Just one word: plastic

An opening paragraph in this morning’s Baltimore Sun:

Sitting at a table of strangers in a steamy gymnasium, Michael Brisco poked at turkey on his Styrofoam plate and reflected on the reversals that had buffeted his life these past few months.

Styrofoam is a trademark for a kind of polystyrene manufactured by Dow Chemical for use in insulation and boat construction. Disposable cups and dishes made of plastic foam are not made of Styrofoam.

The carelessness of journalists — admonitions against using Styrofoam for foam plastic plates and cups have been in The Associated Press Stylebook, other stylebooks, and in-house style manuals for decades — has surely reinforced public carelessness with this word. Editors can, and should, rap the knuckles of writers who disregard such niceties, but Styrofoam may be well on its way toward joining kleenex and xerox and the other trade names that the public has transformed into generic words.

The Times leads a sheltered life

In the New York Times article on Michaele and Tarek Salahi. the would-be reality show participants who wormed their way, uninvited, into a state dinner at the White House, you will find this sentence:

And the two money shots: Mrs. Salahi, her red and gold sari glittering, snaked around a grinning Mr. Biden, her hand resting on his chest, his arm wrapped around her waist; and both Salahis, with a smiling Mr. Emanuel, described on Mrs. Salahi’s Facebook page as “Chief of Staff of the United States White House.”

It’s not my place to tell Helene Cooper, Janie Lorber, Brian Stelter, or their editors at The Times what a “money shot” is or where the term originated, but really, someone should.

Only another copy editor would understand

Reacting to my mordant “Horoscope for editors” post (sample: The people who carried your company into bankruptcy will be given bonuses. You will be told to take a five-day furlough), one reader commented:

... and yet he wistfully longs for his days on the copy desk.

God, I miss them. What you must understand is that even in the best of times, copy editors fought a daily desperate rear-guard action, clawing their way to some increase in clarity and precision against unforgiving deadlines, obtuse colleagues who never troubled to understand the details of production (or, often, syntax), balky equipment, and asinine directives from on high. Every victory, however minor, was a hard-won triumph to be savored, every defeat a spur to greater effort.

To you, you writer, we were impediments to the full flowering of your “voice.” To you, you civilian, if you had heard of us at all, we were a bunch of nerds, certifiable obsessive-compulsives who cared about things that you would not even notice. To you, you sharp-penciled bean counter, we were, and are, disposable “non-core” staff.

But among ourselves, we were comrades who took to the field on Saint Crispin’s Day, and when we gather to nurse our beers and talk about lost glory, we few, we happy few, will strip our sleeves and show our scars, saying, “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”

A pity you weren’t there.

Unstable core

I am not persuaded that the Internet reduces our attention spans or that the 140-word bursts on Twitter make our thinking superficial, but you see things that make you wonder.

This morning I came across a retweet from one Tom Gara in Abu Dhabi opining, “Outsourcing copy editors and other non-core jobs is inevitable and a good thing for newspapers.” Mr. Gara was referring to a decision by the management of the Toronto Star to eliminate seventy-eight editing positions and outsource its copy editing to Pagemasters North America.

The asininity of proclaiming that editing is not a core function takes one’s breath away.

No one disputes that newspapers, struggling to stay afloat in stormy waters, have to make difficult decisions. Any business that does not manage to keep its costs within its revenues is going to sink, but that does not mean that just anything can be thrown over the side.

We have heard the “non-core” talk even in relatively prosperous times. Of course you can eliminate the library staff. Reporters can just add routine research to their daily workload. Of course you can sack the editorial assistants. The editors can answer the phones all day; and if the reporters are busy, the editors can keyboard datebook copy.

Now, of course, you can jettison the editors and copy editors in favor of some distant corps of editing units who do not know your staff or your area. You will merely multiply embarrassing errors of fact, publish slack writing, and alienate your most loyal customers. Evidence of the first two phenomena will be evident each day on your pages, evidence of the third in the accelerating decline of your circulation.

Unfortunately, difficult decisions are not necessarily good decisions.



