Writing about Sarah Palin in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban characterized Going Rogue as a “paean to virtuous ignorance,” a term that looks like something that could stand further examination.
***Just a minute, boys, let me be clear from the outset that I am not writing about Sarah Palin but about the concept of “virtuous ignorance.” No need to douse me with that adolescent vitriol you splashed on Mr. Raban at Free Republic. (Apparently, anyone who is not enchanted with Ms. Palin is a homosexual given to using big words, and that counts as refutation, at least on that site.)***
For a pure example of virtuous ignorance, it is hard to surpass Jenny McCarthy, the actress-turned-autism-advocate. Diane Sawyer invited her onto ABC News to denounce a study in Pediatrics, a medical journal, that determined that the special diets Ms. McCarthy advocates are ineffective. Her response was that it’s time that doctors “start listening to our anecdotal evidence.”
Ms. McCarthy, who has an autistic son, Evan, was previously granted a platform by Oprah Winfrey to discuss growing scientific evidence that there is no link between vaccines and autism. Ms. McCarthy rebutted it thus: ‘My science is Evan, and he's at home. That's my science.”
It is a puzzlement: In a technologically advanced society, in which lifespan and standards of living have been improved by more than two centuries of post-Enlightenment scientific research, a Jenny McCarthy can become an influential figure in public health. Increasingly, people believe what they wish to believe, against all evidence, especially if someone with whom they can identify, whom they see as a sincere person, agrees with them.
The Columbia Journalism Review has an article on the high proportion of television meteorologists who are skeptical about the scientific evidence for global warming. Never mind that meteorology and climatology, though related, are distinct disciplines. Never mind that TV weather forecasters may have negligible training in climatology. They are the people seen every day as representatives of science, and their word carries weight.
Ms. McCarthy and the climate skeptics are quick to claim that there is a scientific establishment with a sinister agenda, falsifying research, operating on behalf of hidden interests. Indeed, there is malpractice in science, as you can read in Horace Freeland Judson’s 2004 book, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. People rush to publish, people lie, peer review can fail.
But it’s dangerous to generalize from single cases. Piltdown Man was a fraud for decades, but its exposure did not mean that we had to discard anthropology. Science still has self-correcting mechanisms. The reason that proponents of creationism and intelligent design have turned to the secular arm to undermine by legislative means the teaching of evolution is that they have not been able to make a persuasive case scientifically.*
Do not imagine that paranoia and self-righteous fantasy are limited to the right, even though contemporary conservatives have vouchsafed us some of the more lurid examples. In Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens examines how Gore Vidal, a distinguished novelist (his Lincoln is exceptional) and formidable essayist, has given himself over in advancing age to uttering crackpot statements, among them the assertion that George W. Bush connived at the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This is vile, and it is painful to see a man of letters fall so low.
Vaccines for credulity appear to be a long way off.
*I fear the day when the bigots discover that we got algebra from the Arabs (al-Kwarizmi’s book ’ilm al-jabr wa’l-mukabala, “the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like”) and mobilize to eliminate the teaching of mathematics in public schools. Then all that will remain for us to do is ask what accommodations our Chinese overlords require.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
You can always blame the customer
Andrew Alexander, the ombudsman for The Washington Post, once more takes on the thankless task of explaining to readers why the number of irritating errors has increased:
When it comes to typos and syntax, retired English teachers and armchair grammarians delight in playing "Gotcha!" with The Post. They are regular (and often good-natured) correspondents, pointing out everything from misplaced modifiers to homonym errors.
In recent months, they've been joined by less genial readers who complain that increased copy-editing errors have become annoying and are damaging The Post's credibility.
Everything would be swell if it weren’t for those damn readers.
Here are some of the things the armchair grammarians and their recent recruits are whingeing about:
The errors are typically small but unremitting. A story about an Arlington National Cemetery burial described a soldier wearing “shiny black boats” (instead of boots). An item about an auto accident involving NBC newsman Tom Brokaw said he had “slammed on the beaks” (brakes). A listing of unemployment rates in foreign countries included “Cypress” (Cyprus). In a Sports story, the “principles” (principals) attended a dinner celebrating the hiring of Redskins coach Mike Shanahan.
Reasons, Mr. Alexander concedes, include the reduction in the number of copy editors at the paper, from seventy-five to forty-three over a three-year span, and the requirement for the remnant to concentrate on “search-engine optimization.” The latter is formatting and tailoring articles to attract the attention of Google and thus additional readers.
Mr. Alexander has more faith than I do about the possibility that new grammar-check software will help ⎯ that Cypress for Cyprus looks like a spell-check-induced error, or Cupertino, to me.*
The increase in errors that make the writer, and the publication, look stupid comes in part from the current belief that getting it fast counts more than getting it right, and the corollary that you can eliminate copy editors, or assign them more and more non-editing duties, because nobody cares about quality, except maybe a few cranky retired English teachers.
Just refer the fusspots to the ombudsman and let the search-engine optimization roll.
*Or maybe, as at the Star Tribune, the writers will spontaneously start using the spell-checker and learn to distinguish homonyms.
When it comes to typos and syntax, retired English teachers and armchair grammarians delight in playing "Gotcha!" with The Post. They are regular (and often good-natured) correspondents, pointing out everything from misplaced modifiers to homonym errors.
In recent months, they've been joined by less genial readers who complain that increased copy-editing errors have become annoying and are damaging The Post's credibility.
Everything would be swell if it weren’t for those damn readers.
Here are some of the things the armchair grammarians and their recent recruits are whingeing about:
The errors are typically small but unremitting. A story about an Arlington National Cemetery burial described a soldier wearing “shiny black boats” (instead of boots). An item about an auto accident involving NBC newsman Tom Brokaw said he had “slammed on the beaks” (brakes). A listing of unemployment rates in foreign countries included “Cypress” (Cyprus). In a Sports story, the “principles” (principals) attended a dinner celebrating the hiring of Redskins coach Mike Shanahan.
Reasons, Mr. Alexander concedes, include the reduction in the number of copy editors at the paper, from seventy-five to forty-three over a three-year span, and the requirement for the remnant to concentrate on “search-engine optimization.” The latter is formatting and tailoring articles to attract the attention of Google and thus additional readers.
Mr. Alexander has more faith than I do about the possibility that new grammar-check software will help ⎯ that Cypress for Cyprus looks like a spell-check-induced error, or Cupertino, to me.*
The increase in errors that make the writer, and the publication, look stupid comes in part from the current belief that getting it fast counts more than getting it right, and the corollary that you can eliminate copy editors, or assign them more and more non-editing duties, because nobody cares about quality, except maybe a few cranky retired English teachers.
Just refer the fusspots to the ombudsman and let the search-engine optimization roll.
