Crash blossoms, y'all, and Jan Freeman

While I was paying attention to other matters, things developed:


Crash blossoms blossom

Last summer the Testy Copy Editors weighed in on a common problem in headline writing: the headline that appears to proceed in one direction but turns out to have a completely different meaning, or, because of ambiguity in the words, a completely opaque meaning. The example, “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms,” led commenters to embrace “crash blossom” as the generic term for such botched headlines.

The term was quickly taken up on Language Log and other sites, and “crash blossom” has become a candidate for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year. The society, which opens its annual meeting in Baltimore tomorrow, will vote on the Word of the Year late Friday afternoon.

Whether or not it wins, copy editors have added a fresh and needed term to the technical vocabulary of journalism. See the original Testy Copy Editors post and the subsequent examples here.


What do y’all think?

You might want to look in on the debate at Language Log over whether y’all can ever be or has even been used legitimately as a singular. Many Southerners claim never to have heard such a usage from a native Southern speaker. Suspecting Yankee ignorance or even dark plots, they bristle as Georgians would at the mention of General Sherman.

For my part, I have known native Southerners, and I have been addressed, solitarily, by them as “y’all.” However, should I be called up before HUAC (the House Committee on Un-American Conversation), I will refuse to name names.


Jan Freeman’s back

The Boston Globe’s estimable language columnist, having recovered from the labor of producing her book on Ambrose Bierce’s idiosyncratic diktats on language (the book having been noted in these precincts), has launched a fresh blog, Throw Grammar from the Train.

You will want to bookmark it.


Poof!

Sometime within the past few weeks, Baltimoresun.com made a software adjustment that renders the 700-plus posts on the previous version of You Don’t Say inaccessible. If you click on the old address, you will be transferred to the current one.

I regret that, because the old site continued for most of 2009 to have regular traffic, drawing readers who found the old posts of continuing value. As time permits, I may revisit those previous topics — all the original texts are in my possession — to update and repurpose the information. If there are any such topics that you would like for me to address, please send me a note.


Good searches

And finally, because I know you are good people, I commend to you again a simple action that will serve your purposes and do good at no cost to you.

Go to GoodSearch.com, and choose as your designated cause the American Copy Editors Society Education Fund. Then, whenever you would use Yahoo’s search engine, use the GoodSearch version of it; each time you do so, a small amount, about a penny, will be designated for the education fund. That brought in more than $70 in 2009, and we should be able to do much better this year.

Editors as entrepreneurs

In twenty-eight semesters of teaching editing, I have been lucky to encounter students who grasped the importance of the craft and showed a gift for it. Today I am pleased to present a guest post from one of those students, Michael Bullwinkle, who, aware of the crisis in editing and the plight of editors turned out of employment, suggests some fresh directions. Editors, particularly copy editors, have not, as a class, been notable for the entrepreneurial impulse, but perhaps Mr. Bullwinkle’s friendly suggestions will stimulate them.

Mr. Bullwinkle:

When I think of editing and the general lack of it that is present on the Internet, I can’t help but remember the opening lines of a TED talk given in 2008 by Benjamin Zander on the state of classical music:

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes. And they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote: “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes.” And the other one wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet.”

I think the classical model of copy editors employed with benefits within an organization is indeed something of a dying breed. However, as outsourcing becomes more and more popular, it is quite clear that there is still an incredible value to the service native-speaking copy editors provide.

What I wonder is if perhaps one could take the basic model of these overseas copy-editing establishments and set up a similar little agency of native-speaking editors in the United States. To start, all you would need is a loosely connected group of work-at-home freelancers who had a common website and e-mail and divided up the editing accordingly. Billing could be done based on number of pages edited or specific contracts depending on customers’ needs.

The real question is, of course, how you actually get customers, since no one, even the more language-minded among us, will actually go out of our way to seek out the paid services of a copy editor.

I think the only way this idea has even the slightest chance to succeed is to target Internet-based content and to very selectively start auditing various websites. Mine them for errors, grammatical, legal, unintentionally embarrassing content, etc. Tally the results and send a nice little e-mail report not too many pages in length to the company, pointing out all of the potential issues that might be prevented if they paid a nominal fee for having their posts professionally screened by your agency.

