Pulp Diction 2: The last copy editor

(Previously: 15 items or trouble)

At the old Sun building on Calvert Street the front door yielded with a rusty creak. Dust lay thick on the guard’s desk, and small birds flew through broken windows. Bundled stacks of the last print edition displayed the headline: SEE US ON THE WEB.

Windows were out on the second floor, too, and scurrying and skittering sounds preceded me as I rounded the corner into the main room. Row on row of cubicles stretched out, each with a computer terminal like a headstone, each with a sad little collection of photos, figurines, long-dead plants. It was like walking the deck of the Mary Celeste.

On a bulletin board near the old copy desk, dangling from a single push pin, a yellowed memo listed a set of banned holiday cliches. The office next to the bulletin board was empty except for a Webster’s New World College Dictionary missing its cover.

A quavering voice asked, “Who’s there?”

A stooped figure, brandishing a red stapler, rose from one of the copy desk work stations where he had been dozing on an improvised pallet of final-edition bundles. His hair was white, his beard untrimmed, his gaze wary. He wore a green eyeshade, and I recognized my quarry: the last copy editor. 

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I used to be a copy editor myself. Tell me how it all ended,” I said, with a sweeping gesture.

“Son, I started here when it was the A.S. Abell Company. Then Times Mirror. Then Tribune. When Tribune went belly-up and the Scavenger Group acquired the place, it was a new editor every six months. Each one came in, did a redesign, announced a new strategy to attract readers, and got bounced before his chair got warm.

“Last one was a fellow named White. Three-barreled name. Allen William White. Lasted a month and a half. They fired him for spending too much on farewell cakes for people leaving the staff.”

“And then?”

“Then they sent in this manager — name of Volponi — who walked into the newsroom, announced that the paper didn’t really need an editor, that editors were just vestiges of an outmoded nineteenth-century industrial model, and fired just about everybody.”

“So why are you still here?”

“See this?” He held up a battered Associated Press Stylebook. “At the end, they could only afford one copy. Kept it locked in the editor’s office. You had to file a form to look at it. When they were all gone, I snagged it. Now it’s mine.”

“So what?”

“See here?” He pointed to a table with a roll of leftover newsprint stretched across the surface. It was covered with writing in a small, crabbed hand. “Now that I’ve got it, I’m revising it, making it right. I’m fixing all the stuff those arrogant fools got wrong for years.”

He was a loony, but I had to humor him. “May I see the book?”

”You have to give it back.” But he handed it over, reluctantly.

It fell open to the VERBS entry. Someone had put a dot under certain letters with a red grease pencil:

“The abbreviation v. is used in this book to identify the spelling of the verb forms of words frequently misspelled.

“SPLIT FORMS: In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb. ...” 

illuminati

Next: The wider web

The Utah House is in session; get popcorn

It is a shame and a loss to the country that newspapers’ cost-cutting has sometimes included their statehouse bureau staffs, for it is in this great republic’s state governments that our native buffoonery comes into gorgeous flower.

I offer this specimen: The House of Representatives in Utah has adopted a resolution that current science about climate change represents “a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome.”

The word conspiracy was removed by amendment from the resolution, presumably by members hoping to retain some shred of reputation for their chamber, but I think you get the drift.

Yesterday on Diane Rehm’s show on National Public Radio, a representative of what I took to be a business-funded nonprofit said that concern about climate change and global warning had been grossly exaggerated by the “alarmist community.” He also talk about scientific “scandals” and used so many other loaded terms that I came to suspect that he might have ties to an alarmist community himself.  

Science over time is self-correcting, when left to scientists. Hypotheses get tested and mistaken ones identified, consensus on theory gives way to revised consensus, and frauds and misconduct ultimately come to light. The worthies of the Utah House might recollect from the Roman Catholic Church’s embarrassing experience with Galileo that it is ill-advised for non-scientists to decree what science says. 

