Take off your hat, sir

I was on the stand, testifying* in Baltimore County Circuit Court, when a man in a dark suit and a hat came into the courtroom and sat down. The judge stopped me and addressed the newcomer: “This is a courtroom. Take off your hat.” The man said, “Your Honor, may I approach?”

It turned out that the man in the hat was a lawyer scheduled to appear in a pending case. He explained that he had just completed a course of chemotherapy. “That’s all right,” the judge said; we don’t care how you look.”

“It’s not pretty, Your Honor,” the lawyer said.

“I’d prefer for you to take it off.”

”Are you threatening me with contempt?” the lawyer asked.

The judge backed off. If the lawyer had been Jewish and Orthodox, a head covering would not have been objectionable. And I assume that the judge preferred not to appear to bully a cancer survivor. The hat stayed on.

It was, however, a white hat worn after Labor Day, and a contempt citation on that ground alone could have been justified.

Gentlemen: I wear a hat, usually a fedora from September to May, a Panama from Memorial Day to Labor Day. You, too, may wear headgear, perhaps, despite your having attained adult years, a baseball cap. Let me give you some advice.

You may recall the song from Hello, Dolly: “I stand for motherhood, America and a hot lunch for orphans, / Take off your hat, sir, Betsy Ross’s flag is passing. ...” Uncover your head in church, at the library, at the opera, at table,** or at any other sacred place, unless you are Jewish and Orthodox, or Quaker. Take your hat off at the singing of the national anthem, or when a lady enters an elevator. You were not brought up in a barn.

Flannery O’Connor, asked repeatedly why the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” wears a black hat, finally snapped, “To cover his head.” That, indeed, is the function of the hat, to cover the head against the heat of the sun in summer and the chill of winter (because so much heat is radiated from the head in cold). Taking the hat off is a mark of respect in those circumstances where respect is advisable.



*My daughter, Alice, had taken her former landlady to Small Claims Court in a dispute over refunding of the bulk of her security deposit. Alice prevailed in Small Claims Court, and again on the landlady’s appeal to Circuit Court, because her heart is pure and her cause was just.

**It should tell you something that James Thurber once described the members of the Ohio Legislature as “the sort of men who fanned their soup with their hats.”

Papers, please

In a jocular post the other day, I connected — and one reader cried “non sequitur”— high school students’ ignorance of basic information about U.S. civics and the uproar over illegal immigration. One reader commented:

"Illegal" should mean you don't qualify for anything to which legal American citizens are entitled. Why is this so difficult to absorb? The idea of anyone just showing up in another country and demanding what those citizens have is, to me, anathema.

The principle is simple and clear. It’s the reality that is not.

For one thing, many illegal immigrants are doing work that Americans prefer not to do, and doing it cheaply. I don’t hear anyone saying that illegal immigration is a good thing, but rather that it has become deeply intertwined with our economy. (Like the underground economy in which people, including citizens, get money on which they don’t pay taxes. You wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?) Disentangling it poses complications.

Assume that illegal immigrants could be expelled and further illegal immigration could be blocked. How much extra, then, are you willing to pay for produce at the grocery? For clean dishes in a restaurant? For clean sheets in a hotel?

That assumption in the previous paragraph that illegal immigration can be reversed and curbed, how far are you willing to go to accomplish that? We have already been paying a fantastic sum to build a wall across our southern border. But that is plainly not enough. How far are you willing to go in enforcement? How many businesses are you willing to shut down and employers to lock up over employment of illegal immigrants? How many additional federal immigration enforcement officers are you willing to pay for?

Or this: Are you willing to require every American citizen to carry an ID card containing a memory chip with personal data? That would make it simple to identify the undocumented. But with people screaming in the streets that the country will go Stalinist if everybody has medical insurance, I doubt that there would be much enthusiasm about being stopped regularly by police officers asking, “May I see your papers, please?”

What journalism — honest-to-God journalism, not the back-and-forth shouting on radio and cable television that passes for it — is supposed to do is to reveal and explain the complexity of the world, so that we can understand it and make intelligent and informed decisions.

That, incidentally, is also why it would be a good thing for high school students to learn how the country operates, so that they can recognize and understand actual journalism when they stumble across it, and perhaps even be a little less vulnerable to demagogy of all flavors.

