An editor asked me yesterday what I thought about the old “split verb” rule, and I managed to cut short the rant before spittle started gathering at the corners of my mouth. But the “split-verb” prohibition is bogus. I have carried on about in workshops, lectured my students, and denounced it in this blog. No reputable authority upholds it, but it does not go away, and I have identified an accessory to this crime against English.
This long-held erroneous belief among journalists is that writers must not place an adverb between an auxiliary verb and the main verb. Here is the entry under verbs from The Associated Press Stylebook, the latest edition of which coincidentally arrived at my house yesterday:
SPLIT FORMS: In general, avoid awkward constructions that split infinitive forms of a verb (to leave, to help, etc.) or compound forms (had left, are found out, etc.)
Awkward: She was ordered to immediately leave on an assignment.
Preferred: She was ordered to leave immediately on an assignment.
Awkward: There stood the wagon that we had early last autumn left by the barn.
Preferred: There stood the wagon that we had left by the barn early last autumn.
Occasionally, however, a split is not awkward and is necessary to convey the meaning:
He wanted to really help his mother.
Those who lie are often found out.
How has your health been?
The budget was tentatively approved.
The “exceptions,” notice, are all idiomatic English, and I think that just about any editor would have identified There stood the wagon that we had early last autumn left by the barn as awkward without any assistance from the Associated Press.
Yet year after year the AP Stylebook and its slavish adherents persist in maintaining this erroneous rule.
If you don’t believe me, check the Never split a verb phrase entry under Superstitions in Garner’s Modern American Usage:
“Because of their misconception as to what a split infinitive really is, some have reached the erroneous conclusion that an adverbial modifier must never be placed between parts of a compound phrase, with the result that they write in such an eccentric style as ‘I greatly have been disappointed’ instead of writing naturally ‘I have been greatly disappointed.’ R.W. Pence & D.W. Emery, A Grammar of Present-Day English 329 n.,69 (1963).
[You noticed I suppose, the never in that sentence. Did you flinch?]
“With a compound verb—that is, one made with an auxiliary and a main verb—the adverb comes between auxiliary and main verb (He will probably telephone before starting / I have often had that thought myself / The clock is consistently losing five minutes a day).” Wilson Follett, Modern American Usage 53 (1966).
Or have a look at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage:
Copperud 1970 1980 talks about an erroneous idea widespread among newspaper journalists that adverbs should not separate auxiliaries from their main verbs (as in “you can easily see” or “they must be heartily congratulated”). This bugaboo, commentators agree, seems to have sprung from fear of the dread split infinitive. ... Copperud cites five commentators on the subject, all of whom see no harm in placing an adverb between the parts of a verb, and one of whom (Fowler 1965) prescribes such placement. Fowler (under placement of adverbs) has a long and detailed discussion, complete with numerous examples in which the adverb has been improperly (to his mind) shifted so as to avoid the split. Since dividing the auxiliary from the verb with an adverb has been approved at least since Lindley Murray 1795, it would seem that Fowler is justified in calling the avoidance a superstition.
Do I need to hit you over the head with those numerous examples from Fowler? Or will you, dammit, cave in and begin to write English instead of journalese?
And you, AP Stylebook, shame, shame for perpetuating a non-rule that has been exploded for decades.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Why this is Wordville
The regulars at Elizabeth Large’s restaurant blog, Dining @ Large, refer to themselves collectively as the Sandbox. Not everyone is happy with the term, and Ms. Large opened up a discussion of the subject today.
The responses so far overwhelmingly endorse the name, in part because it was first applied to the group by the late Robert (the Single One), whose memory the group honors in deep affection.
But the compelling reason to accept the name is that it is in the nature of nicknames to arise spontaneously and stick. Contrived names just don’t seem to work A couple of years ago, the expenditure of half a million dollars on a project to generate a new municipal slogan for Baltimore yielded this: Baltimore: Get in on it! (The public’s responses to current statistics about the murder rate and articles about muggings by bands of unruly youths suggest that a more resonant slogan would be Baltimore: Give up on It.) Like a previous slogan, The City that Reads, Baltimore: Get in on It! was subjected to widespread ridicule before dropping out of active memory.