Unfortunately, you would probably have to engage in this exercise a number of times before anyone was interested and paid any money, and selecting which type or size of sites would represent the greatest potential for becoming customers would be an interesting game of trial-and-error research. This also means you will at least initially be working for free with only the hope of maybe getting customers. But theoretically, if you could build a large enough client base, you could charge an exceedingly low rate per article/page to be edited and still make a profit worthy of your time based on the large number of pages that can be edited in a single day.

Another place to look for business might be in the professional blog sphere. While there are not a huge number of them, there are at least a couple of hundred blogs that serve as the sole source of income for their authors. These highly successful bloggers do quite well for themselves, and if you presented them with a similar report of the various errors, potential legal missteps, etc., that appear on their blogs, they might be willing to pay a small fee to have each post screened by a professional editor. Many of these bloggers have a fairly firm understanding of the concept of time and image as money, and professional editing might help them with both of these things. This would serve two purposes — one, it is another paying customer; two, it gives you a chance to clean up the crap that appears on the Web.

You could also offer free editing for a month to a few key highly successful bloggers (high page-view count) in exchange for a plug on their site linking to your editing agency’s site, and the chance that they might become your customer in the future.
Eventually, if you could actually get a successful brand going, you could have a symbol like the little VeriSign security symbols that subscribers to your service could post on their site. For a low cost they would have an insignia to remind their readers that the information on their site is professionally edited, or even fact-checked.

Operators are standing by

If you marked the start of a new year with a resolve for some kind of self-improvement — and who among us couldn’t stand a little betterment? — here are two opportunities to make good on that resolution, without your having to leave the house.

The first is a week and a half away, but there is still time to sign up for

Things Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You

This audioconference produced by McMurry, which also publishes the Copyediting newsletter, will help you distinguish a rule from a guideline from a superstition in English usage. It will run for ninety minutes on January 14, and in addition to being able to listen to my dulcet tones, you will have the opportunity to ask questions and argue with me.

Details about fees and registration are on the link.

Next month will bring another opportunity:

Where to Turn: Resources for Editors

If you have been leaning too heavily on those frail reeds, The Elements of Style and Wikipedia, you will benefit from advice on more reliable resources and references. The ninety-minute audioconference on February 18 will explore both print and electronic references that will, used with appropriate caution and judgment, get you where you want to go. Here, too, you will have an opportunity to share your views.

Again, details are on the link.

I hope to hear from you on one or both of these occasions.

Don't do yourself a mischief

I had better issue an ***ICK ALERT*** for potentially offensive content below.

(That should hook you.)

Those of you who were at least moderately sentient in the 1960s and 1970s may recall Tom Lehrer’s little proposed theme song for a film version of Oedipus Rex (and the younger sort will have some cultural education to undergo):

When he found what he had done,
He tore his eyes out, one by one,
A tragic end for a loyal son
Who LOVED his mother.*

I suspect that this may not be one of Jan Freeman’s favorite tunes, because she has written in The Boston Globe about her distaste for self-maiming hyperbole:

My nominee isn’t new, but last February I noticed it in a classier location than its usual haunts. At John McIntyre’s language blog, You Don’t Say—where readers are asked to “keep a civil tongue in their heads”—one commenter posted a complaint about the language of a TV weatherman. “Tonight he came up with ‘the evening-hour time frame’,” said the commenter. “Made me want to dig my eyeballs and eardrums out with a soup spoon.”

She goes on to comment:

At the Baltimore Sun, where McIntyre used to run the copy desks, the eye-gouging imagery would be off limits, he confirmed. Figurative language that’s “gratuitously violent or distasteful” is unwelcome, as the paper’s writing guidelines make clear. “Hyperbole, and particularly death hyperbole,” is not to be used flippantly. “Repulsive metaphors have no place in the paper.” The cautionary example is an oyster simile I won’t quote, since it might make you want to…you know.