*Or maybe, as at the Star Tribune, the writers will spontaneously start using the spell-checker and learn to distinguish homonyms.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Blast from the past
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 disappointed that the You Don’t Say posts at Baltimoresun.com are no longer accessible, I am reproducing here all four installments of last year’s Grammarnoir serial. (I’m undecided about what to do this year.)
GRAMMARNOIR
I. Down those mean sentences I walk alone
I was sitting at my desk in the old Intelligencer-Argus building the day she walked in. It was late afternoon on a rainy day, and my hand had strayed more than once toward the dictionary in the bottom desk drawer. I heard footsteps approaching, and when I looked up, there she was. She was — lissome.
“Mr. McIntyre?” she said.
“Take a load off, lady,” I said pushing a chair, the one with the loose armrest, toward her. Cheapskate publishers. “What can I do for you?”
“Mr. McIntyre, my name is Martha Brockenbrough, and I need your help.”
“What’s the problem, sis?”
“Well, a dear friend of mine is married to a man — he’s a hard worker and a good provider, I don’t mean to say anything against him — but he’s so rigid.”
“What’s his game?” I asked, with a suspicion dawning like the morning sun over the penitentiary down the street.
“He’s a writer.”
“I know the type.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, lifting her stubborn little chin. “He’s a good writer. Well, most of the time, anyway. It’s just that he’s fallen into some bad ways.”
“Tell me about them, doll,” I said.
“He positively insists that none can be used only as a singular.“
“Uh-huh.”
“And once he threatened to strike a grocery clerk in the ‘10 items or less’ aisle.”
“Yeah?”
“He got so angry once over my … my friend’s placement of only in a sentence that she was afraid she would have to call the police.”
“Baby, I’ve met a million of ’em. This place used to crawl with ’em before the bottom fell out of the paragraph game. But why are you coming to me about this bozo?”
“Well, I heard, Mr. McIntyre, that you’re a highly professional copy editor.”
“I’ve nailed the errant adverb in my time.”
“I thought you could talk him, work with him, help him somehow.”
“Toots, I’ve got it soft here. Twenty an hour, and I don’t have to furnish my own pencil. I don’t need the aggravation.”
“But Mr. McIntyre, National Grammar Day is almost here. It’s March 4, and I’m so afraid for him, and for my friend, that if he isn’t turned around by then, something terrible might happen.” She sobbed softly into a dainty little lace thing she’d plucked from her purse.
It was the tears that got to me, against my better judgment. I should’ve known better. I did know better. Always a sucker for any sweet dame.
“All right, Ms. Brockenbrough, you’ve got yourself a green eyeshade. Let’s have his name and address.”
“Oh,” she said. “There’s a problem.”
To be continued …
II. “What are we going to do now?” she asked
Martha zipped off in some little Italian two-seater that she’d bought with the proceeds of Things That Make Us [Sic], and I lumbered along in my wheezing General Motors product. Maybe I should write a book.
Her house — yeah, she was the “friend” with the problem, to your astonishment and mine, I’m sure — was a modest bungalow. Guess the royalties hadn’t spread wide enough to upgrade the house, too. Even the rain couldn’t disguise that it could have used coat of paint.
She shivered a little at the front door, and her hand was unsteady as she tried to get the key into the lock.
I grabbed her by the elbow. “You going to tell me what your problem is?” I asked.
“Soon enough.” And she went in.
There wasn’t a light on in the place. It was as cold as a publisher’s heart, and nearly as black. She switched on a lamp. It had one of those little fluorescent bulbs, so the light just limped out a couple of feet and died.
“Well?” I said.
“Mr. McIntyre, I’m afraid that I didn’t tell you everything back at your office.”
“Sugar, I’m a copy editor. Nobody ever tells me the whole story.”
“All right, would you please just follow me.”
She walked across the room to a closed door and paused with her hand on the knob.
“It’s in here.”
I stepped through the door as she switched on an overhead light.
There he was. A man of middle years, slumped over a desk. There was a flier for National Grammar Day on March 4 clutched in his fist.
I walked over and touched the cold dead flesh of his neck. No pulse, of course. There was a small bruise at his right temple. I reached for his collar and pulled him upright in his chair.
An Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart.
“Did that kill him?” she asked. Her voice quavered.
“Sweetheart, that’s for the M.E. to say, but I’d bet a first-edition Fowler’s that that pencil has been recently sharpened.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“You, my lovely, are going to call the police and sit here waiting for them.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’m going to see the Fat Man.”
To be continued ...
III. The Fat Man chuckles
I stood in front of the Fat Man’s house and waited. Our reporters would have called it a manse, but it was grander than anything the Presbyterian clergy ever set foot inside. One light was on — the ground floor, the library.
I knew he would be there.
Only seconds after I rang the bell, the door opened a crack as narrow as a consultant’s brainpan. The Fat Man’s houseboy took my name, let me in and offered to take my battered fedora. “Just tell your boss I’m here,” I said.
“Very well, Mr. McIntyre,” he said. He was back almost immediately. “This way,” he said, and led me down the hall to the library.
“Ah, McIntyre, delighted to see you again,” the Fat Man wheezed as he heaved himself out of his armchair to greet me. “Come take a pew, while I try to do something about this vile chill,” he said, throwing another copy of Strunk and White onto the fire.
I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.
“So, dear boy,” he said, “what brings you out in the rain and the dark?”
“I just came from the Brockenbrough house.”
“Nothing amiss with the charming Martha, I hope.”
“She’s OK. A little white around the gills. Somebody did in the Mister.”
“Oh. How?”
“Col-erase straight through the ticker.”
“Ah. Oddly appropriate, nil nisi bonum and all. That puts paid to his grand scheme, I suppose.”
“Scheme?”
“You really ought to get out of the newsroom more often, dear boy. Yes, a scheme, a cabal, a conspiracy, a plot as loony as Booth’s plan to decapitate the Union government in ’65. And the Mister was in the thick of it.”
I settled back in my chair. “Perhaps you can enlighten me.”
“You must have known that the Mister, despite dear little Martha’s charm, was as hard-edged a proponent of prescriptivist poppycock as any pedant who has ever bemoaned the decline of his language. I once saw him throw a hard roll at a waitress who had merely told him that hopefully his entree would be ready in a few minutes.”
“Go on.”
“Like Cassius, he insinuated himself into a company of like-minded mavens — John Simon, William Safire, James J. Kilpatrick, that lot — and inveigled them into a planning a crack-brained putsch. They were going to kidnap Jesse Sheidlower and storm the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary to ‘purify’ the language by force majeure. And they were going to pull this off —“
“On National Grammar Day. March 4,” I said. “So who would have wanted to snuff him?”
“You could assemble a cast of thousands for that task.” He paused. “But I wonder…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just, dear boy,” he said with an evil little chuckle, “that I wouldn’t imagine that he alone could be stirred to wrath over the little niceties and false commandments of usage, or that he alone may have had plans for National Grammar Day.”
I saw then what I had to do.
