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.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

With malice toward 'none'

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Not to carp and cavil and kvetch, but I have been telling you repeatedly that none is a Janus pronoun. It swings both ways. It is either sin...
13 comments:
Tuesday, January 19, 2010

O ye of little faith

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Last week The Baltimore Sun ran an article by Tracy Wilkinson of Tribune Newspapers about relief efforts in Haiti that contained this quest...
9 comments:
Monday, January 18, 2010

The bliss of ignorance

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Writing about Sarah Palin in The New York Review of Books , Jonathan Raban characterized Going Rogue as a “paean to virtuous ignorance,” a ...
15 comments:
Saturday, January 16, 2010

You can always blame the customer

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Andrew Alexander, the ombudsman for The Washington Post , once more takes on the thankless task of explaining to readers why the number of ...
11 comments:
Friday, January 15, 2010

Blast from the past

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It is probably not too soon to steel yourself for National Grammar Day on March 4. By way of preparation, and to respond to readers disappoi...
8 comments:
Thursday, January 14, 2010

Must be important; it's on Facebook

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One of my readers, a former University of Maryland at Baltimore County student, noticed a couple of articles at Baltimoresun.com that cited ...
4 comments:
Wednesday, January 13, 2010

RAWSEX

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Made you look. When I first worked at The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1980, the newspaper used the Hendrix publishing system, on which the slug...
11 comments:
Tuesday, January 12, 2010

You call that a great headline?

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On Twitter, I came across a tweet from @howardowens: “A copy editor could work a lifetime and never get a chance to write such a great headl...
49 comments:
Monday, January 11, 2010

Bungling at the top

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Tempting as it is to associate imbecility mainly with the publishing executives who have hollowed out America’s newspapers, there is plenty ...
5 comments:

Monday, bloody Monday

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Not an auspicious start to the week: woke at 3:00 a.m. yesterday, feverish, then chilled, congested, with a sore throat. Had to back out, sh...
8 comments:
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