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, July 28, 2021

Schooled in dishonesty about the nation's past

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 You may have seen an asinine tweet by Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, earlier this month: "If we teach that the founding o...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Not worth knowing

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You do not have to be on Twitter or Facebook long before you come across some glaring example of pedagogical malfeasance.  Today some poor d...
2 comments:
Monday, July 19, 2021

Another futile low growl in the morning

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I snarled one morning on reading that someone had refuted  another party in a political dispute, deploring the erosion of the word's str...
3 comments:
Tuesday, July 13, 2021

It looked so nice they wrote it twice

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From The New York Times as published in my morning paper: "Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monda...
Sunday, July 11, 2021

Your complaints about English usage are noted and disregarded

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 After forty years in the Wilderness, the Israelites arrived at Canaan, the land that had been promised to them,  to discover that there wer...
6 comments:
Sunday, July 4, 2021

Independence Day

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 When I was a graduate student at Syracuse University, a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral described a Memorial Day service at which a m...
2 comments:
Friday, July 2, 2021

Sound familiar?

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"The sacredness of our Sabbath, of our homes, of chastity, and finally even of our right to teach our own children in our own schools f...
Tuesday, June 29, 2021

Newspapers are so prissy

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 A recent Washington Post article said that former Attorney General William Barr "likened Trump’s claims [of voter fraud] to excrement ...
2 comments:
Saturday, June 26, 2021

The spell of spelling

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 Many Sunday afternoons when I was in the fifth and sixth grades at Elizaville Elementary were spent copying the week's spelling words, ...
Saturday, June 19, 2021

On the first morning of retirement ...

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I picked up the Associated Press Stylebook  from my desk and placed it on the shelf.  Penguin has been bringing out Georges Simenon's In...
6 comments:
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