To be continued …
IV. The rule you don’t break
The cold rain was coming down as hard and fast as layoff notices in a newsroom. As I hurried down the front walk of the Fat Man’s house, I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. Ducking around a corner, I stood behind a tree and waited. A figure in a dark raincoat came around, and I grabbed an arm and twisted.
“Hey! Take it easy, buster. Do you know who I am?”
A woman’s voice. I pulled her over to a streetlight for a look.
“Well, well, a little far from home, Ms. Freeman.” Jan Freeman, copy-editor-turned-moll for Language Log’s Boston family. First non-linguist to be named a consigliere. I let go.
Rubbing her arm, she said, “You’re out of your depth here, McIntyre. Go home.”
“No chance, sister. I’m not going to walk away and let you do Steven Pinker’s dirty work here. I know about the putsch, and what’s more, I figured out who killed the Mister.”
Her shoulders slumped. She shook her head and turned. She stopped and hissed at me: “You're just a two-bit grifter, and that's all you'll ever be.” Then she was gone.
I was pensive on the drive back to the Brockenbrough bungalow. Editing’s a mug’s game. The words strain and crack; sometimes they break under the burden, the tension. They slip and slide and perish — won’t stay still. You go out on a raid on the inarticulate, and not everybody comes back. The public doesn’t like to see it but wants it done. That leaves it to me.
Martha was sitting in the living room. The scientists had gone, taking the body.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“What I needed to know.”
“And?”
“Let me ask you a question. Your book, Things That Make Us [Sic], doesn’t it have an entry on what Bryan Garner lists under ‘Superstitions’ and H.W. Fowler under ‘Fetishes,”?
“Yes. Sure. I called them “false commandments.’”
“Uh-huh. Got a copy handy?”
“There’s one in the study.”
“Come on.”
She led the way through the door to the library and over to the desk. There was a little blood on the blotter, and next to it, on top of a clipping of James J. Kilpatrick’s annual column on the placement of only — it figures — was Martha’s book. I picked it up and turned to page 223, “THE TEN FALSE COMMANDMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.”
“Was this what you and he were arguing about?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t play games with me. I made a phone call on my way back, and the boys will be back. Once they match this dent in the buckram cover to that bruise on the Mister’s temple, it’s all over.”
Her face crumpled. “National Grammar Day was mine, mine, and he and his pack of cranks wanted to take it over. There were going to be uprisings of English teachers in all the major cities. He laughed at Chapter 10, ‘Rules That Never Were, Are No More, and Should Be Broken.’ He said that when the cabal made English the official language, all those rules would be written into the United States Code. He was mad and out of control, and I picked up my book and struck him.”
“And then?”
“He swore, said the cabal would have me locked up in Leavenworth. I reached for that red pencil and struck at him, and he groaned and slumped over the desk and was still.”
“It’s over. Oxford University Press has moved Jesse Sheidlower to a secure, undisclosed location. The flatfoots are rounding up the members of the cabal. The threat to National Grammar Day is over. I just want to know one thing.”
“What?”
“Why’d you call me in?”
“You’re a professional copy editor. You fix things.”
“All but this. Sweetheart, you’re taking the fall. National Grammar Day will go on, but you’ll be spending it in a cell.”
Outside, a siren was growing louder.
The end
GRAMMARNOIR
I. Down those mean sentences I walk alone
I was sitting at my desk in the old Intelligencer-Argus building the day she walked in. It was late afternoon on a rainy day, and my hand had strayed more than once toward the dictionary in the bottom desk drawer. I heard footsteps approaching, and when I looked up, there she was. She was — lissome.
“Mr. McIntyre?” she said.
“Take a load off, lady,” I said pushing a chair, the one with the loose armrest, toward her. Cheapskate publishers. “What can I do for you?”
“Mr. McIntyre, my name is Martha Brockenbrough, and I need your help.”
“What’s the problem, sis?”
“Well, a dear friend of mine is married to a man — he’s a hard worker and a good provider, I don’t mean to say anything against him — but he’s so rigid.”
“What’s his game?” I asked, with a suspicion dawning like the morning sun over the penitentiary down the street.
“He’s a writer.”
“I know the type.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, lifting her stubborn little chin. “He’s a good writer. Well, most of the time, anyway. It’s just that he’s fallen into some bad ways.”
“Tell me about them, doll,” I said.
“He positively insists that none can be used only as a singular.“
“Uh-huh.”
“And once he threatened to strike a grocery clerk in the ‘10 items or less’ aisle.”
“Yeah?”
“He got so angry once over my … my friend’s placement of only in a sentence that she was afraid she would have to call the police.”
“Baby, I’ve met a million of ’em. This place used to crawl with ’em before the bottom fell out of the paragraph game. But why are you coming to me about this bozo?”
“Well, I heard, Mr. McIntyre, that you’re a highly professional copy editor.”
“I’ve nailed the errant adverb in my time.”
“I thought you could talk him, work with him, help him somehow.”
“Toots, I’ve got it soft here. Twenty an hour, and I don’t have to furnish my own pencil. I don’t need the aggravation.”
“But Mr. McIntyre, National Grammar Day is almost here. It’s March 4, and I’m so afraid for him, and for my friend, that if he isn’t turned around by then, something terrible might happen.” She sobbed softly into a dainty little lace thing she’d plucked from her purse.
It was the tears that got to me, against my better judgment. I should’ve known better. I did know better. Always a sucker for any sweet dame.
“All right, Ms. Brockenbrough, you’ve got yourself a green eyeshade. Let’s have his name and address.”
“Oh,” she said. “There’s a problem.”
To be continued …
II. “What are we going to do now?” she asked
Martha zipped off in some little Italian two-seater that she’d bought with the proceeds of Things That Make Us [Sic], and I lumbered along in my wheezing General Motors product. Maybe I should write a book.
Her house — yeah, she was the “friend” with the problem, to your astonishment and mine, I’m sure — was a modest bungalow. Guess the royalties hadn’t spread wide enough to upgrade the house, too. Even the rain couldn’t disguise that it could have used coat of paint.
She shivered a little at the front door, and her hand was unsteady as she tried to get the key into the lock.
I grabbed her by the elbow. “You going to tell me what your problem is?” I asked.
“Soon enough.” And she went in.
There wasn’t a light on in the place. It was as cold as a publisher’s heart, and nearly as black. She switched on a lamp. It had one of those little fluorescent bulbs, so the light just limped out a couple of feet and died.
“Well?” I said.
“Mr. McIntyre, I’m afraid that I didn’t tell you everything back at your office.”
“Sugar, I’m a copy editor. Nobody ever tells me the whole story.”
“All right, would you please just follow me.”
She walked across the room to a closed door and paused with her hand on the knob.
“It’s in here.”
I stepped through the door as she switched on an overhead light.
There he was. A man of middle years, slumped over a desk. There was a flier for National Grammar Day on March 4 clutched in his fist.
