We've been had

My eminent colleague Karen Conlin posted this morning an awkward sentence published by a Chicago television station: "A man killed in a shooting outside a Chicago Greyhound bus terminal in the West Loop on Harrison Street has had his identity released." It presents two issues, one grammatical and one journalistic. 

For the first, the verb "had" commonly suggests agency: "She had the leak in the roof fixed." "They had their wills and powers of attorney drawn up." But journalists frequently use "had" to indicate merely that something has happened, as in the specimen sentence, which suggests that the dead man released his identity posthumously. The examples of "had" meaning "happened" aren't always this ludicrous, but they always strike a false note. 

The reason journalists use this construction is to make sure they have something up front in the sentence to draw the reader's attention. It would have been easy to write "Police released yesterday the identify of a man killed. ..." But "Police released ..." is a yawn. "Man killed in shooting outside Greyhound bus station" is the most interesting thing the writer can offer, particularly since this looks like a second-day story with the identification the only new element. 

And the identity isn't in the opening sentence, likely because the victim was not anyone notable.

This specimen sentence has not had itself edited. 

Maybe it's time to let go of it

I posted this a couple of days ago: What long-held usage distinction/rule/shibboleth have you just given up as an editor, reluctantly or not? I was happy to drop the bogus "over/more than" and no longer see any utility in "comprise/compose" and "compare with/compare to."

Many of the responses were instructive. 

Dave Nelsen replied, "There was a time when I gave a lot more thought to singular 'they,' carefully considering the context and audience every time I’d come across it. Now I just allow it anywhere and everywhere, which is so much easier.."

Wendalyn Nichols was succinct: "I welcomed the moment that being a fan of singular 'they' no longer felt like a dirty secret."

Inevitably, one gentleman replied: "actually, right is right and wrong is wrong, and as the ink-on-paper world dies it should do so with some fidelity to the language. also, 'they' and 'their' as references to an individual are always grammatically wrong. precision exists for a reason."

"They" has been in use as a singular in English as long as there has been an English, antedating the singular use of "you." Even the Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook have grudgingly accepted reality. Language Log has multiple posts on the subject, for those willing to be informed. 

As it happens, today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, after which the damned Normans destroyed English, collaborating with illiterate peasants to drop inflections and junk the genders of nouns, and to illustrate how a language is an evolving consensus among its users. 

Thomas Consolo says that he is "still not giving up on 'comprises' vs. 'is comprised of.' " Ah, the years I've spent changing "is comprised of" to "is composed of." The rule, for civilians, is that "comprise" can only mean "includes," not "is made up of." The other day I made a quick check at the Corpus of Contemporary American English (limited access because I no longer have university faculty status) and found 2,537 citations for "comprises" and 3,229 citations for "comprised of." When the language moves on, think about moving with it. 

Someone else asked about "farther/further." In the 2011 edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, 62% of the since-disbanded usage panel favored the traditional distinction that "farther" should be restricted to physical distance, not "to a greater degree or extent." In the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2014), the first definition of "further" is given as "farther." 

"Farther/further" is a prime example of what I have called dog-whistle editing: insisting on distinctions of usage that only other copy editors hear. Another is the journalistic "over/more than" rule, developed by 19th-century U.S. newspaper editors to restrict "over" to physical distance. It is a rule that does not actually exist in English outside of newspapers. Look that up in Merriam-Webster's. 

Of course, there was a tweet saying, "So, taken together, the thread respondents uphold no standards at all. Depressing."

I spent forty years as a copy editor enforcing standards, and still do as a retirement side-hustle. Some of the standards I used to enforce I no longer do, having recognized that the language has changed and that some of them  ("farther/further," "over/more than," "since/because") were bogus. If you want to be a serious editor, you must continually examine what you are doing and make an effort to keep informed. 

And there is this. There is not enough time for editing, even in the places that still place a value on it. All editing involves triage, and if you are still spending your time changing "further" to "farther" or "over" to "more than" out of a misplaced sense of precision, you may well be overlooking some error of fact, some jumble of organization, or some piece of slack writing that begs to be tightened. 

Try to keep up.

Hilary Mantel on royals and pandas

 From "Royal bodies: From Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton"

"Our current royal family doesn't have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren't they interesting? Aren't they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it's still a cage." 

It's all the rage

 Words and usages in English go in and out of fashion. When a new expression, or a repurposed old one, emerges, the eager adapters jump on it, because it's all the rage, and the traditionalists scorn it, because all is rage. 

I've mentioned elsewhere that contact as a verb was widely deplored as a vulgarism in the 1940s and 1950s (" 'Contact" is not a verb in this house," Nero Wolfe tells Archie Goodwin). But as the means of getting in contact multiplied, the objection faded. The objection to hopefully as a sentence adverb meaning "it is hoped that" from the 1970s and 1980s has also been wearing away, having had little foundation to start with beyond disliking "the way those people talk." 