On the other hand, a wealth of free entertainment is there to be had. I look forward to the exposure by the Beehive State’s lawmakers of the Darwinian conspiracy and the Copernican conspiracy, and others I cannot yet imagine. 

Images from the Nopocalypse

Amid the storm, a family dinner last Wednesday evening to celebrate my fifty-ninth birthday. (I am wearing my Baltimore Sun Blizzard of' '93 commemorative sweat shirt from a preprandial bout of shoveling.)  

The young gentlemen from Trinity Episcopal, Towson, whose youthful musculature, assisted by the decrepitude of several elders, cleared half of Roselawn on Sunday afternoon, from the garage in the background to the intersection with Plymouth Road. (Note the flung clump of snow, upper left.)

Happy birthday, Mr. President

Today is a federal holiday, Washington’s Birthday. You may know it as President’s Day, Presidents Day, or Presidents’ Day, but that is a popular title, or the title of some state observances of the day. The federal legislation of 1968 calls it Washington’s Birthday.

George Washington’s birthday is actually February 22, but federal law makes the holiday the third Monday in February. For the first few years of his life, Washington marked birthday was February 11, because in 1732 Britain had not yet adopted the popish Gregorian calendar.

Since the intention of the holiday is to honor the presidency and all presidents, President’s Day looks like a bad choice. You can choose between Presidents Day, which the Associated Press Stylebook prefers, for what that’s worth, or Presidents’ Day.

Today is also Snow day 11 in my reckoning of the Baltimore Nopocalypse, and I can report with pleasure that mobility has been restored at 5516 Plymouth.

Yesterday Kathleen recruited three teenage youths from Trinity Church to help clear Roselawn from our garage to the intersection with Plymouth Road.

J.P. had been out in the morning, making calculations. He measured the distance from the garage to Plymouth Road, the width of our Malibu, and the depth of the snow. He filled a cardboard box with a cubic foot of snow and weighed it — eleven pounds. His determination was that we would have to shift 18,000 pounds of snow, nine tons, to clear the street, and I am in no position to challenge the mathematics of a St. John’s College graduate.

Fortunately, no one had told the three teenagers that the task was impossible, and they went to work with a will. Kathleen, J.P. and I picked up our shovels and were joined by two neighbors, Robin and Harry. In a little over two hours, the eight of us had cleared one lane of the street down to pavement.

Maneuvering the Malibu out of the garage for the first time in nine days, I drove Kathleen and J.P. to the Hamilton Tavern for a celebratory dinner. Try the jalapeno-cheese fritters.

Off with their heads

A reader was momentarily puzzled by a Baltimore Sun headline —

Structure collapses dot city, region

— until he realized that collapses is a noun and dot a verb in this context.

Far more reprehensible, however, is today’s

Purrr-sonal finance

about the costs of owning a pet.

Were I still wielding the rubber chicken of authority, someone would smart for this: an ancient, labored pun requiring punctuation to nudge the reader in the ribs.

Of course, there is also CNN’s Ceremony marks Hariri’s 2005 death. Someone in Atlanta apparently missed English class on the day that “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once” was taught.

On Friday, HeadsUp saw a Fox News headline, Iowa High School Football Coach Murder Trial Starts, and asked, reasonably, “Who did what to whom?”

The newspaper convention of using a comma in place of and comes a cropper in a Dayton Daily News headline noted at TestyCopyEditors.com: Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help.

None of these, however, rise to the level of embarrassment last Monday in Norfolk when the Virginian-Pilot reversed the score of the Superbowl on the front page of the sports section. AOL News quoted the paper’s managing editor, Maria Carrillo, as saying, “It’s just one of those things. We went over every aspect of that story a dozen times. Everything but the score.”

Not that AOL News has a lot to brag about with its own sports headlines, having given us Bledsoe Breathes Life Into Kentucky. I thought that chest compressions were now the preferred method of resuscitation.

Snow day 9

Yeah, I said earlier today I wasn’t going to do another of these. Sue me.