Last year, when this blog was still as Baltimoresun.com, I shamelessly attempted to mimic Ms. Large’s blog by soliciting nicknames for You Don’t Say. Something shy of a flood of suggestions yielded a mild plurality in favor of the Parlor or Parlour, reflecting the refined (i.e., stuffy) discourse here. It never caught on. Then one day a Sandboxer mentioned having been over at Wordville, and the name seemed exactly right and has been current ever since.
You would be well advised to be suspicious of campaigns to name zoo animals or come up with slogans or anything of the sort.
A final note: As Sandboxers have comments Robert (the Single One)’s coinage came as a reminder to behave well in the sandbox. The word fits because the community of readers that has developed in Ms. Large’s blog is self-policing. People who are abusive or unpleasant are met immediately with gentle but firm reproof from the Sandboxers, and, finding the place inhospitable to venom, they go away and do not return. Names stick when they fit.
The responses so far overwhelmingly endorse the name, in part because it was first applied to the group by the late Robert (the Single One), whose memory the group honors in deep affection.
But the compelling reason to accept the name is that it is in the nature of nicknames to arise spontaneously and stick. Contrived names just don’t seem to work A couple of years ago, the expenditure of half a million dollars on a project to generate a new municipal slogan for Baltimore yielded this: Baltimore: Get in on it! (The public’s responses to current statistics about the murder rate and articles about muggings by bands of unruly youths suggest that a more resonant slogan would be Baltimore: Give up on It.) Like a previous slogan, The City that Reads, Baltimore: Get in on It! was subjected to widespread ridicule before dropping out of active memory.
Last year, when this blog was still as Baltimoresun.com, I shamelessly attempted to mimic Ms. Large’s blog by soliciting nicknames for You Don’t Say. Something shy of a flood of suggestions yielded a mild plurality in favor of the Parlor or Parlour, reflecting the refined (i.e., stuffy) discourse here. It never caught on. Then one day a Sandboxer mentioned having been over at Wordville, and the name seemed exactly right and has been current ever since.
You would be well advised to be suspicious of campaigns to name zoo animals or come up with slogans or anything of the sort.
A final note: As Sandboxers have comments Robert (the Single One)’s coinage came as a reminder to behave well in the sandbox. The word fits because the community of readers that has developed in Ms. Large’s blog is self-policing. People who are abusive or unpleasant are met immediately with gentle but firm reproof from the Sandboxers, and, finding the place inhospitable to venom, they go away and do not return. Names stick when they fit.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Wake up and smell the coffins
David Sullivan wrote a typically thoughtful and moving account last week of what the daily newspaper has meant to its community. This is the core of it:
[E]ven in its damaged state, people still have certain expectations of a newspaper — expectations that they do not have for other media. The newspaper is supposed to reflect and stand for what is right, whether it be linguistically correct or morally correct. The newspaper is supposed to seek the truth and not be complicit in coverups, lies, and the general human search for entropy. The newspaper is supposed to be one of the institutions that hold the community to a higher standard.
So far, we have not discovered a media replacement for that role, which is largely based upon print's combination of near-universal access to a product with a high cost of entry for producing similar products, which makes it both ubiquitous and singular.
My son has been challenging me recently about my mention of community institutions. When you look at the changes in society, the 1950s vs. now; the more roles, options, choices people have; the continuing rise of social justice; the limits that were placed on people in an era when everyone had to read the World-Herald and shop at Brandeis or Kilpatrick's to see an informed and representative choice of what was available, in news or merchandise — exactly how did these slow-moving, bureaucratic, closed-minded, often racist and sexist institutions (including mainstream churches, and schools in the era of rote learning) make things better than they are now? It's a good question, and part of the answer has to be — they didn't.
But community institutions such as newspapers — which are in some ways the last community institutions — still stand for the community's desire to be better than it is.
Unfortunately, that view appears to be held mainly by a couple of generations that are passing away. It is a view that would seem bizarre, even ludicrous, to people under the age of thirty, and perhaps under the age of forty. Newspapers have failed those potential readers by publishing stories that were overlong, appallingly dull, and monumentally self-indulgent. Do you know why multi-part series have so often been published in November and December, during holiday seasons when people have less time to read? So publication would fall within the calendar year and makes those series eligible for consideration by prize juries.
Publishing newspapers for other journalists rather than for readers should have looked iffy — and I have a fairly good idea of how many of my former colleagues over the years did not even read their own newspaper regularly or thoroughly.
But even at the most self-indulgent and obtuse moments, newspapers still aspired to the role that Mr. Sullivan describes, and sometimes actually rose to it.