I walked over and touched the cold dead flesh of his neck. No pulse, of course. There was a small bruise at his right temple. I reached for his collar and pulled him upright in his chair.
An Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart.
“Did that kill him?” she asked. Her voice quavered.
“Sweetheart, that’s for the M.E. to say, but I’d bet a first-edition Fowler’s that that pencil has been recently sharpened.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“You, my lovely, are going to call the police and sit here waiting for them.”
“And what will you do?”
“I’m going to see the Fat Man.”
To be continued ...
III. The Fat Man chuckles
I stood in front of the Fat Man’s house and waited. Our reporters would have called it a manse, but it was grander than anything the Presbyterian clergy ever set foot inside. One light was on — the ground floor, the library.
I knew he would be there.
Only seconds after I rang the bell, the door opened a crack as narrow as a consultant’s brainpan. The Fat Man’s houseboy took my name, let me in and offered to take my battered fedora. “Just tell your boss I’m here,” I said.
“Very well, Mr. McIntyre,” he said. He was back almost immediately. “This way,” he said, and led me down the hall to the library.
“Ah, McIntyre, delighted to see you again,” the Fat Man wheezed as he heaved himself out of his armchair to greet me. “Come take a pew, while I try to do something about this vile chill,” he said, throwing another copy of Strunk and White onto the fire.
I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.
“So, dear boy,” he said, “what brings you out in the rain and the dark?”
“I just came from the Brockenbrough house.”
“Nothing amiss with the charming Martha, I hope.”
“She’s OK. A little white around the gills. Somebody did in the Mister.”
“Oh. How?”
“Col-erase straight through the ticker.”
“Ah. Oddly appropriate, nil nisi bonum and all. That puts paid to his grand scheme, I suppose.”
“Scheme?”
“You really ought to get out of the newsroom more often, dear boy. Yes, a scheme, a cabal, a conspiracy, a plot as loony as Booth’s plan to decapitate the Union government in ’65. And the Mister was in the thick of it.”
I settled back in my chair. “Perhaps you can enlighten me.”
“You must have known that the Mister, despite dear little Martha’s charm, was as hard-edged a proponent of prescriptivist poppycock as any pedant who has ever bemoaned the decline of his language. I once saw him throw a hard roll at a waitress who had merely told him that hopefully his entree would be ready in a few minutes.”
“Go on.”
“Like Cassius, he insinuated himself into a company of like-minded mavens — John Simon, William Safire, James J. Kilpatrick, that lot — and inveigled them into a planning a crack-brained putsch. They were going to kidnap Jesse Sheidlower and storm the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary to ‘purify’ the language by force majeure. And they were going to pull this off —“
“On National Grammar Day. March 4,” I said. “So who would have wanted to snuff him?”
“You could assemble a cast of thousands for that task.” He paused. “But I wonder…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just, dear boy,” he said with an evil little chuckle, “that I wouldn’t imagine that he alone could be stirred to wrath over the little niceties and false commandments of usage, or that he alone may have had plans for National Grammar Day.”
I saw then what I had to do.
To be continued …
IV. The rule you don’t break
The cold rain was coming down as hard and fast as layoff notices in a newsroom. As I hurried down the front walk of the Fat Man’s house, I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. Ducking around a corner, I stood behind a tree and waited. A figure in a dark raincoat came around, and I grabbed an arm and twisted.
“Hey! Take it easy, buster. Do you know who I am?”
A woman’s voice. I pulled her over to a streetlight for a look.
“Well, well, a little far from home, Ms. Freeman.” Jan Freeman, copy-editor-turned-moll for Language Log’s Boston family. First non-linguist to be named a consigliere. I let go.
Rubbing her arm, she said, “You’re out of your depth here, McIntyre. Go home.”
“No chance, sister. I’m not going to walk away and let you do Steven Pinker’s dirty work here. I know about the putsch, and what’s more, I figured out who killed the Mister.”
Her shoulders slumped. She shook her head and turned. She stopped and hissed at me: “You're just a two-bit grifter, and that's all you'll ever be.” Then she was gone.
I was pensive on the drive back to the Brockenbrough bungalow. Editing’s a mug’s game. The words strain and crack; sometimes they break under the burden, the tension. They slip and slide and perish — won’t stay still. You go out on a raid on the inarticulate, and not everybody comes back. The public doesn’t like to see it but wants it done. That leaves it to me.
Martha was sitting in the living room. The scientists had gone, taking the body.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“What I needed to know.”
“And?”
“Let me ask you a question. Your book, Things That Make Us [Sic], doesn’t it have an entry on what Bryan Garner lists under ‘Superstitions’ and H.W. Fowler under ‘Fetishes,”?
“Yes. Sure. I called them “false commandments.’”
“Uh-huh. Got a copy handy?”
“There’s one in the study.”
“Come on.”
She led the way through the door to the library and over to the desk. There was a little blood on the blotter, and next to it, on top of a clipping of James J. Kilpatrick’s annual column on the placement of only — it figures — was Martha’s book. I picked it up and turned to page 223, “THE TEN FALSE COMMANDMENTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.”
“Was this what you and he were arguing about?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t play games with me. I made a phone call on my way back, and the boys will be back. Once they match this dent in the buckram cover to that bruise on the Mister’s temple, it’s all over.”
Her face crumpled. “National Grammar Day was mine, mine, and he and his pack of cranks wanted to take it over. There were going to be uprisings of English teachers in all the major cities. He laughed at Chapter 10, ‘Rules That Never Were, Are No More, and Should Be Broken.’ He said that when the cabal made English the official language, all those rules would be written into the United States Code. He was mad and out of control, and I picked up my book and struck him.”
“And then?”
“He swore, said the cabal would have me locked up in Leavenworth. I reached for that red pencil and struck at him, and he groaned and slumped over the desk and was still.”
“It’s over. Oxford University Press has moved Jesse Sheidlower to a secure, undisclosed location. The flatfoots are rounding up the members of the cabal. The threat to National Grammar Day is over. I just want to know one thing.”
“What?”
“Why’d you call me in?”
“You’re a professional copy editor. You fix things.”
“All but this. Sweetheart, you’re taking the fall. National Grammar Day will go on, but you’ll be spending it in a cell.”
Outside, a siren was growing louder.
The end
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Must be important; it's on Facebook
One of my readers, a former University of Maryland at Baltimore County student, noticed a couple of articles at Baltimoresun.com that cited Facebook numbers. His comments:
Both stories cite the membership of a Facebook group related to the story as a substantial fact (the first in the seventh paragraph, the second in the 18th. Both figures are between 1,000 and 2,000, but neither provide any context such as how quickly that figure was reached or even e.g. how many people there are in total on Facebook in the County or the City, or what constitutes a significant number for a group of this sort.