Thirty years ago, John S. Carroll as editor of The Sun had strong traditionalist views about language, and he deplored using host as a verb. So I dutifully added the prohibition to our house stylebook, and the copy desk dutifully changed every host as verb to play host to. In time John Carroll and the language moved on, and at The Sun we hosted without trepidation. With good reason. The current sense of hosting events carries a sense of sponsorship, often of large-scale events, by organizations, something beyond the traditional sense of receiving guests and entertaining socially. And play host to as a substitute is stilted. 

Thirty years ago, The Sun also had a prohibition in its stylebook damning the use of suck to mean "objectionable or inadequate" as "vulgar street language." The reason, when younger reporters asked for an explanation, was that the word suggested fellation, and their reaction was "Oh come on." (Merriam-Webster still calls it "slang, sometimes vulgar.")

We also upheld the pupil/student distinction but dropped it as educators increasingly came to see younger children as active participants in their learning rather than passive recipients of information. The Associated Press Stylebook has eliminated all vestiges of the traditional distinction. We also got the occasional letter from a reader objecting to our referring to children as kids ("Kids are goats"), but that is another item that the AP Stylebook has quietly heaved over the side. 

Language, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our cavils away. 

Death, be not affected

 Don't be mealy-mouthed about mortality. People die. When they do, just say so. 

At the death of Elizabeth II, some reports said that she had "passed" or "passed away." She died. 

Much as your squeamish discomfort with brute facts might tempt you to euphemize, pray don't. 

People die; they do not pass, pass away, pass over, expire, depart, succumb, enter eternal rest, go to be with Jesus/the Lord, go west, cross the bar, buy the farm, pay a debt to nature, rest from their labors, wander the Elysian Fields, breathe their last, answer the final summons, go to meet their Maker, yield up the ghost, ring down the curtain, cash in their chips, shuffle off this mortal coil, join the choir invisible, or climb the golden staircase.

The generous and the pinched

Another wrangle last week, this one in an online discussion with people who insist that the relative pronoun that, against all evidence, must not be used to refer to human beings and is "dehumanizing" when used so. Such dogmatism about the English language is common, strident, and frequently ill-informed. 

H.W. Fowler exploded the split-infinitive superstition a century ago. Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins has been available for half a century. Bryan Garner has been exposing superstitions and shibboleths about English usage for a generation. And yet what we commonly hear is that some commonplace word or usage is "uneducated" or "illiterate" or "like fingernails on a blackboard," and that we are verging on barbarism. 

What by contrast I found appealing in Ellen Jovin's Rebel with a Clause is its atmosphere of openness and generosity. Ellen Jovin travels around the country from her base in New York City, setting up her Grammar Table in public spaces to engage any passerby who is interested in discussion of grammar and usage. Her account shows that people are fascinated by language, keen to talk about it, and--make note--willing to be better informed. 

My own experience as a professional copy editor over forty years is that my colleagues, far from being the robotic assassins of prose that some reporters would have had you think, have been open and generous in their approach to the craft. It was a quarter-century ago that Pam Robinson and the late Hank Glamann on their own volunteer time got the American Copy Editors Society (now ACES: The Society for Editing) launched. It has ever since relied on scores of volunteer speakers to broaden our perspective on language and editing and deepen our skills. 

In my own blogging I have learned a great deal from exchanges with linguists such as Geoffrey Pullum and Arnold Zwicky and with lexicographers such as Peter Sokolowski, Kory Stamper, Steve Kleinedler, and Emily Brewster, all willing to share their expertise and offer support. What one finds from them is that there are many Englishes beyond the standard written form, all of which have fascinating features worth examining. 

Karen Yin's Conscious Style Guide and Conscious Language Newsletter are invaluable sources of intelligent and informed explorations of the ways the language is shifting and efforts to treat everyone we write about with dignity and respect. 

There are, of course, fair targets: journalists who can't make their subjects and verbs agree, academics who make a fetish of obscurity, merchants of vacuous business jargon, and anyone who inflicts  pretentious or dishonest or dull prose on you. Striking a blow for clarity and accuracy is always apt. 

But they aren't the targets of the people with the pinched view of language, the view that some form of standard written English is the only "correct" one, that some schoolroom nostrum carried into adulthood (and often misremembered) is eternally valid. What is actually behind the pinched view is not really an objection to words and usages in themselves, but to the people who use them. These objections are an opportunity to parade contempt for people thought to be inferiors.

Life is all choices. You can choose to frisk among the Englishes with people who are open-handedly willing to talk about them with you. Or you can clutch a precarious gentility. 

God doesn't think he's a doctor

I got into a back-and-forth online this week over using the title doctor for people with non-medical degrees. 

He's the issue for stylebook editors and  the tinpot despots who make style decrees for publications: At colleges and universities, the title doctor is in widespread, nearly universal,* use. But people who have attended college or university are a minority, and in the wider population, a doctor is understood to be an M.D. 

Or a D.D.S. or a D.O. or a D.C. or a D.P.M. or a D.V.M. (Those are the doctorates the Associated Press Stylebook approves.)

