: On Twitter, @henryhitchings is marking the run-up to the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson’s birth (September 18) with a tweet-a-day quote. The first was Johnson’s decisive riposte to the hoary artists’ complaint that non-artists aren’t qualified to criticize their work:
“You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
And subsequently, a salutary reminder to those of us who quibble over words:
“No word is ... intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words ... depends wholly upon accident and custom.”
Item: Look at Headsup: The Blog for some prime examples of tortured journalistic syntax. Then ask yourself whether sheer bad writing might have something to do with the plight of newspapers.
Item: Belatedly but appropriately, the British government, in the person of the prime minister, has apologized for the unconscionable persecution of Alan Turing, which drove him to suicide. As a bonus, as Language Log notes, it is an illustration of a proper apology.
*I, too, was once such a tinpot authority. Ah, the bygone palmy days.
**About which, more in a future post.
***I am not a reader of the Maryland Gazette and so cannot comment on its degree of refinement or that of its readers.
****Dearly as I love you all, the freelance clients pay me, and you do not.
An alcoholic homeless man who was run over and killed Tuesday night in Glen Burnie may have laid down in the road on purpose, an advocate for the homeless who knew him said this week.
The complaint, that laid should have been lain, prompted a defense from Rick Hutzell, the editor and, he says, “the ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling for the newspaper.”* In his defense, Mr. Hutzell wrote:
“... I made a conscious decision to use laid in the lead, or opening paragraph, and headline instead of the grammatically correct lain.
“While the transitive verb was called for, Strunk and White note in ‘The Elements of Style’ that laid can be used in colloquial or slang speech. Because lain is almost never used in common conversation, I felt its presence in the lead paragraph and headline would have been a stopper for most readers. I ran this by another editor, who agreed.”
Permit me to express regret that a fellow ultimate aribiter should use Strunk and White as a prop for his authority and, even more regrettably, confuse transitive and intransitive.
Perhaps if the revenues of the Maryland Gazette hold up, Mr. Hutzell could lay out $45 for the third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage,** which would help him sort out transitive and intransitive and give him a little more support for his decision on laid and lain.
Bryan Garner explains that the nonstandard use of forms of lay in place of lie is very common in speech and that some commentators insist that it is not even an error. “But make no mistake,” he says, “using these verbs correctly is a mark of refinement.”***
On his new “language-change index” feature, Mr. Garner rates laid for a past tense of lie as “virtually universal” but “opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts.”
There you go, Mr. Hutzell, a defensible decision but a faulty explanation. It is never easy being an ultimate arbiter of grammar and spelling.
And catching up ...
Did you miss me during the past week? Preoccupied with new class preps and a series of freelance editing gigs, I lacked the time to post.**** So:
Item: Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word is formally published. Maybe you say, “DILLIGAF,” a term you will find therein.
Item: On Twitter, @henryhitchings is marking the run-up to the tercentenary of Samuel Johnson’s birth (September 18) with a tweet-a-day quote. The first was Johnson’s decisive riposte to the hoary artists’ complaint that non-artists aren’t qualified to criticize their work:
“You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
And subsequently, a salutary reminder to those of us who quibble over words:
“No word is ... intrinsically meaner than another; our opinion therefore of words ... depends wholly upon accident and custom.”
Item: Look at Headsup: The Blog for some prime examples of tortured journalistic syntax. Then ask yourself whether sheer bad writing might have something to do with the plight of newspapers.
Item: Belatedly but appropriately, the British government, in the person of the prime minister, has apologized for the unconscionable persecution of Alan Turing, which drove him to suicide. As a bonus, as Language Log notes, it is an illustration of a proper apology.
*I, too, was once such a tinpot authority. Ah, the bygone palmy days.
**About which, more in a future post.
***I am not a reader of the Maryland Gazette and so cannot comment on its degree of refinement or that of its readers.
****Dearly as I love you all, the freelance clients pay me, and you do not.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
A qualified endorsement of the press
George Chandler-Powell is a character, a surgeon, in P.D. James’s most recent novel, The Private Patient. At one point Mr. Chandler-Powell (British surgeons do not call themselves “doctor”) expresses views about the press:
“[F]rankly, I wouldn’t lift a finger to muzzle the popular press. When you consider the machinations and deviousness of governments, we need some organisation strong enough to shout occasionally. I used to believe that I lived in a free country. Now I have to accept that I don’t. But at least we have a free press, and I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of vulgarity, popularisation, sentimentality and even misrepresentation to ensure it remains free.”