It wasn't so long ago that I was a college student, and I don't recall the joining of a Facebook group as a particularly meaningful act (compared to, say, writing a letter or attending a demonstration). I'm sure checking Facebook is now an early step in the first pass on reporting any story, but it doesn't seem to me either of these numbers _mean anything_. Would this give you pause as a copy editor?
Oh yes. Nearly anything will stimulate suspicion in a copy editor, especially an article that cites numbers.
Nothing is easier than clicking on a link to join a Facebook group. I have joined a few, and some I have not gone back to look at in months. I can see raw numbers of membership in these groups, but, apart from comments by a fraction of the members, I have no idea how often or how much anyone participates in them.
What, as a copy editor, I suspect, is that these citations of Facebook numbers are analogous to those bogus Internet polls that Web sites love to set up and then quote.* Any poll, the ready reader understands, that depends on self-selected responses is statistically invalid. Dubious. Suspect. Worthless.
Trying to gauge involvement with an issue by a raw count of Facebook members in a group, without the availability of a metric to measure the degree of involvement, is just one more largely meaningless number.
*You may have seen some of these ludicrous polls that show the percentages, for and against, in large type, and then reveal in the small type beneath that the poll drew no more than two or three dozen responses.
Both stories cite the membership of a Facebook group related to the story as a substantial fact (the first in the seventh paragraph, the second in the 18th. Both figures are between 1,000 and 2,000, but neither provide any context such as how quickly that figure was reached or even e.g. how many people there are in total on Facebook in the County or the City, or what constitutes a significant number for a group of this sort.
It wasn't so long ago that I was a college student, and I don't recall the joining of a Facebook group as a particularly meaningful act (compared to, say, writing a letter or attending a demonstration). I'm sure checking Facebook is now an early step in the first pass on reporting any story, but it doesn't seem to me either of these numbers _mean anything_. Would this give you pause as a copy editor?
Oh yes. Nearly anything will stimulate suspicion in a copy editor, especially an article that cites numbers.
Nothing is easier than clicking on a link to join a Facebook group. I have joined a few, and some I have not gone back to look at in months. I can see raw numbers of membership in these groups, but, apart from comments by a fraction of the members, I have no idea how often or how much anyone participates in them.
What, as a copy editor, I suspect, is that these citations of Facebook numbers are analogous to those bogus Internet polls that Web sites love to set up and then quote.* Any poll, the ready reader understands, that depends on self-selected responses is statistically invalid. Dubious. Suspect. Worthless.
Trying to gauge involvement with an issue by a raw count of Facebook members in a group, without the availability of a metric to measure the degree of involvement, is just one more largely meaningless number.
*You may have seen some of these ludicrous polls that show the percentages, for and against, in large type, and then reveal in the small type beneath that the poll drew no more than two or three dozen responses.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
RAWSEX
Made you look.
When I first worked at The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1980, the newspaper used the Hendrix publishing system, on which the slug, or working title, of a story was limited to six letters. Rawsex was a popular slug, and dropping a story with that slug on the copy desk was like dropping a calf into a stream full of piranha.
About ninety percent of the time, RAWSEX would be about ORSANCO, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, or some equally gripping topic, and about ten percent of the time it would be about sex, but it always got picked up fast, which was the city desk’s intention.
I mention this in connection with yesterday’s post, “You call that a great headline?”
I wrote the post to take exception with Howard Owens’s tweet about a three-year-old headline, “Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo," as being a great one that any copy editor would envy.
Mr. Owens subsequently took exception to my exception, commenting (and you’ll want to be sure to look at the comments, which came in a burst after Romenesko linked to the post):
I think the fact that the headline has gotten so much attention speaks for itself.
The headline did its job -- got attention to the story.
End of story.
Great headline. One of the best ever.
By that standard, one, by the way, echoed by other commenters, ‘RAWSEX” would be an even greater one. Maybe add an exclamation point.
When he was in charge of the copy editors at the Free Press in Detroit, Alex Cruden conducted a series of headline workshops at American Copy Editor Society conferences, the American Press Institute, and other venues, in which he empaneled civilians — actual readers — to comment on a variety of headlines while muzzled copy editors looked on.
The results were startling to many of the copy editors. Even veteran readers of newspapers did not always pick up on all the headline conventions. And one thing came up repeatedly, in panel after panel across the country: Readers were much less impressed with clever headlines and wordplay than the editors who wrote them. What the readers wanted was clarity.
Not to mention that many clever headlines in newspapers are hardly more than obvious puns, suggesting that copy editors as a group share one of the characteristics that Samuel Johnson found in Shakespeare: “A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”
It remains only to make a couple of points about the alternative headline I mentioned yesterday, my old friend Paul Clark’s “Freedom’s just another bird with nothing left to lose.”
If memory serves, I was the slot editor who approved it for Page One, and I did — pace, commenters — not to allude to Janis Joplin. Without going into the philosophical underpinning of “Me and Bobby McGee,” I thought the headline suggested that the signature line of the song had a parallel to this eagle that had twice been injured.
I’m afraid that nearly all of you who commented on it missed a salient point. Over or the past several years, when I have used this headline in my editing class at Loyola, I have gotten blank looks from every student. If you caught the allusion, then you are probably a fogy like me who still reads things in print. If you drew a blank, you’re probably under forty. If I were in a position to approve that headline today, I’d probably have to kick it back to the editor, much as I like it. Allusion is slippery.
One last thing, commenting on Twitter, Steve Buttry, a classy guy, wrote, “We disagree, but I call attention to John's argument.” Contrast that with a comment by someone named Ray, who wrote, “It's a good headline. It only took a look at the accompanying picture to know what the story was about. This is just a case of sour grapes on McIntyre's part.”
When I first worked at The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1980, the newspaper used the Hendrix publishing system, on which the slug, or working title, of a story was limited to six letters. Rawsex was a popular slug, and dropping a story with that slug on the copy desk was like dropping a calf into a stream full of piranha.
About ninety percent of the time, RAWSEX would be about ORSANCO, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, or some equally gripping topic, and about ten percent of the time it would be about sex, but it always got picked up fast, which was the city desk’s intention.
I mention this in connection with yesterday’s post, “You call that a great headline?”
I wrote the post to take exception with Howard Owens’s tweet about a three-year-old headline, “Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo," as being a great one that any copy editor would envy.
Mr. Owens subsequently took exception to my exception, commenting (and you’ll want to be sure to look at the comments, which came in a burst after Romenesko linked to the post):
I think the fact that the headline has gotten so much attention speaks for itself.
The headline did its job -- got attention to the story.
End of story.
Great headline. One of the best ever.
By that standard, one, by the way, echoed by other commenters, ‘RAWSEX” would be an even greater one. Maybe add an exclamation point.
When he was in charge of the copy editors at the Free Press in Detroit, Alex Cruden conducted a series of headline workshops at American Copy Editor Society conferences, the American Press Institute, and other venues, in which he empaneled civilians — actual readers — to comment on a variety of headlines while muzzled copy editors looked on.