The great failure of metropolitan daily newspapers has not been in the newsroom but in the boardroom.
Newspapers still have a huge body of readers, in print and online, but the advertising to support the operation has gone away, a trend that the recession has accelerated. Alan Mutters Reflections of a Newsosaur reported yesterday that newspaper advertising fell a sickening 28.3 percent in the first quarter of this year. That is a loss of $2.6 billion. And that number is down from 2008, which itself was no banner year. If you don’t understand why your newspaper is wafer-thin, think about these numbers.
The failure in the boardroom has been a failure to adjust to radically changing business conditions — that is, inability to acquire new sources of revenue — complicated by enormous debt taken on during more prosperous times. That failure likely means the end of the metropolitan daily as readers have known it.
In 1986, when I came to work at The Sun, the paper had eight foreign bureaus, a Washington bureau, reporters in New York and California, suburban bureaus in the core counties, and reporters in Western Maryland and on the Eastern Shore. It was a serious paper. When the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded, The Sun put the story on the front page, accompanied inside by an excerpt of the author’s work. The Sun was the paper in which David Simon anatomized the drug trade in Baltimore. The Sun was a paper that won the Pulitzer. People I met were proud that their city could boast such a paper, and I was damn proud to work for it.
That paper is gone (as am I), and it is not coming back. Nostalgia is a poor substitute for income.
What will survive, in print and online, remains to be seen. Steve Buttry’s “Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection” points to one approach. There is also renewed talk about charging for online content — an idea about which I remain deeply skeptical. Not even in print’s palmy days were readers willing to pony up the cash required to support a metropolitan daily, and it will be hard for publications with diminished staffs to produce the kind of quality, unique content that people might be willing to pay for. And even then, would it be enough?
I don’t subscribe to the overheated talk that the decline of the metropolitan daily, or even its extinction, would destroy democracy. There are lots of voices being published, in print and electronically. I do worry about where to find verified information of the kind that newspapers strived to produce. I do worry about journalists being able to make a living at the craft. And I wait to see what comes next.
[E]ven in its damaged state, people still have certain expectations of a newspaper — expectations that they do not have for other media. The newspaper is supposed to reflect and stand for what is right, whether it be linguistically correct or morally correct. The newspaper is supposed to seek the truth and not be complicit in coverups, lies, and the general human search for entropy. The newspaper is supposed to be one of the institutions that hold the community to a higher standard.
So far, we have not discovered a media replacement for that role, which is largely based upon print's combination of near-universal access to a product with a high cost of entry for producing similar products, which makes it both ubiquitous and singular.
My son has been challenging me recently about my mention of community institutions. When you look at the changes in society, the 1950s vs. now; the more roles, options, choices people have; the continuing rise of social justice; the limits that were placed on people in an era when everyone had to read the World-Herald and shop at Brandeis or Kilpatrick's to see an informed and representative choice of what was available, in news or merchandise — exactly how did these slow-moving, bureaucratic, closed-minded, often racist and sexist institutions (including mainstream churches, and schools in the era of rote learning) make things better than they are now? It's a good question, and part of the answer has to be — they didn't.
But community institutions such as newspapers — which are in some ways the last community institutions — still stand for the community's desire to be better than it is.
Unfortunately, that view appears to be held mainly by a couple of generations that are passing away. It is a view that would seem bizarre, even ludicrous, to people under the age of thirty, and perhaps under the age of forty. Newspapers have failed those potential readers by publishing stories that were overlong, appallingly dull, and monumentally self-indulgent. Do you know why multi-part series have so often been published in November and December, during holiday seasons when people have less time to read? So publication would fall within the calendar year and makes those series eligible for consideration by prize juries.
Publishing newspapers for other journalists rather than for readers should have looked iffy — and I have a fairly good idea of how many of my former colleagues over the years did not even read their own newspaper regularly or thoroughly.
But even at the most self-indulgent and obtuse moments, newspapers still aspired to the role that Mr. Sullivan describes, and sometimes actually rose to it.
The great failure of metropolitan daily newspapers has not been in the newsroom but in the boardroom.
Newspapers still have a huge body of readers, in print and online, but the advertising to support the operation has gone away, a trend that the recession has accelerated. Alan Mutters Reflections of a Newsosaur reported yesterday that newspaper advertising fell a sickening 28.3 percent in the first quarter of this year. That is a loss of $2.6 billion. And that number is down from 2008, which itself was no banner year. If you don’t understand why your newspaper is wafer-thin, think about these numbers.