Saturday morning

Saturday turns out to be a day to catch up.

Item: James Wolcott makes a graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson on his Vanity Fair blog, bringing a blush to my pallid cheeks in the process.

Item: Language Log linked to a Daily Telegraph article that attempts to identify the twenty worst sentences in Dan Brown’s oeuvre. It couldn't have been an easy task.

Item: If you were wondering just how America’s newspapers came to the brink of destruction, and what they might yet do in an attempt to pull back from that brink, have a look at Part 1 and Part 2 of Bill Wyman’s analysis. It was published a month ago, and I have only just gotten to it. It all rings depressingly true.

Item: Time follows its cover story on Glenn Beck with an article, “The secrets inside your dog’s mind.”

Sorry. Too easy. Moving on.

Item: Elizabeth Large asks readers of Dining@Large what people 35 and older look for in a bar’s happy hour. “A clean glass for my Metamucil,” one reader suggested. Having gone with Kathleen to the Best of Baltimore reception* on Wednesday, for a few bursts of shouted conversation amid the ear-splitting music and a lengthy period of meditation waiting — vainly — to see if a bartender would arrive within fifteen feet of me, I find resonance in her topic. If you do, too, go over there and add your comments.

Item: That’s how the day goes; I didn’t get this finished until Saturday afternoon.



*Thanks, guys, for the award. I was touched. And that missing hyphen in the headline — no biggie.

A copy editor's job description

My son, J.P., recounts that one of his high school classmates said of me that “he was the most intimidating of my friends’ parents, because his job was to know as much as possible.”

That is it: An effective editor can never know too much, and will never know enough.

To the books, citizens!

In the clamor over revamping the health care system, the term illegal immigrants is surfacing again. But before our good native-born fellow citizens hit the streets with their pitchforks and torches, they might consider the following set of questions.

These ten questions — all taken from the test that an immigrant must pass to acquire U.S. citizenship — were administered to a thousand Oklahoma public high school students. About three percent of them got enough correct answers to pass the citizenship test.* I entertain deep suspicions that those thousand Oklahoma high school students are not anomalous.

But I also doubt that raising this point will bring any measure of humility or restraint to the discussion of immigration.


What is the supreme law of the land?

What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?

What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?

How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?

What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?

What are the two major political parties in the United States?

We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?

Who was the first President of the United States?

Who is in charge of the executive branch?


No, dammit, I am not going to give you the answers.



*The article about this experiment can be found here. Thanks, @Fritinancy, for the tip.

A personal note at the Johnson tercentenary

“Greek, sir, is like lace,” said Samuel Johnson; “every man gets as much of it as he can.” Fashions in men’s clothing and, sadly, learning have changed since the eighteenth century, and not all of Johnson’s advice remains applicable. But the great lexicographer, critic, essayist, and poet, born three hundred years ago today, has much to say that we would do well to hear.

One caricature of Johnson that has come down to us is the roaring Tory. He did “talk for victory,” and, in a sublime understatement in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, he was “sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of contradiction.” But he was a complex personality, and deeply humane.

He knew what it was to be poor without a place to spend the night. He knew the grind of turning out hackwork for small pay. He knew the horror of depression and breakdown, and the fear of its return. He knew himself to be ugly, even physically repulsive. His struggles with his own disabilities and disadvantages gave him an insight into and sympathy with the struggles of other human beings.

In No. 14 of the Rambler he wrote:

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues, which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.

In No. 60, the great essay on the writing of biography, he summed up:

We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.

Human life, he saw, was a struggle “in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” His own career is mirrored in the famous line from his poem London:

SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESSED

And yet, all this granted, he had a genius for friendship, a relish of conversation, and — despite his self-condemnations for indolence and procrastination — an energy to take on and complete huge and complex tasks. One of the things that ring most true in Boswell’s grand biography is his image of Johnson as a gladiator in the amphitheater of his own mind, heroically combating the apprehensions that beset him.

Twenty years ago, in a vacation in London, I made a pilgrimage to the garret in Gough Square where, sitting in a defective chair propped against a wall, Johnson labored for nearly nine years to produce the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, and I stood, my head bowed, for a moment at his grave in Westminster Abbey.

His work and his example merit our attention and respect.

Leafiness

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.

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.

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.

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.