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.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

BFD

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Get that smirk off your face, kid; this is serious etymology. Jesse Sheidlower, the formidable Editor at Large of the Oxford English Diction...
8 comments:
Friday, August 21, 2009

May I quote you on that?

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Thirty years in the business, you think you’ve seen it all, and then this : Rebecca Maitland, a freelancer for an edition of the Houston Chr...
10 comments:

Four words

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After today’s earlier heaviosity , I offer a little contest for the weekend. What is the funniest four-word message you can devise? A classi...
16 comments:

How to question authority

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For my generation, now so slow to lumber off the stage, a rallying cry was “Question authority.”* It is still a sound principle, and I conti...
6 comments:
Thursday, August 20, 2009

Man vs. machine

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There is excellent reason to suppose that the designer of the Bryant furnace/air conditioner in my basement suffered from demonic possession...
13 comments:
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Our vanishing heritage

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You asked for it: some terms — hardly an exhaustive list — retrieved from newspaper lingo before these endangered print artifacts vanish lik...
45 comments:

Now the treatment begins

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Calm yourself. Help is at hand. Earlier today this tweet went out from APStylebook on Twitter: RT @emilynichols: there is little more beauti...
6 comments:
Tuesday, August 18, 2009

An editor's haiku

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The coffee is hot, my hands poised above the text, its vitals exposed Regard the comma, apt with the compound sentence, not with compound ve...
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Best of Baltimore?

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I tried to contribute today to the City Paper ’s Best of Baltimore 2009 reader poll , mainly to nominate Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large as t...
3 comments:
Monday, August 17, 2009

The tale of the gnome

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In the old days, when copy editors left newspaper one by one, instead of being pushed down a chute with a man holding a sledgehammer standin...
6 comments:
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