The results were startling to many of the copy editors. Even veteran readers of newspapers did not always pick up on all the headline conventions. And one thing came up repeatedly, in panel after panel across the country: Readers were much less impressed with clever headlines and wordplay than the editors who wrote them. What the readers wanted was clarity.
Not to mention that many clever headlines in newspapers are hardly more than obvious puns, suggesting that copy editors as a group share one of the characteristics that Samuel Johnson found in Shakespeare: “A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.”
It remains only to make a couple of points about the alternative headline I mentioned yesterday, my old friend Paul Clark’s “Freedom’s just another bird with nothing left to lose.”
If memory serves, I was the slot editor who approved it for Page One, and I did — pace, commenters — not to allude to Janis Joplin. Without going into the philosophical underpinning of “Me and Bobby McGee,” I thought the headline suggested that the signature line of the song had a parallel to this eagle that had twice been injured.
I’m afraid that nearly all of you who commented on it missed a salient point. Over or the past several years, when I have used this headline in my editing class at Loyola, I have gotten blank looks from every student. If you caught the allusion, then you are probably a fogy like me who still reads things in print. If you drew a blank, you’re probably under forty. If I were in a position to approve that headline today, I’d probably have to kick it back to the editor, much as I like it. Allusion is slippery.
One last thing, commenting on Twitter, Steve Buttry, a classy guy, wrote, “We disagree, but I call attention to John's argument.” Contrast that with a comment by someone named Ray, who wrote, “It's a good headline. It only took a look at the accompanying picture to know what the story was about. This is just a case of sour grapes on McIntyre's part.”
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
You call that a great headline?
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 headline.” Intrigued, I clicked on the link and found this Washington Post headline:
Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo
I’m sorry. I can’t endorse this one.
I’ll grant you that it’s cute, and I’m sure it brought a round of chuckles at what remains of the Post’s copy desk. But it’s just arbitrary.
A play on words in a headline, particularly one combined with an allusion, should work both ways. It should give a sense of the content of the story, and the allusion should have some connection with the story. There is no Star Wars angle in the story, so the headline is just standing there, saying, “Look how clever I am.”
I’ll give you an example from the archives of one that works.
Some years back, Bill Clinton visited Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and to commemorate the president’s visit, a bald eagle that had injured a wing and been nursed back to health was released into the wild. They called the eagle “Freedom.” Unfortunately, Freedom promptly got into a scrap with a couple of ospreys, was injured, and was returned to veterinary care.
The irrepressible Paul Clark, then working on The Sun’s copy desk, wrote the headline:
Freedom’s just another bird with nothing left to lose
Watch and learn.
Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo
I’m sorry. I can’t endorse this one.
I’ll grant you that it’s cute, and I’m sure it brought a round of chuckles at what remains of the Post’s copy desk. But it’s just arbitrary.
A play on words in a headline, particularly one combined with an allusion, should work both ways. It should give a sense of the content of the story, and the allusion should have some connection with the story. There is no Star Wars angle in the story, so the headline is just standing there, saying, “Look how clever I am.”
I’ll give you an example from the archives of one that works.
Some years back, Bill Clinton visited Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and to commemorate the president’s visit, a bald eagle that had injured a wing and been nursed back to health was released into the wild. They called the eagle “Freedom.” Unfortunately, Freedom promptly got into a scrap with a couple of ospreys, was injured, and was returned to veterinary care.
The irrepressible Paul Clark, then working on The Sun’s copy desk, wrote the headline:
Freedom’s just another bird with nothing left to lose
Watch and learn.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Bungling at the top
Tempting as it is to associate imbecility mainly with the publishing executives who have hollowed out America’s newspapers, there is plenty of that quality to go around, and not just for bankers.
David Zurawik’s article in today’s Baltimore Sun about the ignominious retreat of NBC over its disaster with Jay Leno’s 10 p.m. show after a mere four months illustrates some of the parallels between broadcast television and the newspaper industry.
Broadcast TV, like newspapers, faces a crisis. The programming is expensive to produce (hence the proliferation of cheap-to-make but tacky reality shows), the viewers are drifting away to more appealing offerings on cable, and advertising revenue is sharply down.
People in a panic are liable to arrive at bad decisions, and the broadcast executives, like their newspaper counterparts, chose something self-destructive. They moved Mr. Leno into the earlier time slot because his show is cheaper than a series to produce. Their contempt for their viewers is comparable to newspaper executives’ contempt for readers: just give them something cheap while pretending that it’s good.*
Unfortunately, NBC also contrived to damage the affiliate stations, whose screaming over lost revenue could be heard throughout the long winter nights even with the windows closed. It was the affiliates’ threat of outright rebellion that prompted NBC’s hasty retreat.
At this point, the principal difference between the broadcast executives and newspaper executives appears to be that the broadcasters conceded publicly that they had made a bad decision.
*I have no particular disregard for Mr. Leno, who appears to be an amiable fellow who can be amusing on the days that his writers give him something to work with.
David Zurawik’s article in today’s Baltimore Sun about the ignominious retreat of NBC over its disaster with Jay Leno’s 10 p.m. show after a mere four months illustrates some of the parallels between broadcast television and the newspaper industry.
Broadcast TV, like newspapers, faces a crisis. The programming is expensive to produce (hence the proliferation of cheap-to-make but tacky reality shows), the viewers are drifting away to more appealing offerings on cable, and advertising revenue is sharply down.
People in a panic are liable to arrive at bad decisions, and the broadcast executives, like their newspaper counterparts, chose something self-destructive. They moved Mr. Leno into the earlier time slot because his show is cheaper than a series to produce. Their contempt for their viewers is comparable to newspaper executives’ contempt for readers: just give them something cheap while pretending that it’s good.*
Unfortunately, NBC also contrived to damage the affiliate stations, whose screaming over lost revenue could be heard throughout the long winter nights even with the windows closed. It was the affiliates’ threat of outright rebellion that prompted NBC’s hasty retreat.
At this point, the principal difference between the broadcast executives and newspaper executives appears to be that the broadcasters conceded publicly that they had made a bad decision.
*I have no particular disregard for Mr. Leno, who appears to be an amiable fellow who can be amusing on the days that his writers give him something to work with.
Monday, bloody Monday
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, shamefully, of a couple of obligations to spend the day swallowing ibuprofen and swilling tea. Today? Too soon to tell.
Before embarking on the week’s activities, some reminders and loose ends.
Still time to sign up
You still have a day or two to sign up for McMurry’s Things Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You audioconference on Thursday. Be assured that I will have pulled back from the edge of the grave by then, not only to alert you to some things about language that it is important to keep in mind, but also to hear what you have to offer. Questions will be taken. Form some.
More than spell-checking
That deeply embarrassing Star Tribune memo last week, the one that implied that the paper could get along without copy editors so long as the reporters ran spell-check on their stories, betrays a widespread ignorance about editing.
