You Don't Say

John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott called "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and random topics. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. His original "You Don't Say" blog at The Baltimore Sun ran from 2005 to 2021, and posts on it can sometimes be found at baltimoresun.com through Google searches.

Friday, July 3, 2009

Shine on

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You’d think that these jaded old copy editor eyes would have seen it all, given the monotonous repetition over the years of the set of error...
4 comments:

Murder must wait

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The editing function does not shut off easily. Cruising through yesterday’s front-porch reading, Susan Hill’s The Pure in Heart , I stopped ...
4 comments:
Thursday, July 2, 2009

Independence of thought, too

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On this date in 1776, the Continental Congress effectively chose independence. July 4 as the date on which the assembly formally adopted Jef...
6 comments:

Pointing the finger

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Please click over to Regret the Error , where you will find a short article, “You Don’t Say: Fixing the Blame,” about the issue of assigning...
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Possessive pregnancy

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A construction keeps turning up in the newspaper that I don’t usually see elsewhere, and it leaves me wondering what the apostrophe has to d...
10 comments:
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Pedantic, but pragmatic

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The Times of London introduces a column on language written by Oliver Kamm. Mr. Kamm, whose column is called “The Pedant,” announces that ...
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The Republic of Moronia

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James Madison believed that a literate, educated populace was indispensable for a representative democracy, that the intrusion of religion i...
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Monday, June 29, 2009

AP Stylebook celebrates nerdity

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There are two stereotypes about copy editors. The first is that they are a group of burnt-out hacks and office failures who were shipped to ...
6 comments:
Sunday, June 28, 2009

A limit to Anglican tolerance

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Anglicans, taking one with another, are a broad-minded and tolerant sort — a colleague once congratulated me on our magnanimity in not resen...

Information without knowledge

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I’ve just started reading a very promising book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free , by Charles P. Pierce...
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