The failure in the boardroom has been a failure to adjust to radically changing business conditions — that is, inability to acquire new sources of revenue — complicated by enormous debt taken on during more prosperous times. That failure likely means the end of the metropolitan daily as readers have known it.
In 1986, when I came to work at The Sun, the paper had eight foreign bureaus, a Washington bureau, reporters in New York and California, suburban bureaus in the core counties, and reporters in Western Maryland and on the Eastern Shore. It was a serious paper. When the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded, The Sun put the story on the front page, accompanied inside by an excerpt of the author’s work. The Sun was the paper in which David Simon anatomized the drug trade in Baltimore. The Sun was a paper that won the Pulitzer. People I met were proud that their city could boast such a paper, and I was damn proud to work for it.
That paper is gone (as am I), and it is not coming back. Nostalgia is a poor substitute for income.
What will survive, in print and online, remains to be seen. Steve Buttry’s “Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection” points to one approach. There is also renewed talk about charging for online content — an idea about which I remain deeply skeptical. Not even in print’s palmy days were readers willing to pony up the cash required to support a metropolitan daily, and it will be hard for publications with diminished staffs to produce the kind of quality, unique content that people might be willing to pay for. And even then, would it be enough?
I don’t subscribe to the overheated talk that the decline of the metropolitan daily, or even its extinction, would destroy democracy. There are lots of voices being published, in print and electronically. I do worry about where to find verified information of the kind that newspapers strived to produce. I do worry about journalists being able to make a living at the craft. And I wait to see what comes next.
Bringing Dickens into focus
One of the problems with Charles Dickens is that there is so much stuff. All those novels. The compelling biographical details. The Victorian background. Where to start?
Happily, Brian Murray, a professor in the writing department at Loyola College, has written a short, readable introduction, the Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens (Continuum, 184 pages, $19.95, due out on July 1). Just the thing for the reader in the foothills of this mountain of prose.
The ethics of disclosure compel me to state that Professor Murray engaged me to go over the proofs of the book. Should you discover any errors in it, you should feel free to blame the copy editor.
Happily, Brian Murray, a professor in the writing department at Loyola College, has written a short, readable introduction, the Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Dickens (Continuum, 184 pages, $19.95, due out on July 1). Just the thing for the reader in the foothills of this mountain of prose.
The ethics of disclosure compel me to state that Professor Murray engaged me to go over the proofs of the book. Should you discover any errors in it, you should feel free to blame the copy editor.
Monday, June 1, 2009
To err is human
Imagine, if you can, a book a copy editor would find more inviting than Joseph T. Hallinan’s Why We Make Mistakes (Broadway Books, 283 pages, $24.95). Mr. Hallinan, who formerly wrote for The Wall Street Journal, offers a catalogue of our predispositions to fallibility.
Because we — that’s us as a species — are impatient and have a misplaced confidence in our ability to figure things out, we don’t read the instructions. Subaru, for example, determined in study of customer complaints that one in five questions to the company’s call center involved a point explained in the owner’s manual.
We are too easily distracted and dangerously prone to the illusion of multitasking. Talking on cell phones while driving, or worse, texting, divides our attention dangerously. So do all the gadgets with which automobiles come equipped. An Eastern Airlines jet crashed in the Everglades because the flight crew got so distracted over determining why the landing gear indicator light hadn’t come on that they forgot to operate the airplane. The industry has a term, “Controlled Flight into Terrain,” CFIT, to describe just such occurrences.
We are overly reliant on our perceptions, which are partial, and our memories, which reconstruct rather than record. This is why eyewitness testimony in trials so regularly contributes to the conviction of innocent people.
And, copy editors should take particular note here, we defer too much to experts, who are in turn overconfident in their expertise. The medical industry, in an effort to reduce anesthesiologists’ errors in the operating room, has taken a number of measures, among them “attitude adjustment.” Pay close attention: “They began discouraging the idea of doctor as know-it-all, and encouraged nurses and others to speak up if they saw someone—especially the anesthesiologist—do something wrong. In error-speak, this is known as ‘flattening the authority gradient,’ and it has been shown as an effective way to reduce errors.”
