Baltimore: The Greatest City in America

 In 1986, when we moved to Baltimore so that I could begin work on The Sun's copy desk, we rented an apartment in Towson while we looked for a house in the city. 

A couple in a nearby apartment had a daughter the same age as our twins, and the children played together and swam in the pool. In conversation with the parents we discovered that though they had lived in Towson for several years, they had never set foot inside Baltimore's city limits. 

Their daughter had never been to the National Aquarium, the Science Center, the Maryland Zoo. Or the Baltimore Museum of Art or the Walters Art Museum. Had never strolled around the Inner Harbor or seen the Constellation. Her parents were content with the turn-ons of Towson (which was not in 1986 the cosmopolitan happening place it has become today).*

In that they resemble many people in the counties surrounding Baltimore who decline to come into the city or, if they happen to work in the city, prefer to drive in at 40 mph or more and exit at the same speed at the earliest possible moment. They regularly write letters to The Sun to inform us that we in the city are living in a cesspit. 

That is not to say that the bleak picture of a crime-ridden decaying city that Sinclair's Fox 45 television station exerts itself to broadcast to the surrounding area can be wished away. 

Too many people, especially impetuous young men, carry guns and use them. Some years ago the driver of an unlicensed cab was fatally shot across the street from my house at 9 p.m. That was when I discovered that one task for the Fire Department is to show up the next day and hose the blood and brain matter from the pavement. 

There is no denying the consequences of living in a one-party city with too many Democratic hacks in government. Two mayors have left office amid charges of corruption. We spend more than $600 million a year on a police department that seems unable to reduce homicides or even manage traffic enforcement, and for which we have spent an additional $22 million in settlements to the victims of the corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. Our Department of PublicWorks can't manage water billing or operate the sewage treatment plants. 

We have schools that have to send children home on days that are intolerably hot or intolerably cold. 

A third of city residents do not own an automobile, and public transit is laughable. 

So you may be wondering why I am still in the modest house my wife and I bought nearly thirty-six years ago, or why I call Baltimore The Greatest City in America.**

Our house is in a racially mixed neighborhood in the northeastern quadrant of the city, and we like our neighbors. There's a creek nearby that I pass on my daily walks, occasionally seeing a heron take flight or a hawk circle overhead. 

Despite the city's reputation for danger, for more than thirty years I drove through the city after work at the newspaper at midnight, one o'clock, or three o'clock in the morning, without incident. 

There's a very nice bookstore in the neighborhood, one of several in the city. (You see that, Towson?) There's also a very nice Italian restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Abruzzo; my wife and I had a leisurely lunch there with a friend yesterday. The Enoch Pratt Free Library has a branch here and is diligent about providing books I request. 

We have a group of friends who meet at a bar near Belvedere Square at three o'clock in the afternoon several days a week for beer and badinage. 

My parish, Memorial Episcopal Church, has a progressive history: rejecting its segregationist past, hiring the first woman priest in the diocese and the first openly gay male priest, working to form alliances with the surrounding Black neighborhoods.***

We've been to the museums, the symphony, the zoo, the opera, and the Inner Harbor. We've visited the one-of-a-kind Visionary Arts Museum and drunk in the view of the city from the summit of Federal Hill. 

And yet, when I say any of this online, some jabroni in the county tells me that I'm living in a shithole and am a hopeless liberal who can't listen to reason (as if some feckless echo of Donald Trump constituted the voice of reason). Let me tell you, I have seen what some call the lovely suburban life, York Road from Towson to Cockeysville, Ritchie Highway from Annapolis to Baltimore, and I'm having none of it.

My wife and I have had a happy life here for three decades, and now that we are retired we feel no impulse to leave what for us has been The Greatest City in America for anywhere else. 

*I joke. Towson, a county seat of 5,000 people adjacent to a state university with more than 20,000 students, cannot support a bookstore.