“[F]rankly, I wouldn’t lift a finger to muzzle the popular press. When you consider the machinations and deviousness of governments, we need some organisation strong enough to shout occasionally. I used to believe that I lived in a free country. Now I have to accept that I don’t. But at least we have a free press, and I’m willing to put up with a certain amount of vulgarity, popularisation, sentimentality and even misrepresentation to ensure it remains free.”
Friday, September 4, 2009
No easy pun here about The Sun setting
Too preoccupied with various editing projects to blog much this week, I still got around to reading the Baltimore Magazine article by Evan Serpick about the parlous state of The Baltimore Sun, my former employer. I wish it had been better.
There is factual matter in the article about the precipitous drop in revenue over the past few years and the consequent reduction of the size and scope of the paper and of the staff — and the electronic version of the article corrects the blunder about the Seattle newspaper scene from the print edition of the magazine.
But I wish that Mr. Serpick had made more of an effort to put the newspaper’s plight in a broader context.
Yes, Tribune Company officials made decisions they came to rue in acquiring Times Mirror, and Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune saddled the company with even greater debt and brought it into bankruptcy. But Tribune does not stand alone, as Mr. Serpick mentions casually but does not explore. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight Ridder, may be at risk of bankruptcy, and Freedom Communications, the parent company of the Orange County Register, once a fabulously profitable newspaper, filed for Chapter 11 this week. Lots of colossi are teetering.
Similarly, Monty Cook’s efforts as editor of The Sun to develop “platform-neutral” articles for both electronic and print publication are hardly an eccentricity. Most other newspapers, watching their aging readership steadily decline, are struggling to find new readers and new advertising revenue on the Internet. What The Sun is attempting may not work, but no one else has come up with a better approach for a metropolitan daily.
But it is a series of remarks that I find most regrettable. The most regrettable is Mr. Serpick’s statement, “Many Sun staffers groan about Cook's incompetence and complain that he has tried to solve the paper's problems with endless redesigns.” You’ll note that Mr. Cook’s supposed incompetence is presented as a settled fact, for which the article does not provide substantiation. And two of most the recent redesigns were conducted before he became editor.
Then there are the anonymous comments, some bashing the editor, some scornful of the younger employees, some indignant about the older employees — exactly the sort of backbiting one would expect in a situation in which people are angry and fearful. But once again, they are assertions for which no support is offered. In my time at The Sun, the paper’s guidelines on anonymous quotations held that they could be justified only when they contributed substantially to the meaning of the story. These don’t.
Toward the end of the article, there is a perfunctory effort to look ahead, at such possible remedies as local ownership, about which I have previously expressed doubts, and David Simon’s proposal to erect a pay wall around newspapers — which has been greeted with widespread skepticism, one observer having suggested that Mr. Simon might make an HBO series about the failure of newspapers that take his advice.
Mr. Serpick is quite correct about the diminished state of a proud newspaper, suffering like many others from demographic, technological, and economic circumstances beyond any single paper’s control. He is correct that the remaining staff is struggling to weather the storm and navigate to calmer waters. But his article does not add much to what was already known.
There is factual matter in the article about the precipitous drop in revenue over the past few years and the consequent reduction of the size and scope of the paper and of the staff — and the electronic version of the article corrects the blunder about the Seattle newspaper scene from the print edition of the magazine.
But I wish that Mr. Serpick had made more of an effort to put the newspaper’s plight in a broader context.
Yes, Tribune Company officials made decisions they came to rue in acquiring Times Mirror, and Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune saddled the company with even greater debt and brought it into bankruptcy. But Tribune does not stand alone, as Mr. Serpick mentions casually but does not explore. The McClatchy Company, which bought Knight Ridder, may be at risk of bankruptcy, and Freedom Communications, the parent company of the Orange County Register, once a fabulously profitable newspaper, filed for Chapter 11 this week. Lots of colossi are teetering.