Not that I mind quoting the cautionary example from The Sun’s “Guidelines on Writing and Editing” (largely disregarded but which, damn my modesty, I had a hand in developing):

Repulsive metaphors have no place in the paper. Here are some illustrations: “The sleek gray meats of the oyster, Sagoff once said, remind him of something you'd see on the floor of a tuberculosis ward.”; “For years, the city's been drooling over the real estate in the 400 block of E. Baltimore St.”; “Mr. Gore didn't search for huge globs of government fat lying around waiting to be lopped off.”

Well, assuming that you still have eyes to read this, it’s clear that I am less squeamish than Ms. Freeman, or perhaps The Boston Globe — surely they don’t talk like that in Boston.

But while I’m willing to grant a little more latitude in my own blog posts and to the comments I authorize on this site, I think that she is on to something. The ready resort to exaggerated reaction to minor irritations, and the partisan impulse toward apocalyptic metaphor over political differences** suggest not only a diminution of civility but also a tendency toward hysteria, both mild and extreme.

Use your indoor voices, please.



*Yes, he loved his mother like no other;
His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother.
One thing on which you can depend is,
He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is.

**On Facebook, a friend liked Bryan Garner’s word the the day the other day — CATCHPENNY, adj. = sensationally appealing to the ignorant — but couldn’t think of an appropriate use. I suggested lawyer-dentist Orly Taitz's catchpenny campaign to prove that Barack Obama is not an American citizen.

Don't give up the ship*

A reader has written to express “gratitude for your blog, which helps me keep the faith,” and adding, “I, too, am an unemployed copy editor who is too old to be hired yet too young to retire and am trying to figure out what to do next.”

There is ample reason to be discouraged. Not merely in faltering daily newspapers, but also in magazines, books, and Internet sites, there has been a large-scale abandonment of the discipline of editing and an acceptance of shoddiness as the norm. The depressed economy aggravates the situation, so that when an actual editing position opens up, scores, or even hundreds, of qualified applicants swarm over it.

There is my own melancholy situation, with dozens of fruitless applications and inquiries over the past eight months. A couple of possibilities I bungled on my own, but when I am invariably turned down or ignored, speculating about other reasons is inevitable: I am too narrowly qualified as a newspaper copy editor, or I am overqualified, or too old, or too expensive (they think) — too easily rejected out of hand. (Just think, dear reader, would you like to have me as a subordinate?)

And yet, even though the day may come that I wind up bagging your groceries, I have not given up and do not intend to.

The freelance editing jobs that have come my way in the past few months have demonstrated two important points: People need editing just as much as they ever did, and I can deliver the goods. To those two points, I can add a generalization: If everyone is to make do with fewer editors, it is important to employ qualified ones and allow them to function properly.

Positive glimmers can be discerned. Twenty-two students have signed up for my editing course at Loyola for the coming semester. (How many will remain after the first class is a different matter.) They are not interested in newspapers, but in their majors in advertising and public relations and other areas, they have been led to understand that a grasp of editing is essential for people who want to make a living with language.

There are you, gentle readers, a sturdy band always returning to this site, perhaps, like my correspondent, finding encouragement here. There are many others doing the Lord’s work, too. Bryan Garner has brought out a third, expanded edition of his dictionary of modern American usage. Grammar Girl has a huge audience for her level-headed advice (delivered without my pomposity and affectation). The estimable Jan Freeman took a major smack at peevologists with her commentary on Ambrose Bierce’s cranky manual of usage; she continues to hold the line with her column in The Boston Globe.

All of these, and more, are offering a moderate and informed prescriptivism to people who want to write more clearly and more precisely, without the bogus rules and idiosyncratic shibboleths that have burdened students and writers for generations.

Let me remind you as well, that the sun has begun to track northward again in this hemisphere and the daylight is slowly lengthening, the American economy is beginning to crawl out of a hole, and we have a fresh year to work with. I have retooled the resume and am preparing a renewed campaign for employment. Those of you in my situation should be doing the same. There is work to be done; it remains for us to find it.

In the meantime, I have not given up. I have kept the faith.



*I am aware, irony fanciers, that Captain Lawrence died shortly after saying something like this (the actual words were “Tell the men to fire faster and not give up the ship”) and that the Chesapeake was compelled to surrender after a disastrously short battle with HMS Shannon. But still.