**"Baltimore: The Greatest City In America" is the slogan then-Mayor Martin O'Malley affixed to benches around the city, a morale booster for a battered urban populace. It got some attention recently when a resident used it on an an NPR radio show. 

***And indulging me in smoking up the joint with incense a couple of times a year. 

Don't dispute refute

I grumped this morning about that article that used refuted in a context plainly indicating that the sense was "disputed" or "rebutted," and someone reminded me that those senses of refute have become widespread enough to be included in dictionaries. 

One colleague, alluding to yesterday's post, said, "You can’t blog about how 'literally' is a perfectly acceptable substitute for 'figuratively' and then split this hair."

I answered: Watch me. 

Are you watching?

The non-literal use of literally is not some linguistic innovation for which we can blame Millennials. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage points out that what it calls the "hyperbolic use" of the word was common in the nineteenth century and can even be traced to Pope. A use so well-attested for so long hardly seems worth fuming and fretting over today. 

Had I been editing that article that ran this morning, I would have changed refuted to either disputed or rebutted, as has been my practice. Since the earlier sense of refute, "to disprove conclusively," survives though blurred, I prefer to retain it for contexts that plainly indicate that sense. 

An example: Sixty court cases have refuted Donald Trump's assertion that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. 

As far as I am concerned, the hair has been split. 

Give up the ship

 During more than forty years as a copy editor, part of my job was to make copy clean and correct. Another part of the job was to determine when things previously thought correct no longer applied. 

I give you the example of the over/more than distinction drummed into journalists, that over may only be used to indicate spatial relationships, a rule so willfully ignorant of standard English usage that even the Associated Press Stylebook finally abandoned it. There are more. 

You may have held bravely to the distinction that literally cannot mean figuratively; that an enormity is a great evil, not a Really Big Thing; that a dilemma involves a choice between two unpleasant options, rather than a mere perplexity. It falls to me to tell you that those ships have sailed; they are not even visible on the horizon. 

No doubt you understand that podium derives from the Greek word for foot and thus indicates an object one stands on, not behind. The thing one stands behind to read from a book or other text is a lectern, from the Latin word for reading. That thing the clerk stands behind at the airport gate is a desk, but so many hundreds of thousands of travelers have now been summoned to the podium that the original sense has been rubbed away. The Greek etymology is instructive, but not definitive. 

I once made a spirited argument that one could distinguish between convince and persuade, the former being a stronger term, because people can be persuaded to do things even when they are not convinced it is right to do so. I long ago gave up on it, and assume you have too. 

Probably you know that to beg the question is to make a logical fallacy, to assume the validity of what you are purportedly trying to prove, not to prompt or pose a question. And if you are writing for The New York Review of Books, more power to you. If you are writing for nearly anyone else, your accusation of question begging is apt to produce furrowed brows. 

Well-brought-up writers and editors know that comprise means to contain, to encompass. The whole comprises the parts, which compose the whole. Well-brought-up writers and editors were taught to shudder at is comprised of, and Bryan A. Garner cites the heroic labors of Bryan Henderson, who single-handedly changed 18,000 Wikipedia instances of  is comprised of to is composed of. The example of Canute comes to mind. 

I learned as a lad that the due in due to must be an adjective following a linking verb. "The error was due to ignorance of standard usage." See: due is the predicate adjective, and to is just a preposition. But to write due to ignorance of standard usage would make due to a PREPOSITION and scare the horses in the streets. If you escaped that particular lesson, count yourself lucky. 

Perhaps in a subsequent post I may mention traditional distinctions of usage that still matter. 

The printed word

 I have been a subscriber to The Baltimore Sun, a seven-day-a-week print subscriber, for thirty-seven years, since I began working on its copy desk, and I have begun to wonder what the point is. 

Since The Sun publishes online first, I have already seen its stories the day before, sometimes several days before, they appear in the print edition. And I will also have seen the Associated Press and New York Times articles The Sun picks up as well. So I am essentially paying for a print newspaper to read the "Ask Amy" column and the comic strips. (Yes, they're in the online edition as well, but there is something just wrong about reading a comic strip on an iPad.)