Similarly, Monty Cook’s efforts as editor of The Sun to develop “platform-neutral” articles for both electronic and print publication are hardly an eccentricity. Most other newspapers, watching their aging readership steadily decline, are struggling to find new readers and new advertising revenue on the Internet. What The Sun is attempting may not work, but no one else has come up with a better approach for a metropolitan daily.
But it is a series of remarks that I find most regrettable. The most regrettable is Mr. Serpick’s statement, “Many Sun staffers groan about Cook's incompetence and complain that he has tried to solve the paper's problems with endless redesigns.” You’ll note that Mr. Cook’s supposed incompetence is presented as a settled fact, for which the article does not provide substantiation. And two of most the recent redesigns were conducted before he became editor.
Then there are the anonymous comments, some bashing the editor, some scornful of the younger employees, some indignant about the older employees — exactly the sort of backbiting one would expect in a situation in which people are angry and fearful. But once again, they are assertions for which no support is offered. In my time at The Sun, the paper’s guidelines on anonymous quotations held that they could be justified only when they contributed substantially to the meaning of the story. These don’t.
Toward the end of the article, there is a perfunctory effort to look ahead, at such possible remedies as local ownership, about which I have previously expressed doubts, and David Simon’s proposal to erect a pay wall around newspapers — which has been greeted with widespread skepticism, one observer having suggested that Mr. Simon might make an HBO series about the failure of newspapers that take his advice.
Mr. Serpick is quite correct about the diminished state of a proud newspaper, suffering like many others from demographic, technological, and economic circumstances beyond any single paper’s control. He is correct that the remaining staff is struggling to weather the storm and navigate to calmer waters. But his article does not add much to what was already known.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Say 'Arrrrrrrr'
With International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19) just a couple of weeks off, here is an important reminder:
A pirate’s rhotic growl is rendered thus: Arrrrrrr, with the number of consonants at your discretion.
Arrrrrrgh is an expression of disappointment, distress, anguish. It is thus not appropriate for pirate talk and should not be confused with Arrrrrrr.
Please note this particularly for headline and caption purposes.
A pirate’s rhotic growl is rendered thus: Arrrrrrr, with the number of consonants at your discretion.
Arrrrrrgh is an expression of disappointment, distress, anguish. It is thus not appropriate for pirate talk and should not be confused with Arrrrrrr.
Please note this particularly for headline and caption purposes.
Peevologist psychology
The peevologist, a self-proclaimed expert on language, can be readily identified by certain key characteristics: a belief, stated or implicit, that the English language is in decline and being corrupted; much moaning about falling standards, often violated by identifiable groups, particularly the young; repeated brandishing of fetishes unsupported by linguistics, history, or practice (think of the split infinitive).
A post last week, “Musée des Peevologies,” offered some exhibits of peevology, and this week, as promised, we undertake a look at the psychological elements that contribute to full-blown peevology.
The teacher’s pet: The student who actually does the assignment and gives the correct answer earns the teacher’s praise. That praise being especially valuable if the student is a bookworm and inept at sports, coming up with the right answer every time becomes a powerful motivator. And when the teacher is a former teacher’s pet, grown up in the belief that there is always a right answer that the student can and should supply, the loop is closed.
The English major: The teacher’s pet who goes on to be an English major is ripe for seduction by High Modernism, with its doctrine that the greatest literary texts can be understood only by an embattled minority sensitive to nuance and allusion, and surrounded by the herd. That the prestige of majoring in English is close to nil (though still a notch or two higher than going into the School of Education) makes it necessary to hold even more firmly to that sense of being among an elect.
The copy editor: Once succumbing to journalism, job prospects for English majors being what they are and always have been, the developing peevologist likely fetches up on the copy desk. Copy editors (a dwindling species) focus on the minutiae of language, and the former English major is expected to be an expert on grammar and usage (though chances are excellent that he has never studied linguistics*). In this environment, the peevologist’s bent is reinforced by the copy editor’s conviction, echoing the lesson of the teacher’s pet, that there is always a right answer. Everything in editing is a 1 or a 0, right or wrong, as specified by the Associated Press Stylebook or some tortured exegesis of it.
The cranky old white guy:** As the arteries harden, so do the attitudes. There was, it seems, a golden age, usually dating from the peevologist’s youth or just before his time, when there were Standards. Those Standards are always being undermined, and the greatest danger comes from people who are younger than the peevologist, or of a different ethnic, cultural, or class background. The peevologist stands bravely on the ramparts, menaced by the barbarian hordes, and he will not capitulate. In plain fact, he is merely a snob.
