Tea Party, please note

The New York Times has an article on the accelerating collapse of ACORN, the grassroots community-organizing group, which appears to be on the brink of bankruptcy:

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella. …

But wait, there’s more:

[T]he organization was dogged for years by financial problems and accusations of fraud. In the summer of 2008, infighting erupted over embezzlement of Acorn funds by the brother of the organization’s founder. Some chapters were also found to have submitted voter application forms with incorrect information on them during the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, leading to blistering charges from conservative organizations linking Acorn’s errors to the Obama campaign.

The extent of sheer incompetence, tinged with possibilities of corruption, does indeed give off a bad smell. But before conservatives indulge themselves in the shouting of hosannas, there is this to consider.

The Tea Party movement, like ACORN, includes many impassioned and well-meaning people who are not part of established groups and whose expertise in setting up and maintaining a national political organization is unproven. There are fledgling organizations within the movement whose goals and tactics may turn out to be inconsistent. And there appear to be large sums of money floating about – and conservatives know as well as anyone that when the money is flowing many people will be tempted to dip their own buckets into the stream.

Both ACORN and the Tea Party movement have their origins in citizens’ disenchantment with the existing political parties and lobbying operations, which they have found ineffective, unresponsive, or susceptible to corruption – or all three. Unfortunately, good intentions do not guarantee immunity from bad decisions, or protection from lurking rascals.

No Irish need apply

Sure and it was a grand day when conservatives finally claimed political correctitude for themselves.

William F. Gavin, writing for National Review Online, opines that McCarthyism is a slur against the Irish.

Don’t leave it with me. See what you make of his argument.

After years of scorning the “culture of victimization” and ridiculing style guides that prohibited paddy wagon and dutch treat and welsh on a bet, a conservative stands up to defend an alcoholic senator who made incoherent and unsubstantiated accusations of subversion, and who was ultimately censured (Do you know what it takes for the United States Senate to censure one of its own?) on the basis of defending his Irish Catholic ethnicity.

A different ethnic tradition might term this chutzpa.

Religion and politics

Yesterday afternoon I sent out this tweet: The Rev. Canon* Mary Douglas Glasspool has received the necessary consents for her consecration as a suffragan bishop. This is significant because her consecration in May will make her only the second openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church and the first lesbian bishop.

Subsequently, @mkecoffee tweeted thus: I think the Episcopal church has long been little more than a thin veneer on top of a secular worldview.

There is something to that. (Thought I was going to spring to the defense of liberal ecclesiology, didn’t you?) If I will concede that there is an argument to be made here, will Mr. Coffee and those who agree with him entertain the possibility that other denominations or congregations are cloaking secular conservative cultural views in the mantle of religion?

Discuss.

*Because she serves as canon to the bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, her formal title is the Rev. Canon. My former newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, continues to refer to her as the Rev. Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Maybe hire a copy editor?

Yahoo News headline: Women, girls rape victims in Haiti quake

Comment on CNN screen crawl: Jewish lobby runs America

MSNBC: I-Team: Judge Married Woman, Suspected Abuser

WJZ-TV: Man Arrested For Sexual Assault On College Campus

Reuters: BOJ split vote raises doubts about future easing

CNBC: End of Mortgage Buys Form of Tightening: Pimco

Manners maketh man

A post from last September, “Take off your hat, sir,” continues to provoke occasional comments, including this most recent one: “I know you say it's disrespectful [to leave one’s hat on in a courtroom], but why is that? it just doesn't make sense.... so please explain that to me so I have a better understanding and so I have a better reason than ‘because it shows respect.’ ”

I can give some historical perspective. Removing headgear was likely a gesture of peacefulness. A warrior removing his helmet exposes his head, and this gesture of vulnerability indicates that no harm is intended. Similarly, the custom of shaking hands upon meeting seems to have originated as an indication that one is not carrying a weapon.

Over time the practice of uncovering took on additional meanings. A man removed his hat as a gesture of respect for authority in the presence of the monarch or a judge. And in time good manners dictated such practices as removing the hat at the theater, at the dinner table, at the opera, in church, in an elevator when a lady is present. Tipping the hat in encountering acquaintances became a gesture of friendly acknowledgement.