Beyond that, the quality of the print edition, since Alden Global Capital shut down The Sun's printing plant and transferred print production to the Gannett organ in Wilmington, Delaware, has been abysmal. Light inking is the least of the problems. 

The cost, however, has been rising. I believe it was Al Neuharth of Gannett who experienced the illumination that a decline in advertising revenue could be offset by jacking up the circulation prices, since newspaper readers were dependent on their habit. Unfortunately, neither Neuharth nor the other corporate illuminati ever figured out a way to attract new readers, and my generation with the newspaper habit is steadily proceeding to a location to which the circulation department cannot deliver. 

Dammit, I want my morning ritual, in my chair with a cup of strong coffee and my newspaper. The main pleasure that has survived is the grumbling. Tribune eliminated copy editing even before the company was acquired by Alden Global, and the daily procession of subject-verb disagreements, misplaced modifiers, and other offenses against English usage does not pass unremarked on at these premises. There is also a grim satisfaction in noticing when the online text has been incorporated intact without altering references, a clear indication of the lack of an editor's eye on the page. Carp, carp, carp, that's the life. 

I could call circulation to cancel print, converting the savings to bourbon money. But I might just ride it out until one of the sharp-pencil people at Alden Global determines that the cost of print production, even with Gannett, is greater than the mingy returns from print advertising and subscriptions, turning my seven-day-a-week newspaper into a three-day-a-week newspaper, or simply online only. 

In forty years at newspapers I only twice heard an editor call the pressroom to say, "Stop the presses." I think it will be a good deal less than forty until all of them are stopped. 

What he said

 Journalists, ever citing people's speech and documents, are rightfully fond of the word said. It is plain, straightforward, unobtrusive. It gets the job done without resort to the thesaurus and pretension. 

But journalists are unaccountably unwilling to invert subject and verb in these citations. Perhaps they feel the construction arch and dated, something one would find in Gilbert and Sullivan, as one indeed can in one of my favorite passages in Trial by Jury, the judge's recommendation of his daughter in marriage: "You'll soon get used to her looks," said he, / "And a very nice girl you'll find her! / She may very well pass for forty-three / In the dusk, with the light behind her!"

But this aversion can lead to strained and awkward constructions, of a kind I see daily. Here's a synthetic example (so as not to embarrass anyone publicly): "Said suffices," John McIntyre, a retired editor of The Baltimore Sun, said. 

You see the problem. The delay between the subject and the verb creates a suspensive effect, dropping you at the end of the sentence at the prosaic and anticlimactic said. Much better to render it said John McIntyre, a retired editor of The Baltimore Sun. 

That keeps the subject and verb nestled close together, where they are happy, while also maintaining the connection between the noun and the appositive phrase.  

Go, and sin no more. 

 

On-the-job learning

 I have allowed a significant date to pass unremarked. On August 17, fifty years ago, I worked my last day at the Flemingsburg Gazette before leaving for graduate school at Syracuse.

Lowell and Jean Denton, the proprietors, had hired me in the summer of 1968, after my junior year in high school, to allow Jean to take the summer off. The six years I worked at the Gazette, a weekly in Fleming County, Kentucky, with about 3,000 circulation, were a practical education, an apprenticeship, in newspaper journalism. 

I attended meetings of the fiscal court (the county council in Kentucky) and interviewed the superintendent of schools about plans for the coming school year. I profiled local worthies. I covered the beautiful baby competition at the Ewing Fair. (I did not determine whether it was accident or design that Mr. Pierce Million, who rented the public address system for the occasion, played a recording of "Born to Lose" as the mothers and babies crossed to the infield.) I Englished the social notes from the outlying communities. I did copy editing and proofreading. I took classified ads over the telephone. On Wednesdays I drove the pasted-up pages to the newspaper in Cynthiana that printed us, drove the printed copies back, helped with the Addressograph, bundled copies for mailing, and delivered the bundles to the post office. On Fridays I swept out the office and dusted the counters. Photography and page makeup were pretty much the only things I didn't do. 