H.L. Mencken, a gifted amateur student of the English language in its American version, was rightly skeptical of snobs and self-anointed authorities, writing in his monumental work, The American Language:
The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach ‘correct’ English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive.
We have English because some exceedingly plain people, a rabble of illiterate peasants, abandoned the standards of Anglo-Saxon, and English remains, like all other languages, what its speakers and writers collectively make of it. Linguists understand this, and they explore the mechanisms and richnesses of the language, as it is actually spoken and actually written. Reasonable prescriptivists, among whom I number myself,*** who aim to advise people how to write more clearly, more effectively, more elegantly, acknowledge this and labor to offer advice that is better informed than the misguided strictures of the peevologists.
*Actually, English majors and journalists (the latter group often with a less reliable education even than the English major’s) may never have studied grammar much in any form. Thus we can find people railing against the split infinitive who do not know what an infinitive is, or condemning passive voice in constructions that are not passive.
**Not to stereotype, but you must surely have noticed how frequently the peevologist is white, male, and middle-aged or older.
***The ready reader of this blog will have recognized how many dangerous personal traits I have struggled with to move toward such reasonableness.
A post last week, “Musée des Peevologies,” offered some exhibits of peevology, and this week, as promised, we undertake a look at the psychological elements that contribute to full-blown peevology.
The teacher’s pet: The student who actually does the assignment and gives the correct answer earns the teacher’s praise. That praise being especially valuable if the student is a bookworm and inept at sports, coming up with the right answer every time becomes a powerful motivator. And when the teacher is a former teacher’s pet, grown up in the belief that there is always a right answer that the student can and should supply, the loop is closed.
The English major: The teacher’s pet who goes on to be an English major is ripe for seduction by High Modernism, with its doctrine that the greatest literary texts can be understood only by an embattled minority sensitive to nuance and allusion, and surrounded by the herd. That the prestige of majoring in English is close to nil (though still a notch or two higher than going into the School of Education) makes it necessary to hold even more firmly to that sense of being among an elect.
The copy editor: Once succumbing to journalism, job prospects for English majors being what they are and always have been, the developing peevologist likely fetches up on the copy desk. Copy editors (a dwindling species) focus on the minutiae of language, and the former English major is expected to be an expert on grammar and usage (though chances are excellent that he has never studied linguistics*). In this environment, the peevologist’s bent is reinforced by the copy editor’s conviction, echoing the lesson of the teacher’s pet, that there is always a right answer. Everything in editing is a 1 or a 0, right or wrong, as specified by the Associated Press Stylebook or some tortured exegesis of it.
The cranky old white guy:** As the arteries harden, so do the attitudes. There was, it seems, a golden age, usually dating from the peevologist’s youth or just before his time, when there were Standards. Those Standards are always being undermined, and the greatest danger comes from people who are younger than the peevologist, or of a different ethnic, cultural, or class background. The peevologist stands bravely on the ramparts, menaced by the barbarian hordes, and he will not capitulate. In plain fact, he is merely a snob.
H.L. Mencken, a gifted amateur student of the English language in its American version, was rightly skeptical of snobs and self-anointed authorities, writing in his monumental work, The American Language:
The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach ‘correct’ English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive.
We have English because some exceedingly plain people, a rabble of illiterate peasants, abandoned the standards of Anglo-Saxon, and English remains, like all other languages, what its speakers and writers collectively make of it. Linguists understand this, and they explore the mechanisms and richnesses of the language, as it is actually spoken and actually written. Reasonable prescriptivists, among whom I number myself,*** who aim to advise people how to write more clearly, more effectively, more elegantly, acknowledge this and labor to offer advice that is better informed than the misguided strictures of the peevologists.
*Actually, English majors and journalists (the latter group often with a less reliable education even than the English major’s) may never have studied grammar much in any form. Thus we can find people railing against the split infinitive who do not know what an infinitive is, or condemning passive voice in constructions that are not passive.
**Not to stereotype, but you must surely have noticed how frequently the peevologist is white, male, and middle-aged or older.
***The ready reader of this blog will have recognized how many dangerous personal traits I have struggled with to move toward such reasonableness.
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