Don't do yourself a mischief

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

(That should hook you.)

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

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

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

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

She goes on to comment:

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

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

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

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

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

Use your indoor voices, please.



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

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

Don't give up the ship*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Quorum call

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

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

Spotted it already, didn’t you?

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

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

O brave new world

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

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

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

Jobs not to be touched with a bargepole

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

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

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

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

College kids should write their own damn term papers.

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

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

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

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

The money-laundering scheme

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

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

“Editor”

That was the title anyhow.

Requirement: a high school diploma.

Trying too hard

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

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

Flags down
over Block
award to
Eagles’ Vick

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

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

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

Simplify, simplify.

Our inbred universities

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

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

You don't want your editor to be your chum

Your editor is your friend, but not your pal.

Your friend knows your strengths and your weaknesses, and is able to tell you a few home truths.

When I first took on the authorship of The Sun’s monthly copy desk newsletter, I inherited the title “Sgt. Friday’s Report.” The gimmick was that it came out on the last Friday of the month and led with a short narrative in which Sergeant Friday and Officer Gannon discussed various writing and editing misdemeanors.

I thought that I handled the device adroitly, with some very droll passages. But when I took it to Dudley Clendinen — then an assistant managing editor — he shook his head. A little puzzled by it. Not sure how it worked or was meant to work. Maybe try something a little different.

I went away, and as I looked at my text, a terrible light dawned. It was not droll. It was labored. And, worst of all, not funny. I realized that Dudley had done me a great service. He had, in the friendliest way, told me something that I badly needed to hear.

Often when editors fail, it is because they misunderstand the relationship with the writers and want to be pals rather than friends. “Hey, buddy, anything you do is A-OK with me. Everything is jake.”

This does not do the writer any good. Buddy-editing lets just anything slide through, and the writer is not held to any particular standard. A colleague on the copy desk once marveled at the low-grade writing of a veteran Sun reporter: “Why, he’s had twenty-five years’ experience!” I muttered, “No, he’s had one year’s experience twenty-five times.” Not one in a succession of editors had held him to any higher standard.

There’s a degree of moral cowardice in slack editing, too. Editing done properly is hard work, but it is even harder to confront people with things they don’t care to hear. If the writer is inept or temperamental, it’s easier just to pass the stuff along — what on a different occasion I referred to as peristalsis rather than editing.

A friend expects the best of you, and you exert yourself to do your best to honor that friendship. When you need an editor — and all of you do — look for a friend. If you want a buddy, go to a bar.

How dumb do they think we are?

Once a television news operation gets a technology, it’s obliged to use it, regardless whether it makes any sense.

When I lived in Cincinnati, WCPO acquired a helicopter. Once the station had sprung for that kind of cash, there was some kind of chopper report every night. Likewise, once a station has the capability to report from a location other than the studio, reporters and camera operators must be dispatched daily to remote locations, however improbable.

One sees at the eleven o’clock news, for example, a reporter standing outside the darkened City Hall to discuss events earlier in the day involving people who are no longer on the site. What this report from a scene where no one else is present should convey to the viewer is elusive.

Tonight, though, I noticed a further refinement on Baltimore’s WJZ.* The story was the melancholy discovery of the body of a missing child on the Eastern Shore. The events were narrated by a reporter “reporting live,” standing outdoors in the dark. Somewhere. But the substitute anchor, who twice identified the reporter as “reporting live,” never mentioned “from” anywhere. This gave rise to a reasonable supposition that the reporter might have been no nearer the Eastern Shore than, say, a parking lot behind the television studio.

If you think that newspaper journalism has become superficial and trivial, you may not have been watching enough television.**



*Regular readers of this blog know that I don’t usually watch local television news, because my shouted objections make the rest of the family nervous. Tonight, however, stunned by overeating at Christmas dinner, we were too lazy to change the channel.

**Out of deference to Christmas goodwill toward all, I have waited until past midnight to make this post.

Another damn word of the year

Every maven and his sisters and his cousins, whom he reckons by the dozens, is pushing a word-of-the-year article or word-of-the-decade article (for that decade that we don’t have a word for, haven’t cared enough about to settle on a word for, and frankly just want to be over).

Even I am not immune to the temptation. So, herewith, my Word of the Year, Word of the Decade:

CRAPTASTIC

A portmanteau word, blending crap and fantastic, not in a favorable connotation, it was particularly beloved among some people whom I know in their descriptions of the work of a particular major media concern. (This description, I realize, will make it impossible for you to narrow the field.)

As a description of the level of public discourse to which we have descended in this waning decade, and particularly as a description of the degeneration of the established news media into drivel, gossip, and irrelevance, it does appear to be the signature word.

Merry Christmas.