Back to the books

 It was a grand feeling to walk out of the Hamilton branch of the Pratt Library this morning with a selection of books under my arm. 

During the apprehensions and tensions of the pandemic, along with stresses at the job that I do not plan to describe, my reading dropped off sharply. Oh, I read articles in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and other publications online, but the appetite to devour books dwindled to next to nothing. 

Happily, release into retirement over the past three months or so saw appetite return. 

Penguin is bringing out Georges Simenon's Maigret novels in fresh translations, and I sampled ten or so of them. They're a quick read. I got through Robert Dallek's Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life without learning much that I hadn't already read elsewhere. Hillary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, the last volume of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, was a delight on every page, as was Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex. 

Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents paralleled and illuminated much of the discussion about critical race theory, and Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg's I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad added considerably to what I already knew about the Gun Trace Task Force scandal. One of Our Own brought to an end the late Jane Haddam's Gregor Demarkian detective series, and rereading John Le Carré's Smiley's People was as enjoyable as the first time. 

Jane Gardam's Old Filth, John Williams's historical epistolary novel Augustus, and the late Thomas Vinciguerra's Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White and the Golden Age of The New Yorker had been on my to-read list for years. I went back to Eudora Welty's A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. 

Now, thanks to the Pratt, I can look forward to Jack Lynch's You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf from Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. I haven't read anything by John O'Hara in forty years, so now I have a book of short stories to investigate, and I picked up Phillip Lopate's Portrait Inside My Head to reacquaint myself with his essays. 

The bookworm returns. 

Just don't do this

 All those years I listened to reporters bitching that the copy desk was crushing their creativity I also  marveled at their fondness for hackneyed devices. It may be that they think, as one reporter once told me, "It's not a cliche when I use it," but readers are undeceived. 

If you feel tempted to use any of these, reach for the nearest book and bring it down smartly on your hand. (Readers should feel free to add items in the comments.) 

Something and something and something, oh my!

Meet Firstname Lastname. 

It's not your grandfathers'/father's X. 

Webster's defines X as ...

Welcome to ... 

Yes, Virginia ...

Ah, X. 

It was an X seasonal, X weathery day ...

Any opening that asks a question, to which the reader's likely response is "Who cares?"

The good news is, the bad news is ... 

A sentence that some situation is "still" the case, tipping the reader that the story offers nothing new. 

The "X is not alone," "X is not the only" transition from an anecdotal opening.  Just get on with it. The reader knows how this convention works. 

Chances are excellent that you are mistaken about English grammar

 One way to get the morning off to a strong start is to open an online discussion of grammar and growl,  realizing that many people hold strong opinions that are wrong. So rather than wear out my wrists responding to them, I am writing an omnibus response to uninformed opinions so that I can simply post a link and move on. 

No one knows how to use proper grammar these days.

I edited the work of professional journalists at daily newspapers for forty years and taught editing at a liberal arts college for twenty-five, and I can assure you that just about no one got the grammar straight. Every shift, every class involved making subjects and verbs agree, putting modifiers in their proper place, sorting out homonyms. Writing formal standard English is a skill that not many people master, and not many ever have. 

The English language is in decline.

English is a living language and has been going strong for centuries. There are, in fact, many Englishes, and the various dialects are not inferior to standard English, just used for different purposes. Usually  fuming about decline comes down to some nonstandard usage or dialect or particular word that the commenter has taken a dislike to. 

I regret to inform you that English does not care what you like or dislike. 

What you see is that the internet permits anyone who has a keyboard and a link to display their skill or lack of skill in writing to the world. Most of the gatekeepers to publication are gone, like the editors on vanished copy desks, and for the first time, as Gretchen McCulloch explains in Because Internet, the whole range of literacy in the populace is visible. 

No one is teaching grammar.

This one boils down to a belief that the traditional schoolroom grammar, relentlessly hammered in, is the only proper method of instruction. 

In elementary school in rural Kentucky, I was instructed in that schoolroom grammar by the formidable Mrs. Jessie Perkins and the equally formidable Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and I mastered it. Evidence suggests that not many of my classmates did. The method is only effective with a minority of students, like sentence diagramming: Students who already have an understanding of syntax love it; students who do not learn little or nothing from it.

The further problem with the schoolroom grammar of elementary and secondary schools is that it is grossly oversimplified, and not many students advance to a more sophisticated understanding. It is also riddled with obsolete dicta and superstitions. This is why, a century after the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler exploded the prohibition about split infinitives, you can still find people carrying on about this imaginary error. 

Some schools, recognizing the ineffectiveness of the traditional method, have tried others. One approach is to say that since many subjects require writing, all the teachers in those subjects are effectively instructing their students in grammar and usage. But we know that what is everyone's job is actually no one's job. 