The issue has some currency because of the recent sneering at Jill Biden's being called "Dr. Biden." She holds an earned doctorate in education, but the Ed.D. does not score high in prestige on some campuses and is often dismissed as not a real doctorate. (One illustration of the snobbery among the learned came when I was at Syracuse. Someone caused a stir by obtaining and releasing the faculty salaries, and the provost caused a further stir by saying publicly that you could not expect to hire a physics professor for what you would pay a Spanish teacher.)

I think it's questionable that the Associated Press Stylebook should take it upon itself to determine which academic degrees are more genuine than others. And its decision seems even more questionable if it is based on prejudice or ignorance in the wider population. 

We are a middle-class, status-conscious society. When someone has sat through all those classes and seminars, slogged through all those articles and books, and pushed out some dissertation which, if they are fortunate, no one but their committee will ever read, let them have what little scrap of distinction society permits them. 

* A member of the faculty at Syracuse, a Chaucerian, preferred the title professor, because, he said, doctor was the title of someone making a living by probing people's orifices.  

Take it out: in the wake of

Journalism operates on conventions (write one obituary or one police story, and you can write a thousand), and the pressure of time leads reporters to reach for prefabricated phrases. The best writers try to break free of formula. Here's a hint. 

Nearly every day I see an account that some event has occurred or circumstance developed in the wake of another event or circumstance. This is, first, a dead or at least moribund metaphor, like free rein. Unless the reader is a sailor, it's unlikely that the expression conveys an image of the disturbance in water from the passage of a ship. 

Apart from the loss of the visual image, the expression has lost much of its original sense. When a large vessel moves through the water, its wake has the potential to endanger smaller craft. But in most contexts in newspapers, in the wake of does not mean "complicates" or "makes more difficult." It often means that one event is a consequence of another, or even simply came after another. 

Change in the wake of to following, and the reader will readily understand your meaning. And you will have omitted three words you can well do without.  

Start here

 When I posted photos of the shelves on which I keep my books on language and writing, Ben Yagoda noticed some gaps and kindly sent me copies of two of his books. Today I commend to you How to Not Write Bad (Riverhead Books, 177 pages, $15 and cheap at the price). 

It is not what you would call an ambitious book; he makes it clear from the start that you should look elsewhere if you have ambitions for belles lettres. He wants to make the student writing papers and the person writing memos for colleagues adequate and free of embarrassment at the task. 

His method is to identify four dozen or so basic lapses in grammar, usage, and writing that he has identified over the years as a teacher of writing at the University of Delaware. Subject-verb disagreement, punctuation, confusion of homonyms, reliance on cliches, and more. I can attest to the accuracy of his catalogue; these are the same deficiencies I identified in student work over twenty-five years at Loyola University Maryland and over forty years in the work of professional journalists. These are the mistakes that everyone makes all the time. 

He urges the writer to keep current with how the language is being used by wide reading. There is no substitute. How to Not Write Bad was published in 2013, and in it he predicts that singular they, widely deplored at the time, was likely to become standard in a decade. So he was prescient. Some of the cliches he lists have faded, but a substantial number of them continue to deaden writing. You have to pay attention. 

His examples, many from student or business work, are apt and his explanations concise. He shows how to excise extraneous language. And he continually stresses that you must clean up after yourself. 

If your ambition is to become a great writer, have at it. But to become a great writer, you must first become a good enough writer. This is a place to start. 

The small part

 On Saturday I attended a little gathering of Baltimore Sun employees and alumni to celebrate the belated acquisition of The Sun's 2020 Pulitzer Prize for exposing Mayor Catherine Pugh's Healthy Holly scandal, a handsome Tiffany crystal. I remarked online of my pride in having had a small part in the enterprise. 

A gentleman, whose name I do not care to mention, commented, "Only losers take credit credit for something in which they had little to no impact."* This is how people think when they do not understand what copy editors do. (Lately this is also how officers of publishing corporations appear to think.) 

It is the case that I did not report or write the articles or take the photographs. But other things accumulate to create impact. 

In editing the Healthy Holly stories, after they had been through the hands of the reporters and the assigning editors, I read each one through. If something did not seem clear to me, and might not be clear to the reader, I asked questions. I checked for factual accuracy and resolved discrepancies. I regularized, where necessary, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, subject-verb agreement, and other matters of English usage. When the length of a story exceeded the space allotted on the page, I had to trim intelligently so that no significant details were lost. I wrote or edited the photo captions. I wrote the headlines, which are the reader's gateway to the text, seeking to make sure that they were accurate and appealing. And I made a page proof so that another editor could check my work. The whole point is to make each story factually correct and as clear as possible. 

Work that is largely invisible may not be appreciated, and it was true in many newsrooms for many years that copy editors were seen as losers, the copy desk the last stop for reporters whose legs or livers had given out. But every copy editor knows how much work goes into this obscure craft, and how much it can improve stories. 

The better reporters also know that. 

*I could write [sic] after that doubled "credit," but that would be snotty.