There are two levels of editing. Running the spell-check is part of mechanical editing: looking for errors in spelling, grammar, usage, points of fact. These are the errors that readers usually pick up on, and this is what people who are ignorant of the craft — many of them, sadly, corporate executives in the publishing industry — think is all there is to it.
The deeper level, analytical editing, is much more difficult. It involves the things that make articles readable, such as focus, structure, organization within the structure, tone, and the legal and ethical issues that get people into trouble. Readers who spot errors in grammar or street names are unlikely to think about the text in these terms, but they can tell very quickly when a story is hard going.
This kind of editing falls to the copy editor when the writer and the assigning editor get so bound up in their own preoccupations with the story that they are unable to step back and look at it as the reader would. Now that crucial step is missing or suppressed at many publications, which may be one reason that newspaper readership is dropping like a stone.
When I step into my classroom at Loyola tomorrow morning, I will be telling my students in the editing course that they are going to be responsible for editing at both levels. We’ll see how many are still there on Thursday.
President Thursday
Now that Baltimoresun.com has made the older You Don’t Say posts inaccessible, I have no compunction about repeating points that I’ve made before. (Not, as my former colleagues can testify, that I have ever been particularly reluctant to repeat myself.)
The opening sentence of a front-page story in Friday’s Sun began thus:
City Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake Thursday ordered a
That was the first line, in enlarged type.
Let’s consider first an aesthetic question, whether a writer ought to string together a long series of capitalized words before ever getting to a verb. Probably not.
Let’s also consider the damnable practice of inserting the day of an event between the subject and the verb, which in this case makes Thursday appear to be Ms. Rawlings-Blake’s last name. This is a non-idiomatic bit of journalese that I campaigned against throughout my tenure as head of The Sun’s copy desk and language noodge. Apparently without effect.
Former Assistant Managing Editor for the Copy Desk John E. McIntyre Monday announced that he has not given up the fight against this detestable practice.
Before embarking on the week’s activities, some reminders and loose ends.
Still time to sign up
You still have a day or two to sign up for McMurry’s Things Your English Teacher Didn’t Tell You audioconference on Thursday. Be assured that I will have pulled back from the edge of the grave by then, not only to alert you to some things about language that it is important to keep in mind, but also to hear what you have to offer. Questions will be taken. Form some.
More than spell-checking
That deeply embarrassing Star Tribune memo last week, the one that implied that the paper could get along without copy editors so long as the reporters ran spell-check on their stories, betrays a widespread ignorance about editing.
There are two levels of editing. Running the spell-check is part of mechanical editing: looking for errors in spelling, grammar, usage, points of fact. These are the errors that readers usually pick up on, and this is what people who are ignorant of the craft — many of them, sadly, corporate executives in the publishing industry — think is all there is to it.
The deeper level, analytical editing, is much more difficult. It involves the things that make articles readable, such as focus, structure, organization within the structure, tone, and the legal and ethical issues that get people into trouble. Readers who spot errors in grammar or street names are unlikely to think about the text in these terms, but they can tell very quickly when a story is hard going.
This kind of editing falls to the copy editor when the writer and the assigning editor get so bound up in their own preoccupations with the story that they are unable to step back and look at it as the reader would. Now that crucial step is missing or suppressed at many publications, which may be one reason that newspaper readership is dropping like a stone.
When I step into my classroom at Loyola tomorrow morning, I will be telling my students in the editing course that they are going to be responsible for editing at both levels. We’ll see how many are still there on Thursday.
President Thursday
Now that Baltimoresun.com has made the older You Don’t Say posts inaccessible, I have no compunction about repeating points that I’ve made before. (Not, as my former colleagues can testify, that I have ever been particularly reluctant to repeat myself.)
The opening sentence of a front-page story in Friday’s Sun began thus:
City Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake Thursday ordered a
That was the first line, in enlarged type.
Let’s consider first an aesthetic question, whether a writer ought to string together a long series of capitalized words before ever getting to a verb. Probably not.
Let’s also consider the damnable practice of inserting the day of an event between the subject and the verb, which in this case makes Thursday appear to be Ms. Rawlings-Blake’s last name. This is a non-idiomatic bit of journalese that I campaigned against throughout my tenure as head of The Sun’s copy desk and language noodge. Apparently without effect.
Former Assistant Managing Editor for the Copy Desk John E. McIntyre Monday announced that he has not given up the fight against this detestable practice.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
I tweet, you tweet, we all tweet
Because the American Dialect Society is meeting in Baltimore this week, along with the Linguistics Society of America, I drove down to the Hilton and paid its extortionate garage fee to attend the cutthroat Word of the Year event.
The linguists were out in force* and had a grand time. Not to keep you in suspense, as you can see from Ben Zimmer’s account in Visual Thesaurus, tweet (v., to post an update on Twitter; n., such an update) won as Word of the Year, and in the exciting additional contest, google was voted Word of the Decade.
It was, however, the secondary contests that captured my interest. I was delighted to be in the majority — yes, they let the rabble in and allowed us to vote — for fail in the Most Useful category. Noun, verb, and interjection, it is, as someone mentioned, the apt word for the recent past. When the votes for the runner-up, the suffix –er, were announced, a glad shout of “FAIL!” went up.
Sea kittens, the inane substitute for fish proposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was the Most Unnecessary winner, and was enthusiastically proposed from the floor in other categories.
Hiking the Appalachian trail coasted to victory in the Most Euphemistic category, and death panel commanded a similar majority among the Most Outrageous nominees.
And, fortunately, Naughties, Aughties, and the other terms proposed for naming the first decade of the current century were the logical choices for Least Likely to Succeed. As someone pointed out during the discussion, people struggled to come up with a suitable term in advance of the decade and debated it during the decade; if there is no consensus now, there is unlikely ever to be one. My view: let’s just be glad it’s over.
It was a damn fine bunch of people crammed into a room much too small. In addition to Mr. Zimmer, I got to meet Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary and author of the F Word**; Grant Barrett of Wordnik and the Double-Tongued Dictionary; Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Language Log; and Arika Okrent, whose In the Land of Invented Languages I reviewed here in May. It was a rare treat to meet people I hold in high esteem but had previously encountered only electronically.
And not just people previously known. I got to meet Richard W. Bailey of the University of Michigan, who is delivering an address later today on “H.L. Mencken and the American Language.” Mencken was a gifted and diligent amateur student of American English, and The American Language, though dated, has much interesting matter, vigorously expressed.
Professor Bailey also mentioned that the Library of America is bringing out Mencken’s Prejudices collections. Pray don’t allow yourself to be trampled in the rush to the bookstores.
*To the disappointment of my stereotypes, there was no crowd of older gentlemen with bow ties in evidence. Alas.
**Mr. Sheidlower’s tweet on the article in The Washington Post about the Word of the Year event: “WaPo article on #woty gets title of my book wrong, misquotes me, mistakes OED for Oxford UP. Damn MSM.” That’s why you should read Mr. Zimmer’s account instead.