This may seem quaint and arbitrary to you, particularly if you’re wearing a baseball cap at table in a laughable effort to conceal your male-pattern baldness. And it is. Manners are inherently arbitrary. If you are male and Jewish and Orthodox, you follow a completely different set of customs about headgear.

Manners are like idioms in language. Idioms convey meanings that are not expressed by the literal words, which is why students learning a new language have to memorize idioms. There is no point in arguing over the gender of nouns in French or German; they’re just that way, and if you don’t trouble to learn them you will sound uneducated and crude to native speakers.

The force of custom can be stronger than law, which is, I think, why some people who write about usage often mistake stylistic preferences for rules of grammar. And even though they are wrong-headed in their advice, such people are on to something. The way you dress and conduct yourself and the way you write transmit messages about yourself.

You may think that wearing a baseball cap in court demonstrates your autonomy and your freedom from the dead hand of archaic custom. That’s fine, but you should be aware that the judge is going to think that you’re just a jerk or a slob. You can ignore or flout the conventions of standard written English, “just so long as you get your meaning across,” as my freshman composition students used to say, so long as you can accept that some readers will conclude that you’re subliterate and will then ignore what you have to say.

Just take off your hat, and no backtalk.  

Beware of the editor

I have spent thirty years working with copy editors, several of whom I have trained and many of whom I admire. They have been boon companions. But it is regrettably true that not all copy editors are equally able, and, even more regrettably, some can be positively dangerous. Here are a few you will want to watch out for.

SPEED DEMON

Speed Demon tears through copy. Hand him a text and he’ll return it to you before you’ve swallowed another sip of coffee. Speed can keep up this pace all night. Unfortunately, as he careers along he fails to notice that a proper name is spelled two different ways, not all of the subjects and verbs agree, and he has left a typo in his headline.

ONE GEAR

One Gear goes to the opposite extreme. One is meticulous. Every name is checked, every fact looked up, every sentence weighed, tested, and verified. One can handle three, maybe four texts a shift, and the pace never changes. If it is twenty minutes past deadline, steam is escaping under pressure from the news editor’s head, and the printing plant foreman is approaching hysteria, One’s lumbering pace never quickens.

PICKY PICKY PICKY

You should have been suspicious when you scored Picky Picky Picky’s applicant test. Something was marked wrong in every single sentence, usually two or three things. Picky is determined to show you that she is, by gum, an editor, and being an editor means finding lots of things wrong, without regard to significance. Large errors, small errors, things that are not errors — Picky vacuums them all up and dumps them on your desk.

BLACK/WHITE

Editing, as Black/White understands it, means following the Rules. The Rules can mainly be found in the Associated Press Stylebook, which Black/White has annotated more thoroughly than the Talmud. For every instance, there is a clear right answer and a clear wrong answer, and Black/White has a no-tolerance policy for wrong answers. Everything that comes from Black/White’s hands has a coat of battleship gray slapped over it.

LOOSEY GOOSEY

If you wrote it, it’s fine with Loosey Goosey, because changing it would interfere with the Writer’s Voice, and the voice of God is not any more sacred than the Writer’s. Loosey is particularly treasured by writers in features departments, because she never thinks that a self-indulgent goat-choker ought to be shorter or that a metaphor that would look excessive in the Bulwer-Lytton competition ought to be challenged.

AUTHOR MANQUE

There are, one blushes to admit, copy editors who fit the stereotype that writers cherish: the frustrated writer who rewrites other people’s prose just because he can. Author, unlike Picky Picky Picky, does not hold that the texts he edits are factually or grammatically defective; he just thinks that he could have written them better, and, whenever he is not closely watched, he simply rewrites to suit his own taste.

I KNOW BETTER

Those reference books on grammar and usage on the shelf next to the copy desk? That list of electronic references painstaking compiled, vetted, and distributed to the editors? I Know has never looked at any of them, because I Know knows better. I Know, as you can count on being reminded, was editing copy when you were still a zygote, and he has forgotten more about the craft than you will ever learn. (Both those statements, oddly, may be true.) He isn’t having any truck with your newfangled enthusiasms about language and editing, and if you are weak and cowardly, you will let him get away with this.