A neighbor says that a city salt truck rolled down Plymouth Road this morning. The main result of that — and I’m sorry to sound like an ingrate — is to have turned the snow at the intersection of Plymouth and Roselawn into mush. Soft and treacherous, but not melted, and with nowhere to go.

I know for sure that there was a salt truck, because the spinning wheels of the SUV I helped to push out of the intersection tonight deposited some salty slush in my mouth.

Kathleen’s latest ambition is that she, J.P., and I will clear Roselawn ourselves in the half block from our garage to the mushy intersections. That would give us Sunday and Monday to accomplish the task before Tuesday’s snow drops what? — another half-foot or so — on top of our efforts.

Of course, it’s possible that a city plow will materialize on Monday and make everything good, especially in light of the two unanswered messages I have sent to Councilman Curran’s office. Then again, it’s possible that most of you will be carried up in the Rapture on Monday and I will have a different set of problems to address. (What? You imagine that Anglicans are going to be in that happy number? Wake up and smell the coffins.)

Back in the mundane world, I have to clean up the dinner dishes. I made linguine with clam sauce, one of my favorites. No one else praised it, but it was consumed. Kathleen baked an excellent focaccia.

After that, the rest of the week’s laundry, in case any of us will require clean clothes past Monday.

Snowbound still, with a side of spleen

Get me out of here: I am discontinuing the Nopocalypse snow day journal, which has become tediously repetitive. Just say to yourself, “The city has not cleared McIntyre’s street,” once a day until I inform you otherwise.


The progress of imbecility: Scripps Howard, which once pretended to publish newspapers, but allowed the newspaper in its corporate headquarters, The Cincinnati Post, to suffer a morbid decline and death, is now transferring copy editing operations from the Ventura County Star in California and the Redding Record Searchlight and Kitsap Sun in Washington state to — wait for it — Corpus Christi, Texas.

That is, in a climate in which corporate figures in the newspaper industry have been chattering merrily about the importance of local news as their key franchise and their hope for the future, they are increasingly ensuring that decisions about the local news you read in your paper will be made by people who are not even in the same state.

Meanwhile, Newsweek has published an article suggesting that the monkey-see-monkey-do pattern of corporate layoffs ends up harming the companies more than helping them.

Attempted suicide: One cannot, however, overstate the damage that newspapers are doing to themselves with slipshod reporting and writing, such as this, that leaves readers in slack-jawed disbelief that people are paid to write like that:

The nightmare of 9/11 will live forever in our minds and memories.

Fast forward eight years later and last Friday, Sept. 11 is a night the Sun Prairie High School football team, coaching staff and Cardinal fans hope can soon be forgotten. Dealt a 22-0 halftime deficit by Madison Memorial in a Big Eight Conference football game at Ashley Field, the Cardinals made an inspiring comeback in the second half but never fully recovered, falling to the Spartans, 22-14.

You Don’t Say will consider nominations for even more egregious prose, while piously hoping that no worse can possibly exist.


It was ever so: Brendan Wolfe, who is working on a book on Bix Beiderbecke, has written to say:

[T]he only newspaper interview he gave in his lifetime, published by his hometown newspaper on Feb. 10, 1929 -- was almost completely plagiarized. The main source was an NEA Service wire story published five months earlier. The 1929 article was unsigned.

I'm curious to know if such plagiarism was common then or viewed any differently from how it is today. I'm also curious to know what significance bylines had in those days. The story appeared on the front of the arts section. Of the several stories on that page, only one had a byline.

Unfortunately, plagiarism has been endemic to journalism from its beginning. Newspapers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century regularly reprinted articles from one another without credit. The nineteenth century was also notable for the pirating of books, in the absence of international copyright law.