I believe that The Baltimore Sun was not represented at the event. I'd check, but my search at Baltimoresun.com has been hung up for more than ten minutes.
The linguists were out in force* and had a grand time. Not to keep you in suspense, as you can see from Ben Zimmer’s account in Visual Thesaurus, tweet (v., to post an update on Twitter; n., such an update) won as Word of the Year, and in the exciting additional contest, google was voted Word of the Decade.
It was, however, the secondary contests that captured my interest. I was delighted to be in the majority — yes, they let the rabble in and allowed us to vote — for fail in the Most Useful category. Noun, verb, and interjection, it is, as someone mentioned, the apt word for the recent past. When the votes for the runner-up, the suffix –er, were announced, a glad shout of “FAIL!” went up.
Sea kittens, the inane substitute for fish proposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was the Most Unnecessary winner, and was enthusiastically proposed from the floor in other categories.
Hiking the Appalachian trail coasted to victory in the Most Euphemistic category, and death panel commanded a similar majority among the Most Outrageous nominees.
And, fortunately, Naughties, Aughties, and the other terms proposed for naming the first decade of the current century were the logical choices for Least Likely to Succeed. As someone pointed out during the discussion, people struggled to come up with a suitable term in advance of the decade and debated it during the decade; if there is no consensus now, there is unlikely ever to be one. My view: let’s just be glad it’s over.
It was a damn fine bunch of people crammed into a room much too small. In addition to Mr. Zimmer, I got to meet Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary and author of the F Word**; Grant Barrett of Wordnik and the Double-Tongued Dictionary; Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania and Language Log; and Arika Okrent, whose In the Land of Invented Languages I reviewed here in May. It was a rare treat to meet people I hold in high esteem but had previously encountered only electronically.
And not just people previously known. I got to meet Richard W. Bailey of the University of Michigan, who is delivering an address later today on “H.L. Mencken and the American Language.” Mencken was a gifted and diligent amateur student of American English, and The American Language, though dated, has much interesting matter, vigorously expressed.
Professor Bailey also mentioned that the Library of America is bringing out Mencken’s Prejudices collections. Pray don’t allow yourself to be trampled in the rush to the bookstores.
*To the disappointment of my stereotypes, there was no crowd of older gentlemen with bow ties in evidence. Alas.
**Mr. Sheidlower’s tweet on the article in The Washington Post about the Word of the Year event: “WaPo article on #woty gets title of my book wrong, misquotes me, mistakes OED for Oxford UP. Damn MSM.” That’s why you should read Mr. Zimmer’s account instead.
I believe that The Baltimore Sun was not represented at the event. I'd check, but my search at Baltimoresun.com has been hung up for more than ten minutes.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Pick up after yourself
Responding to yesterday’s “Turn out the lights” post, Doug Fisher of Common Sense Journalism commented thus:
Most interesting from the Strib editor's memo, of course, is this:
“This will also require more individual responsibility: Reporters cannot turn in stories without running a basic spell check. Editors should have reporters read over every story they have edited. Photographers must turn in accurate cutlines that adhere to AP style. More staffers will need to be flexible about the work they do, meaning some reporters might serve a shift as a copy editor or line editor in any given week.”
I hope they sell tickets. Promises to be great entertainment.
The civilians among you may find this difficult to credit, but there are indeed professional journalists at major newspapers who do not routinely spell-check their own work before submitting it for publication. They are under time pressure, poor dears, and besides, they have been accustomed to the idea that some anonymous drudge on the copy desk will clean up after them. (Incidentally, any number of assigning editors don’t bother to run a spell-check either.)
It’s not just spell-checking — though that would tend to catch when they spell proper names inconsistently — but a host of other matters usually left to the copy desk: Fact-checking. Establishing conventional grammar and syntax. Locating the focus, if any, in the article. Cutting padding and irrelevant material. Restraining ill-advised self-indulgence.
It doesn’t matter. The people at the higher levels making these decisions to eliminate copy editors don’t understand what copy editors do. They think they can just tell reporters to pick up the slack. It is as if a teenager whose entire wardrobe lies in heaps on the floor, who has never carried a dirty plate or glass from the living room to the kitchen without prodding, and who leaves the bathroom in a shape not fit to be described here, will instantaneously — at a mere word — make everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.
Thus Mr. Fisher’s well-founded expectation of amusement to come.
I do feel a pang for the people at working level, the supervisors whose task is to carry out imbecilic directives. They must feel as General von Paulus did on his promotion to field marshal.
(Hitler’s thinking, with the Sixth Army collapsing under the Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad, was that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Von Paulus surrendered the day after his promotion. Examples of wishful thinking are not limited to the Nazi high command. )
The new era arrives and will not be denied. So. Let the corrections column expand. Let the crash blossoms flower. Let even more readers seek their information elsewhere.
Most interesting from the Strib editor's memo, of course, is this:
“This will also require more individual responsibility: Reporters cannot turn in stories without running a basic spell check. Editors should have reporters read over every story they have edited. Photographers must turn in accurate cutlines that adhere to AP style. More staffers will need to be flexible about the work they do, meaning some reporters might serve a shift as a copy editor or line editor in any given week.”
I hope they sell tickets. Promises to be great entertainment.
The civilians among you may find this difficult to credit, but there are indeed professional journalists at major newspapers who do not routinely spell-check their own work before submitting it for publication. They are under time pressure, poor dears, and besides, they have been accustomed to the idea that some anonymous drudge on the copy desk will clean up after them. (Incidentally, any number of assigning editors don’t bother to run a spell-check either.)
It’s not just spell-checking — though that would tend to catch when they spell proper names inconsistently — but a host of other matters usually left to the copy desk: Fact-checking. Establishing conventional grammar and syntax. Locating the focus, if any, in the article. Cutting padding and irrelevant material. Restraining ill-advised self-indulgence.
It doesn’t matter. The people at the higher levels making these decisions to eliminate copy editors don’t understand what copy editors do. They think they can just tell reporters to pick up the slack. It is as if a teenager whose entire wardrobe lies in heaps on the floor, who has never carried a dirty plate or glass from the living room to the kitchen without prodding, and who leaves the bathroom in a shape not fit to be described here, will instantaneously — at a mere word — make everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.
Thus Mr. Fisher’s well-founded expectation of amusement to come.
I do feel a pang for the people at working level, the supervisors whose task is to carry out imbecilic directives. They must feel as General von Paulus did on his promotion to field marshal.
(Hitler’s thinking, with the Sixth Army collapsing under the Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad, was that no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Von Paulus surrendered the day after his promotion. Examples of wishful thinking are not limited to the Nazi high command. )
The new era arrives and will not be denied. So. Let the corrections column expand. Let the crash blossoms flower. Let even more readers seek their information elsewhere.
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