Some of the scandals in the newspaper industry — the plagiarisms and fabrications, the articles based on shaky information — can be attributed to too steep an authority gradient. The copy editors and lower-level editors were either not encouraged to question the work of stars or decisions of the high command, or were ignored when they did.
One way to avoid error is to develop systematic defenses, like the checklists used in the airplane cockpit and the operating theater. The sorts of questions that copy editors ask are like those checklists: Is this right? How do we know this? Who says so? Do we have independent confirmation? Does this make sense?
Because we — that’s us as a species — are impatient and have a misplaced confidence in our ability to figure things out, we don’t read the instructions. Subaru, for example, determined in study of customer complaints that one in five questions to the company’s call center involved a point explained in the owner’s manual.
We are too easily distracted and dangerously prone to the illusion of multitasking. Talking on cell phones while driving, or worse, texting, divides our attention dangerously. So do all the gadgets with which automobiles come equipped. An Eastern Airlines jet crashed in the Everglades because the flight crew got so distracted over determining why the landing gear indicator light hadn’t come on that they forgot to operate the airplane. The industry has a term, “Controlled Flight into Terrain,” CFIT, to describe just such occurrences.
We are overly reliant on our perceptions, which are partial, and our memories, which reconstruct rather than record. This is why eyewitness testimony in trials so regularly contributes to the conviction of innocent people.
And, copy editors should take particular note here, we defer too much to experts, who are in turn overconfident in their expertise. The medical industry, in an effort to reduce anesthesiologists’ errors in the operating room, has taken a number of measures, among them “attitude adjustment.” Pay close attention: “They began discouraging the idea of doctor as know-it-all, and encouraged nurses and others to speak up if they saw someone—especially the anesthesiologist—do something wrong. In error-speak, this is known as ‘flattening the authority gradient,’ and it has been shown as an effective way to reduce errors.”
Some of the scandals in the newspaper industry — the plagiarisms and fabrications, the articles based on shaky information — can be attributed to too steep an authority gradient. The copy editors and lower-level editors were either not encouraged to question the work of stars or decisions of the high command, or were ignored when they did.
One way to avoid error is to develop systematic defenses, like the checklists used in the airplane cockpit and the operating theater. The sorts of questions that copy editors ask are like those checklists: Is this right? How do we know this? Who says so? Do we have independent confirmation? Does this make sense?
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Weekend miscellany
Item: Tomorrow is the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Joseph Haydn, and as I crouch over the computer in the basement, I’m listening to the Opus 77 string quartets. Listen to the sublime second movement of Opus 72, No. 2 in F major, this weekend if you have a chance; if you are not moved to admiration, you have a heart of stone.
Item: Earlier this week I attended my first tweet-up, in which people linked to The Baltimore Sun by Twitter gathered at The Windup Space, a gallery/bar in the Station North Arts district (with a vacant building on one side and a demolished one on the other, suggesting that Station North remains a work in progress).
I met @MinistryOfBacon and @SpamSpam, among others. The former was impressed by my evaluation of the superiority of bacon over sausage: with bacon, you know what you’re eating. There was also a subsequent mention on Facebook that Owl Meat,* the indefatigable commenter on Elizabeth Large’s Dining@Large blog, had encountered me there. I myself was unaware of the honor, not recognizing any of his many personae. Or perhaps he was just having me on at Facebook. Owl Meat, Internet Man of Mystery.**
Item: Snark cropped up this week on Ms. Large’s blog when regular contributor John Lindner unveiled his lack of enthusiasm for the cuisine — if that’s the word we want — at Looney’s bar. Someone appropriated Michael Gray’s name to post a patently false comment. When Mr. Gray objected, someone signing as “Ellen” responded:
For someone who prides himself on his writing style and likes to lob scuds at other's writing ("prattle"), your last post was an English teacher's nightmare.
"Just because of a few obnoxious, childish buffoons" shouldn't be it's own sentence.
Everyone is a legend in their own mind.
Anyone who has leapt with delight on my typos and solecisms will recognize the hazard people run when they set themselves up to comment on other people’s grammar and usage. Others’ writing and its own sentence would surely have been preferable, and while I have loosened up considerably on everyone ... their constructions, I’m not sure that “Ellen” and those English teachers twitching in their sleep would grant the same latitude.
I am sure, however, that legend in his own mind is a damnable cliche.
The snarker snarked is a recurring theme on the Internet.