The development of industry-wide standards of ethics, as opposed to the dictates of individual proprietors, is a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, associated with the rise and proliferation of journalism schools and professional organizations. That these efforts have been somewhat less than successful is seen in the regular explosion of plagiarism scandals among both the mighty and the petty. Consulting Craig Silverman’s annual roundups of plagiarism and fabrication (2009’s is here) will offer melancholy proof.

In an age when undergraduates beyond number think that copying and pasting from the Internet constitutes writing, this should not come as a shock.

Bylines were not routinely awarded to reporters for much of the history of newspapers. They were conferred as a mark of particular achievement. Over the pasty thirty or forty years, however, they have become routine, so much so that a reporter can expect, and get, a byline for rewriting, or perhaps merely transcribing a press release. Think Gresham’s law.

I took a sardonic amusement on the copy desk whenever a story came over with the names of a dozen reporters to be appended in a “shirttail” as contributors to the heroic effort, because I knew that in order to get the names in — the most important element of the story — the copy desk would have to excise the information the contributors supplied.


Are we to be spared nothing? Oh God, now the Olympics.

Snow day 8

Now we get the How come? What do you mean? questions. How come you say you’re still stranded at home? What do you mean, you can’t get off your street?

For those of you who live in places that enjoy services, let me explain. Once again, the block of Roselawn onto which our garage opens has the accumulation of two major snowfalls. At this point, it is doubtful that anything less than a halftrack could drive on it. Yes, we should have thought to park at least one car on the street where it could have been dug out, but we didn’t think of that. Both cars are immobilized.

My request to the city, made Monday morning, for a plow on Roselawn languishes in Baltimore’s vast archive of unmet requests.

Plymouth Road is little better. The only places where pavement shows are those that the residents have cleared by hand, assisted by the sun. The middle of the street has a double-rut of compacted snow made by various SUVs and pickup trucks. That hardened snow melts a little in the sun during the day and refreezes in the night. In the absence of a salt truck, we should have a nice treacherous little glare of ice in another day or so.

A little stir-crazy, I ventured over to Harford Road this morning for a reconnoiter. Hamilton Avenue on the far side of McClean/Laurelton/Woodbourne — that is, on the other side of the street from our neighborhood — has two clear lanes. That is a good thing, because no more than half the houses on Hamilton have cleared the sidewalks, forcing pedestrians to resort to the street and dodge oncoming traffic. (Not everyone has a copy editor’s brute strength to shovel his weight in water several dozen times.)

I took a cane on this walk, in part for balance in the slippery patches, but also because even in this society motorists are reluctant to run down a gray-haired cripple.

Harford Road appears to be largely clear and well-trafficked. The #19 bus is running again. So on Tuesday morning, assuming that classes resume at Loyola, I should be able to travel by bus from Harford Road to Charles Street, allowing a couple of hours or more for the walk, the wait, and the transfer. Assuming that Baltimore will shrug off the snowfall projected for Monday. I can hardly wait.

Kathleen and J.P. got a ride this morning with a friend who was able to drive within three blocks of our house, so she is catching up with work at Trinity Episcopal in Towson and he is serving soup at the Atwater’s at Kenilworth. I have custody of the cats, who are dozing.

I may follow their example.

Pulp Diction: 15 items or trouble

You get ’em in the checkout at Safeway — harried mothers with kids clamoring for candy, bleary-eyed old guys pushing a cartload into the fifteen-items line, kids with green hair buying exotic produce. Some chat with the cashier, but nobody talks to the bag boy. Fine with me. I liked anonymity when I was a copy editor. I like it better now.

I was pushing a train of carts back toward the store when she grabbed my arm. I turned. “You,” I said. It wasn’t friendly.

“Mr. McIntyre, I really need to talk with you,” she said. Mostly, she was a pert little thing, but this time her voice trembled.

“I don’t have anything to say to you, Fogarty.” That’s Mignon Fogarty, Grammar Dame, Grammar Girl, something like that. Big-time blogger, raking in big bucks from rubes who couldn’t tell the present from the preterite if it jabbed them in the keister.