I was reporter, columnist, copy editor, proofreader, clerk, and dogsbody. 

It was grand. Lowell and Jean were generous and indulgent in allowing me to make mistakes and recover from them, and the income from the job was a welcome help with my college expenses. Lowell was the practical partner in the enterprise; he did all the photography and dealt with all the advertisers. Jean was the literary partner, particularly fond of the work of Joan Didion. I was once assigned to profile a worthy and "lay it on thick." I attempted that, and Jean looked at it, told me, "We don't publish satire," and rewrote it herself. 

And I owe them my life's career. When, after abandoning the Ph.D. program in English at Syracuse, I approached The Cincinnati Enquirer for a post on the copy desk, the Flemingsburg Gazette was my only significant journalistic credential. (As an undergraduate and graduate student, I [cough] never took any classes in journalism.)

Lowell and Jean are gone, and I honor their memory, grateful that they were willing to take me, a skinny kid, a bookworm, into their business and allow me to learn it. Yes, I spent six summers at the Gazette, and they became the prelude to forty years in newspaper journalism. 

We used to read the stuff before publication

When I retired two years ago from The Baltimore Sun after more than three decades of service as an editor, I swore a mighty oath that I would not become one of those former Sun employees who splutter that the place went straight to hell once they left. 

But damme, there's a limit. 

A Sun reporter filed a story that began, "Nearly 60 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared he had a dream. ..." It was published online two days ago. 

It appeared this morning on Page One of The Sun, above the fold, with the identical opening sentence, the day AFTER the 60th anniversary. Paired with the story was a refer to the wire service story inside on commemoration of the anniversary. 

So it seems that the print edition has become of so little consequence that there is no editor on hand paying sufficient attention to protect a reporter from looking like a fool. 

This is precisely the sort of thing that used to be caught before publication on the copy desk, when newspapers still had copy desks. 

COUGH:

A fellow copy editor reminds me that tomorrow, Aug. 28, is the 60th anniversary of the King speech. as we see, I do not have an editor to keep me from looking like a fool. 

Shootings first, questions after

 The recent violence at the Brooklyn Homes housing project in Baltimore, in which two people were fatally shot and 28 wounded, is being commonly described as a "mass shooting." That is a slippery term. 

The Associated Press Stylebook says that there is no firm consensus on what constitutes a mass shooting: "Definitions vary. A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University defines mass killings as four or more dead, not including the shooter."

When The Sun described the Brooklyn Homes shootings as perhaps the greatest mass shooting in Baltimore history, I wondered whether the Pratt Street riot of 1861 should be included. When the local mob attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry as the troops were marching between two train stations, the casualties included eight rioters, three soldiers, and a bystander killed, with scores of soldiers and civilians wounded. 

But no, the term mass shooting is a 20th-century U.S. coinage. Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas in Austin in August 1966, fatally shot 15 people and wounded 31 others before being killed by police officers, setting the pattern for mass shootings: A gunman (mass shooters are typically male), for motives that may be unknown and unknowable, begins firing in public, at specific individuals or at random, with multiple fatalities and woundings, at a single event. 

That pattern fits the shootings in 2017 in Las Vegas, in which Stephen Paddock, firing from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 before he killed himself. 

But groups of people die in shootings in other contexts. We don't necessarily call it a mass shooting when gunfire breaks out in public between gang members, when people are killed in an armed robbery, or when an entire family dies in a murder-suicide. 

Do the Brooklyn Homes shootings qualify as a mass shooting? There appear to have been two or more shooters, and their motives are unknown. If the violence turns out to have been gang-related, will we still call it a mass shooting? Or if it started as a domestic dispute? Are two deaths rather than four or more enough to qualify?