Item: Among the events of the week to come is something less than a tweet-up but nonetheless promising: the 2009 Abell Symposium, "The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?," sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. This will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. in Westminster Hall (519 West Fayette Street, Baltimore) on the University of Maryland Baltimore campus. Among the luminaries on the panel will be Monty Cook, editor of The Sun, and Tim Franklin, his immediate predecessor. I plan to show up, and I hope that you will, too.
*Owl Meat Gravy in full reference, though the cognomen varies depending on the subject he addresses.
**Yes, another pop culture allusion.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Know your U.S. Presidents
A correction today from the Times Observer of Warren, Pa.:
An errant classified "personal" ad which appeared in Thursday's Times Observer has drawn the attention of law enforcement officials.
A person from Warren placed the ad, which apparently alludes to the wish that President Obama meet an untimely end by linking him with four assassinated presidents. The ad representative didn't make the connection among the four other presidents mentioned [emphasis added] and mistakenly allowed the ad to run.
Upon realizing the mistake early Thursday morning, the ad was immediately discontinued and the identity of the person who placed the ad was turned over to Warren City Police as per newspaper policy. The local police department forwarded the information to federal authorities, as per department policy.
The Times Observer apologizes for the oversight.
The ad — thank you, Mr. Romenesko — read: “May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!"
An errant classified "personal" ad which appeared in Thursday's Times Observer has drawn the attention of law enforcement officials.
A person from Warren placed the ad, which apparently alludes to the wish that President Obama meet an untimely end by linking him with four assassinated presidents. The ad representative didn't make the connection among the four other presidents mentioned [emphasis added] and mistakenly allowed the ad to run.
Upon realizing the mistake early Thursday morning, the ad was immediately discontinued and the identity of the person who placed the ad was turned over to Warren City Police as per newspaper policy. The local police department forwarded the information to federal authorities, as per department policy.
The Times Observer apologizes for the oversight.
The ad — thank you, Mr. Romenesko — read: “May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!"
The grit in the oyster
I can’t help myself; I’ve been a copy editor for too long. When I read for amusement, I notice things that go awry, and they stick in my mind.
I recently read, and mainly enjoyed, Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Hendry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. It was a refreshing, somewhat novelistic survey of the writers of the Concord circle.
But Martin Van Buren was not the incumbent president in the election of 1852, and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, not April 19, and noticing these slips in the text leaves me wondering how many other, unnoticed errors it might harbor.
This week’s book was Daniel Mark Epstein’s Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries. Looking at Lincoln and his administration through the perspective of John Nicolay and John Hay (and William Osborn Stoddard, about whom I had previously been unaware) was informative both about Lincoln’s character and his management of his administration. Mr. Epstein’s book is also gracefully written and insightful.
Still, I doubt that Hay was the bridegroom at Nicolay’s wedding and suspect that he was instead the best man.
I sat with my son in the October sunlight last year at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill, with a glass of McHenry beer and a plate of oysters on the half shell. That is nearly as good as life gets. The oysters were a little gritty, which did not erase the joy of the day, but it would have been a keener pleasure without the grit.
I admire and enjoy the work of Ms. Cheever and Mr. Epstein, but my pleasure would have been uncorrupted if someone — say a copy editor — had gone through their texts on the alert for the mishaps that befall even the best writers.
I recently read, and mainly enjoyed, Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Hendry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. It was a refreshing, somewhat novelistic survey of the writers of the Concord circle.
But Martin Van Buren was not the incumbent president in the election of 1852, and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, not April 19, and noticing these slips in the text leaves me wondering how many other, unnoticed errors it might harbor.
This week’s book was Daniel Mark Epstein’s Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries. Looking at Lincoln and his administration through the perspective of John Nicolay and John Hay (and William Osborn Stoddard, about whom I had previously been unaware) was informative both about Lincoln’s character and his management of his administration. Mr. Epstein’s book is also gracefully written and insightful.
Still, I doubt that Hay was the bridegroom at Nicolay’s wedding and suspect that he was instead the best man.
I sat with my son in the October sunlight last year at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill, with a glass of McHenry beer and a plate of oysters on the half shell. That is nearly as good as life gets. The oysters were a little gritty, which did not erase the joy of the day, but it would have been a keener pleasure without the grit.
I admire and enjoy the work of Ms. Cheever and Mr. Epstein, but my pleasure would have been uncorrupted if someone — say a copy editor — had gone through their texts on the alert for the mishaps that befall even the best writers.