“Please, it’s urgent. I’ve heard from Martha Brockenbrough.”

More female trouble. The last time I saw the Brockenbrough skirt, I was in the witness stand, and she was at the defense table, trying — not convincingly — to look innocent. I’d turned her in for a homicide. I didn’t stay for the rest of the trial, but I’d heard she copped a plea to manslaughter while the jury was still out. Now she’s in the Big House for a good long while. You know the story.

“Sister, I’ve still got nothing to say to you. How the hell did you know to look for me here, anyhow?”

“I asked about you at the Intelligencer-Argus, and they said you’d been let go. Somebody said you might be here.”

“Let go? Let go? Toots, I was unceremoniously dumped, made redundant, sacked, eighty-sixed, kicked to the curb, reduced in force, right-sized. A year ago I was a minor-league copy desk tsar, and today I’m wearing a cardboard belt. The big boys got this idea that editors were interposing too many touches between the writer and the reader, and they sacked the lot of us. Just as well. They were talking about touching more than the staff at a day care center that’s hired a pedophile. I’m well rid of ’em.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I know you were well thought of. But I’m in trouble, and I really need your help.”

“Why? Caught with counterfeit gerunds again?”

“It’s not like that. Ever since I heard from Martha, I’ve been followed. I think my phone is tapped. My mail is being tampered with. My car is making a funny noise. I think it needs an oil change.”

She was getting rattled. Nothing new there. “So who cares about you?” I asked. “You’re just some two-bit grammar fancier who made it big on the Internet. There’re dozens like you — scores.”

“It’s not over,” she said, her voice breaking. “That plot you stopped last time, the one to sabotage National Grammar Day, that’s not over. They just got some of the little fish.”

“And now that you’ve been seen talking to me, they’ll come after me. Thanks a heap, lady.”

“I know where to go to find out more, but I can’t go myself. I thought you might.”

“Where is it that you can’t go that you want me to?”

She looked at me. Something cold enveloped my whole body.

“Calvert Street.”


NEXT: The last copy editor

Snow day 7

At seven o’clock yesterday morning the snow had stopped briefly, with about three inches or so of new snow topping the old accumulation. By eight the storm had resumed, and it kept going for another eleven hours. Heavy snow, whipped horizontally by high winds.

At times during the day I just sat, looking out the window and marveling. We are used to the idea of making plans and taking action; there is, we think, always something we can do. Not yesterday. Most of the state simply shut down. Travel on the roads was forbidden, you couldn’t get anywhere, and there was nothing much to go to anyhow. Noting to do but wait until the storm had spent itself.

J.P. did go out in the morning to clear the walks, and I did a turn in late afternoon. Today we’ll finish up the walks and see what, if anything, can be done about the street. But no plow ever appeared on Plymouth or Roselawn, and there are places where the snow has drifted three feet deep on the street. Our cars are not leaving the garage for some time, and we’ll have to see what kind of bus service will be restored. And when.

Fortunately, the power did not fail, so I was able to pass the first day of my sixtieth year — sounds worse than fifty-nine, doesn’t it? — comfortably.

I blogged a bit and got a good start on David Nokes’s biography of Jonathan Swift. I indulged in a wee dram or two of the good bourbon.

I tinkered some with this year’s grammarnoir series, “Pulp Diction.” The first installment will go up later today, followed by weekly installments and concluding on March 4, National Grammar Day.

I spent some time on Facebook, reading a steady stream of birthday greetings and good wishes from far-flung friends and fans, for which I am touched and deeply grateful.

Kathleen and J.P. collaborated on the birthday dinner. J.P. put together a casserole from available materials: ham, rice, peas, asparagus, cheddar cheese, and an improvised sauce tinged with horseradish. Kathleen labored over an apple-cranberry pie, a remnant of which I am about to tuck into for breakfast. We toasted the day with prosecco and afterward settled down to a quiet evening, grateful that the snow had finally come to a halt.

Today, the digging out begins again.