I found in teaching that many students came to me with little or no instruction in grammar and usage, and that those who had been instructed had often been taught rubbish. 

It was acquaintance with linguists and lexicographers that helped me to finally unlearn the defective or inadequate learning I had so painstakingly acquired. 

Maybe think before you post.

You think it's incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition? Use literally in the nonliteral sense or use hopefully to mean "it is hoped that"?  Seeing or hearing some particular word is "like fingernails on a chalkboard"? (Not the most original simile you could have laid hands on.) 

I remind you that Garner's Modern English Usage by Bryan A. Garner (for reasonably informed prescriptivism), Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (for historical perspective and range of choices), and Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer (for bracing advice) are in the stores. You could look it up. There's a lot in English, and even standard English has more choices than you may be aware of. 

A final note

I included a split infinitive and a singular their in this post. If you read past them, then you can see that they are imaginary errors. If you did notice them and were inclined to remark on them, get a life. 

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?

 The Census Bureau's 2020 count shows a continuation of the trend noticed a century ago when Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor were singing "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" after the end of the First World War.  

Many rural counties lost population over the past decade while the population of metro areas (cities and suburbs) increased. It's notable what happened within specific segments of the population. White people, who made up 63% of the population ten years ago now amount to 57.3%, continuing a demographic trend that will make white people a minority. The percentage of people identifying as Latino, Asian, or multiracial increased, while the percentage of Black people remained constant.

Strikingly, the actual number of white people decreased in the count by 5 million, which can be accounted for by the deaths of older white people and a reduced birthrate among younger white people unable to afford having children in the current economy. 

We can expect these numbers to add to the fears and resentments of older white people, already apprehensive about the diminution of their political and cultural influence, and they will surely stimulate efforts to exploit that fear and resentment. The efforts by some Republicans to maintain white political power by making voting more difficult for minorities would, if successful, amount to an American version of apartheid. And the weight given in the Senate by members from what H.L. Mencken called "the cow states" could contribute to the success of that project. 

White panic, the dark mutterings of white supremacists, and the desire to reconstruct some nostalgic version of the 1950s--Blacks at the back of the bus, women in the kitchen, gays in the closet--are political realities of the day, but there is no reason to think that they will prevail, despite making a great deal of noise. Demographic trends are in motion that are not likely to be reversed. Even South African eventually had to give up apartheid. 

Better to make the most of an increasingly diverse nation, which will also be a more interesting one. 

Here for the asking

 The academic year is cranking up, and though it has been two years since I last taught editing at Loyola University Maryland, an impulse to harangue the young remains.

So if you teach a class in the Baltimore area and think your students might benefit from my making a guest appearance to talk about grammar and usage or journalism, write to me at jemcintyre@gmail.com, and we'll discuss the possibilities.  

Whose prayer in school?

 People are cluttering Facebook and Twitter with calls to put God, and specifically prayer, in the public schools. I'm old enough to remember compulsory prayer in school: It was Christian, and Protestant at that. 

If some way around 1962's Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision were found, I think the Constitution would still not allow one form of religious belief to be privileged. So how would you devout folks feel about Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or Native American prayers in the schools? Wiccan? Perhaps not so enthusiastic? 

The Founders knew what life was like in nations with official state religions, and they were determined that the United States would be a secular republic, with freedom to profess any form of religion, or none. True, the early Republic was culturally Christian, and mainly Protestant, but if you look out the window, you may notice that white Protestants have become a minority, and we usually frown on a minority that seeks to dictate to the majority. 

So if are concerned to spread Christian belief and practice, you might do well to emulate the earliest Christians, by the example of your lives rather than by attempts to hijack the state to impose your preferences. 

Schooled in dishonesty about the nation's past

 You may have seen an asinine tweet by Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, earlier this month: "If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed. It was corrupt. It was racist. That's really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country."

Even I, in American history class in my junior year of high school knew about the three-fifths clause: that the slaveholding states would not ratify the Constitution without protection of slavery, and that counting each Black human being as a non-voting three-fifths of a person would give those states a boost in representation in the House of Representatives. 

And I knew, in the sanitized textbook version,* that the fights over admission of new states in the first half of the nineteenth century were over maintaining enough slaveholding states to maintain a bloc of senators able to thwart any antislavery legislation. 

The Civil War, I recall, had something to do with tariffs and was mainly about states' rights. We were not told that slavery was the only state's right the Confederacy cared about, though their own secession legislation said so. Reconstruction was something about "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags." Don't recall that we go to Jim Crow. 

