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, April 24, 2010

Tagged as a descriptivist

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If you missed yesterday’s post, “For whom, the bell tolls,” or read it yesterday, you have missed a recent comment by a reader signing i...
12 comments:
Friday, April 23, 2010

For whom, the bell tolls

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Yesterday’s “Rules are rules” post quoted Professor Geoffrey Pullum on actual, rather than imagined, rules about the comma, but his post a...
20 comments:
Thursday, April 22, 2010

Rules are rules

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Over at Language Log , Professor Geoffrey Pullum gives the lie to the canard that descriptivists think that there are no rules in English, p...
12 comments:
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Mark Twain showed us ourselves

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Samuel Clemens died a hundred years ago today, and Mark Twain with him. He was a newspaper reporter (“I hated to do it, but there wasn’t ...
7 comments:

When do you stop?

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No doubt it is psychologically necessary for writers to believe that someone will read their work, but our experience as readers tells us ot...
11 comments:
Monday, April 19, 2010

The $18,000 typo

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Penguin Group Australia is pulping 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible cookbook because the recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciut...
16 comments:

Uncle John says, I want YOU

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for the American Copy Editors Society. Last week, after a five-year absence, I was able to return to a national ACES conference. In Phil...
6 comments:
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

You'd rather be in Philadelphia

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Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I’m going to tell it anyway. At the first national conference of the American Copy Editors ...
5 comments:
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Written at random

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Talking with an admirer of the poetry of James Thomson, Samuel Johnson, who found Thomson deplorably wordy, took down a volume of Thomson...
9 comments:

Santayana on the copy desk

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Those who do not learn from the headline mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. A reader forwards this Denver Post headline...
5 comments:
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