Quorum call

A gentleman from Seattle named Charles Kraus published a light-hearted set of New Year’s resolutions in this morning’s Baltimore Sun. Among them was this one:

This year, I resolve to purchase The New York Times at the local newsstand at least once a week to show solidarity with those of us who believe Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Stanley Fish, David Brooks, Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Bob Herbert form a minion, and should never be forced to work for Arianna Huffington.

Spotted it already, didn’t you?

A minion is an underling, particularly a servile one — a flunky, a stooge, a lackey, a tool, a cat’s paw. A minyan is the quorum required for public worship in a synagogue — ten Jewish men over the age of thirteen, or, in some congregations, ten men and women.

Reaching for the mistaken homophone (or homograph) is one of the commonest errors in writing, and this little gem leads us to expect a fresh new year of opportunities to carp, cavil, and quibble. Life is good.

O brave new world

You can read in the Philadelphia Inquirer about words and catchphrases of the year, but for me and many of my colleagues, there is one statement that fitly epitomizes the year that is gasping its last today:

“Our market-based, forward-looking plan is both a response to the recessionary economy, continued downward financial pressures on the news industry and our transition into a 21st-century multimedia enterprise.”

Thus Jonathan Slevin, publisher of the Washington Times, in a statement redolent of the rancid corporate-speak so familiar during the past twelve months, announces that he is sacking forty percent of the newsroom staff.

Jobs not to be touched with a bargepole

You might think that, eight months out of work and two and a half months past the end of severance pay, I would snap at just about any possible job. You would be wrong. Here is some of what is out there, served up on listings I’ve signed up for.

Video Game Tester - Xbox Wii Playstation PC - Needed Immediately - Make Up To $30/Hour!

I played one game of Space Invaders one night in a bar, maybe in 1980. I’m out of the demographic.

Writers wanted for academic writing
We are interested in writers with prior experience in academic writing (essays, term papers, research papers, etc.).

College kids should write their own damn term papers.

WORK WITH BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY. Make $5000/Mo. Online...Part Time. Proven System, Huge Company

$5,000 a month for just typing some things into the Internet for a couple of hours a day. Older readers may recall classified ads in the back of magazines telling readers they could make big bucks stuffing envelopes at home; this appears to be the contemporary version.

FREE GOVERNMENT MONEY. Make 5k/Month Working From Home. Limited Positions

Uh-huh. This one looks to be a variation on the previous one.

The money-laundering scheme

The offer, deleted pretty much as soon as it landed in my computer, told me that all I needed to do was sit at home for a couple hours a day to receive foreign money transfers in my bank account and ship them to another one.

I suppose that becoming a guest of the state would solve the problem of my upkeep, but I hear that the food is terrible.

“Editor”

That was the title anyhow.

Requirement: a high school diploma.

Trying too hard

The art of writing a headline is to encapsulate the central element and tone of the article in a way that a reader can take in at a glance.

It took more than a glance for me to decipher this headline on the front page of this morning’s Baltimore Sun:

Flags down
over Block
award to
Eagles’ Vick

This is one of those headlines that make sense only after you read the story: That the annual Ed Block Courage Award is being given to Michael Vick of the Philadelphia Eagles — the man who ran a dog-fighting operation — has caused local outrage.

There are two ways in which this headline tries too hard and defeats its own purposes. The first is to jam all those proper nouns, Block, Eagles, Vick. Michael Vick is notorious enough locally that Eagles could have been sacrificed. The second mistake was to try to be clever while jamming all that information in with wordplay on flag down on play. You know, football.

The result is a headline that has too much — information — and too little — context for the wordplay. It is only in the secondary headline, Animal advocates outraged / over teammates’ choice, that the penny drops.

Simplify, simplify.

Our inbred universities

One of my informants sends this specimen from the Daily Local News of Chester County, Pennsylvania. It is the second sentence in an article about the demolition of a log cabin at Eastern University:

School officials say the long-abandoned structure was unsafe, the logs were incest-infested and the price of renovation too high for the institution to afford.