At least we weren't subjected to one of those Southern textbooks saying that enslaved people were well off and grateful to their beneficent masters.**

Everything touchy about the nation's past was minimized. There had been "problems," for sure, and perhaps mistakes were sometimes made, but nothing halted our national triumphal rush to glory. 

My history teacher, Jim Johnson, had impulses to encourage thought. He set up a class debate over the Mexican War and assigned me the contra side. So I pointed out, with evidence, that the United States provoked a conflict with a weaker nation to seize territory for expansion. (Abraham Lincoln opposed the war.) And I was voted down by my classmates, who had swallowed Manifest Destiny whole. 

So it's not surprising that those whose scanty schooling in history amounted to patriotic mythology resist any effort to teach an honest account of our past. 

* To learn why U.S. textbooks reduce the country's history to a kind of anodyne paste, look into Frances Fitzgerald's America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979). 

** I suspect that Mr. Pompeo may not be as ignorant as he sounds. He doesn't want anyone to think that the United States has a racist past extending into the present, but I expect that he knows that there was once a legal category, octoroon, to identify someone with one black great-grandparent who was therefore Black. 

Not worth knowing

You do not have to be on Twitter or Facebook long before you come across some glaring example of pedagogical malfeasance. 

Today some poor devil mentioned a teacher who cut one letter grade from a paper each time the word that occurred, a lesson the poor devil has apparently carried into adult life.* One recalls Jane Austen: "We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing."

Let's be clear.

That as a relative pronoun introduces dependent clauses, marking the relationship with a main clause. 

It is often omitted in speech, particularly when the main clause and dependent clause are both short, as in the line from O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “We thought you was a toad.” But you do not want to make this a universal practice.

The Associated Press Stylebook, so frequently cited by people unaware of what is in it, offers useful advice. First, that must be used when an adverb of time follows the main verb. "They found out Thursday that their ship had sailed." 

Also, some verbs idiomatically require the use of that: advocate, assert, contend, declare, estimate, make clear, point out, propose, and state. 

And it must be used before subordinate clauses beginning with after, although, because, before, in addition to, until, and while. "McIntyre said that while he has made this point repeatedly over the years, no one appears to have taken notice."

AP advises, “When in doubt, include that. Omission can hurt. Inclusion never does.” 

For my part, it is depressing to calculate how much time I spent over the past forty years inserting that into awkwardly phrased and unidiomatic newspaper copy.

* I do not know but suspect that the class was in journalism, since journalists as a class appear to get the fantods over that relative pronoun. 

Another futile low growl in the morning

I snarled one morning on reading that someone had refuted another party in a political dispute, deploring the erosion of the word's strict sense of "to prove wrong."  

But it has been a long time since Samuel Johnson could reply to the argument of Bishop Berkeley that the objects of our senses are not actually material objects by dashing his foot against a stone and saying."I refute him thus!" Today, I think thanks mainly to journalists, the sense "to deny the truth or accuracy of" or "to dispute" is prevalent. 

Thus when you read that one bombastic politico has "refuted" another bombastic political, you are to understand that the one merely rebutted the other, proof being in short supply among us these days. 

You may feel, as does Bryan Garner, that refute "doesn't mean merely 'to counter an argument' but 'to disprove beyond doubt; to prove a statement false,' " and that the "rebut" sense is an error. But Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that the "rebut" sense became standard in the twentieth century, and it can be found today in all the dictionaries. 

What then to do. There is always the option of taking to some online platform to whinge that people who use the "rebut" sense are uneducated cattle and that English is rotting away before our eyes. (You know the type.)

But the language goes where it will, even if I do not care for the direction. That leaves me, in practice as a writer and editor, to frame a necessary question: If I want to use refute in the older, strict sense, can I be sure that readers will understand how I mean it? 

If I can't pile up enough context to bolster the "prove wrong" sense, then I am better off abandoning the enterprise. 

It looked so nice they wrote it twice

From The New York Times as published in my morning paper: "Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monday following rare protests around the island nation against food shortages, high prices and a worrying lack of medicine amid the coronavirus crisis. [Take a breath.] Cuba's president said the demonstrations were stirred up on social media by Cuban Americans in the United States. [Take another breath. Second paragraph] "President Joe Biden on Monday called on the Cuban government to heed the demands of thousands of citizens who took to the streets Sunday to protest power outages, food shortages and a worrying lack of medicine."

Of the two opening paragraphs tacked on to this article, I much prefer the shorter one, the longer one being upholstered with "the capital of Havana" when "Havana" would have been concise and less condescending, and that hoary cliche "the island nation," assuming that I wouldn't be quite sure that Cuba is surrounded by water.

Later in the article, the reader discovers that Cuba is "a country known for quashing dissent." Noted.

This concludes the morning grumble.