OUT OF MY DEPTH

Nobody knows why Out Of applied to be a copy editor. Perhaps someone on the parole board suggested it. Perhaps Out Of just heard that it was a job where you could sit down all day without having to run around town and talk to people you don’t know who don’t want to answer your questions anyhow. Nobody knows why Out Of was hired, either, except that the managers don’t have a clue about what editing is and imagine that just about anybody can run spell-check and format a text for the Web. Out Of doesn’t know much about language, so he doesn’t fix anything. He’s not particularly curious, so he doesn’t ask many questions. He just takes what comes along and passes it along.

I Know Better is the past of editing. Out Of My Depth is the future.

It just don't add up

Before you go all peevy on me about the headline, you should be reminded that it is a direct quotation from a Warner Bros. cartoon of my youth. I will offer a public salute to the first reader who accurately identifies the source.* What it does indicate is that we live in a world in which many things simply make no sense.

Item: Mattel is producing a series of Barbie-style dolls based on characters from Mad Men. But the dolls will not have drinks and cigarettes as accessories. What next, a Glenn Beck doll that doesn’t cry?

Item: A lawsuit has been filed claiming that the E-Trade commercial showing a “milkaholic” baby named Lindsay appropriates Lindsay Lohan’s name and image without her consent. Oddly, milk is an addiction with which Ms. Lohan has not previously been associated.

As my first news editor, the late Bob Johnson, used to say, “You can sue the Bishop of Boston for bastardy. But can you get a judgment?”

Item: The Itawamba County School Board in Mississippi canceled a high school prom to which a lesbian student wanted to bring a date, saying that it did so “taking into consideration the education, safety and well-being of our students.”

Now I see that I must have been psychologically scarred by the sight of girls dancing with each other at dances when I was in high school. (Not because they were lesbian, mind you, but because the boys mistook awkwardness for masculinity and gracefulness for effeminacy.)

Item: There appear to be a great number of people interested in Tiger Woods’s sex life. There appear also to be a great number of people interested in golf. Neither interest is fathomable.

Item: Warner Bros. has begun development of a Gilligan’s Island movie. Further comment should be superfluous, though you may still have time to light out for the territory.

*Hint: Did you remember the gravy?

The world turned upside down

Two propositions worth considering:

Item: Glenn Beck is a satirist employed by the sinister left-wing media to subvert conservatism by making it look ridiculous.

Evidence: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show simply runs excerpts of the Beck interview with Eric Massa. Commentary is hardly necessary.

Item: The Onion is not a satirical publication, but a factual one.

Evidence: Yesterday’s article, “Nation Shudders at Large Block on Uninterrupted text”:

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won't it just tell me what it's about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I've looked everywhere—there's nothing here but words.”

“Ow,” Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about. …

 Think of the students whose eyes glaze over if they are asked to read more than a page, or the managers unable to conceptualize except in PowerPoint. This is a documentary article.

It's good to be the king

Memories have not yet faded of the pleasure derived from being the benevolent despot of The Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, so I took a natural interest in learning that Randy Michaels, the CEO of the Tribune Company, has issued a ukase forbidding the use of 119 words or phrases on WGN-AM.

Some of his preferences merit hearty endorsement. I was rolling my eyes at giving 110 percent from the mouths of blowhard coaches at mandatory school assemblies forty years ago. Anyone on television or radio who refers to snow as white stuff should be sent to a re-education camp in Thunder Bay, Ontario, for the winter. He scorns close proximity (where else would it be?) and the confusion of podium for lectern.

Some preferences may leave you shaking your head. No seek for look for. Motorist is out, officials verboten, pedestrian eighty-sixed. Don’t ask me why. I can understand tired vogue words like diva, idiotic weather-speak like shower activity­ for showers, and affected diction like perished, but allegations has always seemed to me to be a perfectly good word for unproven claims.

Still, it’s his radio station, and he has say-so.