'White' is also an ethnicity
The nomination to the Supreme Court of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has generated a quantity of chatter about race, little of it edifying.
Tom Tancredo, a Republican and former congressman from Colorado, has been widely quoted: “If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case ... which is from my point of of view anyway ... nothing more than a ... Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that's going to convince me and a lot of other people that it's got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’ What does that tell you?”*
It tells me something about Mr. Tancredo, but not much about the issue of race.
Let’s refresh the perspective: George W. Bush appointed two middle-aged white men to the Supreme Court.* White is as much an ethnic marker as black or Hispanic — particularly since demographic trends point to a future in which all three groups will be minorities in the U.S. population.
Given that that future is near at hand, it would be a good idea to abandon the practice of saying that ethnicity is an issue only when African-Americans and Latinos are involved. White is also an ethnicity, even if the news media and the commentators are not used to thinking in those terms.
*The quoted material is taken from Politico.com. It is possible that it’s a little garbled, but it is also plausible that Mr. Tancredo sometimes gets his feet tangled in his own syntax.
**It would be odious to identify middle-aged white men with a particular political party.
Tom Tancredo, a Republican and former congressman from Colorado, has been widely quoted: “If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case ... which is from my point of of view anyway ... nothing more than a ... Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that's going to convince me and a lot of other people that it's got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’ What does that tell you?”*
It tells me something about Mr. Tancredo, but not much about the issue of race.
Let’s refresh the perspective: George W. Bush appointed two middle-aged white men to the Supreme Court.* White is as much an ethnic marker as black or Hispanic — particularly since demographic trends point to a future in which all three groups will be minorities in the U.S. population.
Given that that future is near at hand, it would be a good idea to abandon the practice of saying that ethnicity is an issue only when African-Americans and Latinos are involved. White is also an ethnicity, even if the news media and the commentators are not used to thinking in those terms.
*The quoted material is taken from Politico.com. It is possible that it’s a little garbled, but it is also plausible that Mr. Tancredo sometimes gets his feet tangled in his own syntax.
**It would be odious to identify middle-aged white men with a particular political party.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Things not to give a fig for
Not to care a fig, according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, refers to the fruit as “something of little or no value.” Or perhaps it suggests the Spanish fico, which was the popular term in Shakespeare’s time “for an obscene gesture of contempt made by thrusting the thumb (representing the male sex organ) between the first and second fingers (representing the female).” Choose the sense you prefer.
Item: Archie is marrying Veronica
I’m sorry, but does anyone born since the Truman administration care? And aren’t those two collecting Social Security by now and living in a facility that prepares food that does not require chewing?
Item: The Scripps National Spelling Bee
Somehow it does not surprise that our national competition celebrating literacy is devoted to rote memorization rather than reading or thinking.
Item: Jon and Kate’s marriage is in trouble
A couple with eight children who have allowed themselves to be presented to the public in a reality TV show are starting to show some strain. Who’d’a thunk?
Item: Chris Brown is in trouble again
Don’t know his music, don’t care to know it. Didn’t watch his YouTube defense of the accusation the he beat up his girlfriend. Not edified by his latest contretemps. The world of celebrity news coverage appears to consist largely of annoying people who just won’t go away.
Item: Fox News
Comment would be superfluous.
Readers: For your part: Suggestions would be welcome on (a) expressions comparable to not give a fig for or (b) additional items not to give a fig for.
Item: Archie is marrying Veronica
I’m sorry, but does anyone born since the Truman administration care? And aren’t those two collecting Social Security by now and living in a facility that prepares food that does not require chewing?
Item: The Scripps National Spelling Bee
Somehow it does not surprise that our national competition celebrating literacy is devoted to rote memorization rather than reading or thinking.
Item: Jon and Kate’s marriage is in trouble
A couple with eight children who have allowed themselves to be presented to the public in a reality TV show are starting to show some strain. Who’d’a thunk?
Item: Chris Brown is in trouble again
Don’t know his music, don’t care to know it. Didn’t watch his YouTube defense of the accusation the he beat up his girlfriend. Not edified by his latest contretemps. The world of celebrity news coverage appears to consist largely of annoying people who just won’t go away.
Item: Fox News
Comment would be superfluous.
Readers: For your part: Suggestions would be welcome on (a) expressions comparable to not give a fig for or (b) additional items not to give a fig for.
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