It would be tidy if we could define the term as a single shooter, at a public event, with four or more fatalities. But the proliferation of firearms in this country and the increasing propensity to use them on impulse make it difficult to characterize these events neatly. And the tendency to lump so many multiple shootings under the category "mass shooting" can blur what is distinctive about each case. 

I don't think that it is a very useful term. 

Yeah, you're not alone

You are writing a story about someone, let's call them X, who has a problem. X has a medical condition and cannot find or afford treatment; X is looking for housing and is unable to afford current rents; X is living in a neighborhood where police presence is sporadic and ineffective, and is afraid to leave the house. 

By the most remarkable coincidence, X exemplifies the larger issues in the story you are actually writing, so after three or four paragraphs about X, you drop them, perhaps to return for brief mention later in the article, and write the nut graph that explains the issue that your article is really about. 

But first you must write the essential transition: X is not alone. 

The thing is that this device, known as the "anecdotal lede" in the paragraph game, has become so familiar to readers over the past quarter-century or so that no transition is really necessary. The reader grasps what the game is. That means that the "X is not alone" transition is something more than a gimmick; it has become a cliche. 

When I was an editor at The Baltimore Sun and an "X is not alone" transition came across the desk, I immediately deleted it, to no harm to the structure of the article and no obstacle to the reader's understanding. We actually disparaged it in the house style guide, to which reporters paid fitful attention. 

But the "monkey-see, monkey-do" tendency in journalism is powerful, and you will see "X is not alone" all the damn time.

On one occasion I deleted it from an article, and the next day the reporter asked for an explanation of the change. A writer is always entitled to an explanation of changes in editing, and so I patiently explained that that transition had become a stock device that was not particularly helpful to readers and that we had been discouraged from using. 

The reporter answered: "It's not a cliche when I use it." 

You see what editors are up against. 

There's a hole in the world

 In the fall of 1973 I arrived at Syracuse University as a graduate student in the English department and almost immediately found my way to the graduate student lounge, a room in the basement of the Hall of Languages featuring pieces of cast-off furniture, among them a repulsive couch the color of spoiled salmon. 

There I met Ed Voytovich, tall, smart, generous, and funny. He was playing bridge with other graduate students. In time I came to see that he was one of the smartest among us, perhaps the smartest, but blessed with an easy geniality that endeared him to everyone in the department. For the next six years I enjoyed his company, making jokes, comparing obscure literary allusions, talking about books and authors, gossiping about the faculty. 

Now he's gone. He died two weeks ago today after several years of fading gradually away from Alzheimer's, and there is a gap in the world that cannot be filled. 

Ed completed an honorable dissertation in 17th-century Jacobean drama (so much stuff there) and made two hundred unsuccessful attempts to find a faculty position, because of the oversupply of Ph.D. holders. So he gave it up. He had made some money by painting houses in the summer, and so he set himself up as a housepainter. 

I joined his crew in 1979, before leaving Syracuse and abandoning my own Ph.D. (though it was some years before I realized I had made the decision and put my notes and drafts on the curb to be pulped into cardboard). 

He was skilled in painting, but his confidence in his abilities led him into more elaborate projects. "I need to have the chimney pointed. Can you do that?" "Sure." And he would read how to point a chimney and do it. During that summer we built a study in a basement with a sloping floor and constructed bookcases for it. He made himself a new career in contracting and gave good value wherever he was engaged. 

He married Marie Sprayberry, another graduate student and friend (she was my best person at my wedding to Kathleen), and over the years they would visit Baltimore or we would visit Syracuse, to eat good food, drink, talk about books, gossip, and jointly recite Philip Larkin's "This be the verse." We were friends for more than forty years until the illness took him from us, and now we mourn. 

I told you he was smart and literate, no one more so. I told you he was funny. But what I need you to understand is that he was even-tempered and the most humane human being I have ever known. And it is left to me to repeat what the Romans said: Sit tibi terra levis. May the earth lie lightly on you.