What will be interesting to see will be the long-term effect. Those of us in the paragraph game were long familiar with decrees from Jupiter Optimus Maximus coming down from the summit of Olympus.

One Sun managing editor took exception to escapee. The –ee suffix, he insisted goes with the name of the person who is the object of the action, not the doer of the action. He decreed that any miscreant who slipped his collar was to be referred to as an escaper. And so we did, for a time. But that managing editor moved on, and the decree lapsed into desuetude. At some point, I silently deleted it from the electronic stylebook, and no one noticed.

But some idiosyncratic directives linger long after the departure of the lawgiver, even past the point at which anyone can remember its rationale. Newspaper stylebooks and copy desk lore are full of these fossil remnants. The phenomenon has been explored in Jan Freeman’s excellent Ambrose Bierce’s Write It Right, which identifies arbitrary edicts about usage that have survived for generations in American newspapers, along with other idiosyncratic preferences that are completely, and rightly, ignored. It is analogous to the way that people retain actual rules of grammar and usage mixed with utter superstitions from their childhood, solid ware and junk eternally mixed.

But, as I said, it’s Mr. Michaels’s shop. He has the scepter, and, baby, he can flaunt it.

Some people at WGN will see it as their responsibility to honor Mr. Michael’s directive to the letter; some, I suspect, will take glee in subverting it at every opportunity. And someday, when Mr. Michaels himself has progressed to fresh woods and pastures new, some of his strictures will remain in force and some will have dropped from living memory.

And no man can say today which will be which.

Those who can't, teach

Geoffrey K. Pullum, the celebrated linguist, laid down a full barrage yesterday, directed at a Web site called The Apple, which proclaims itself to be “Where Teachers Meet and Learn.”

The object of Professor Pullum’s artillery was a post, “11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid.” As he brought each gun to bear, the target disintegrated in a cloud of smoke and smithereens. Some of the eleven “mistakes” were not even about grammar but about subjective stylistic preferences, and the ones that were about grammar and usage were manifestly defective. You owe it to yourself to click on the link and watch the action.

Repeat customers at this location will recognize that I have exercised my own more modest battery in similar manner, recently taking aim at the bogus advice of one Sam Greenspan, whose own “11 Little-Known Grammatical Errors That Will Shock and Horrify You” also curiously follows the ten-plus-one pattern, but to no better effect.

Yielding to temptation, I sampled the comments on The Apple’s “11 Grammar Mistakes to Avoid,” and, reader, I tremble for the future of the Republic. Some of the respondents, presumably teachers in our nation’s schools, heartily endorsed the author’s misguided advice. “Great post!”

A few pointed out the questionable nature of the author’s assertions about language, but some of the comments that challenged the article or other commenters did so on equally faulty grounds, as in this gorgeous specimen:

Actually, the comment should read, “The clouds appeared; then, it rained.” The “then” is separating 2 complete sentences and requires a semicolon between them and a comma after the “then”. Shame on you, writer, on national grammer day!

Language snobs were also well represented:

I am such a grammar snob and this is right up my alley. I know it may sound as though I am being arrogant but nothing makes me cringe more than when people use bad grammar. I physically feel the shivers up my spine when either one of my students or colleagues makes a grammatical mistake.

I thought for a moment that it might be the snobs and the peevers the writer was attacking in this comment:

They do serve to divide people and keep the status quo alive and well as well as serving as a very effective hegemonic tool where we police ourselves.

But on reading further I realized that this writer was aligned with the other members of the tribe holding forth at The Apple that teaching the grammar and usage of standard written English inhibits learning, leaving students’ free expression cabined, cribbed, and confined. We’ve seen the attitude before, that students cannot be taught things that they do not already know, but seldom as openly expressed.

This display of ignorance combined with arrogance is at once laughable and deeply saddening: people instructing the young in English who do not and apparently cannot identify actual rules of grammar, or distinguish standard usage from personal stylistic preference, or identify shibboleths that even diehard prescriptivists identify as errors.

It used to distress me that so many of my juniors and seniors in the editing class have trouble with grammar and usage. Now I realize that I should be humbly grateful that any of them can write intelligibly at all.