*The editor responsible for the Star’s decision is Michael Cooke, former editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, a newspaper that has not been a byword for excellence in management.

And yet, it moves

By coincidence, the weekend brought the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and the publication of an Associated Press article, deservedly mocked at HeadsUp: The Blog, on claims that an analysis of letters on the Shroud of Turin establishes that it dates from the first century and is not a medieval forgery.

A century and a half of science have confirmed the integrity of the Darwinian explanation, despite disagreement over details. Oddly, it remains controversial, and some who espouse the Christian doctrine of creation have turned to the secular arm, provoking disputes on school boards and lawsuits determining whether and how evolution may be taught in public schools. A scientific analysis of the cloth of the Shroud performed twenty years ago determined that it dated from the 13th or 14th centuries.

I have no business ridiculing other people’s religious beliefs and customs, and the devout are free to revere the Shroud of Turin and to take the opening chapter of Genesis as, however improbably, a recounting of historical fact. But I would urge those who continue to resist Darwin to consider the example of Galileo. When the Church decides to oppose and suppress science, it damages itself.

I watched my son work out a diagram of celestial mechanics in his freshman year at St. John’s College in Annapolis. St. John’s teaches both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, as a means of showing how the mathematics can explain observed phenomena. But no one (I hope) thinks that the Ptolemaic system should be taught in the public schools as an equivalent explanation. Galileo may or may not have muttered, “Eppur, si muove” (nonetheless, it moves), but no one disputes today that the earth moves around the sun, though it was once thought to be fatal to religion to think so. We can read a writer’s conjectures about the Shroud of Turin, but there, too, sooner or later, we face facts.

At Headsup, “fev” finds the Shroud story, as presented in his local newspaper, symptomatic of the credulity and shallowness of our journalism and our public discourse. Since I cannot say it better myself, I’ll close with his remarks:

This isn't just a stupid, credulous story. At the metropolitan daily that still deigns to show up in driveways three days a week here, the teaser above [to the Shroud of Turin story] is the only international presence on today's front page, and the story itself is far and away the largest bit of news (700-plus words, to some 330 for the runner-up) from outside our little corner of the world. The looming Senate vote on health care is a four-graf brief. I don't see a word about either of the shooting wars the country is still involved in.

And that's the cherry-picking stuff. If you think California's higher-ed debacle might hold some lessons for the rather dire situation that looms up here, too bad for you. Are Iran or Honduras or any of the other 190-odd countries out there entering the sort of low boil that tends to spill all over the front page in a few weeks? You're just going to have to wait and see, aren't you?

No clueless wire story is going to bring the republic down by itself. But each blunder of this scale represents a missed chance to make people incrementally smarter, rather than incrementally stupider. The gasbags of the pundosphere excel at turning fictions into conventional wisdom. If you have a steady, reliable supply of actual news, it isn't hard to catch them out. If you don't, well — lots of luck with that representative democracy stuff.

Luke Skywalker, call your service

Hyperbole of the day, from The New York Times:

A fight of galactic proportions over health care looms.

Horoscope for editors

Aries (March 21-April 19) — A writer whose childish excesses you challenge will accuse you of interfering with his “voice.” His editor will back him, not you. Duck and cover.

Taurus (April 20-May 20) — The project that has been in the works for eight weeks will land on your desk three hours before deadline. You do not have the photos, and the graphic is not finished. Brew another pot of coffee.

Gemini (May 21-June 21) — The people who carried your company into bankruptcy will be given bonuses. You will be told to take a five-day furlough.

Cancer (June 22-July 22) — You will become “platform-neutral.” Brace yourself to do two jobs at once.

Leo (July 23-Aug. 22) — The benefits of your employer-provided health insurance will be reduced. But your deductible and your premium will increase.

Virgo (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) — In an article you edit, you will correct the spelling of the subject’s name, give him the accurate title, straighten out the chronology, and delete an unsupported assertion that is potentially libelous. But you will overlook a misplaced decimal point, for which you, not the writer, will receive a disciplinary note.

Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 22) — The person who sits next to you will heat fish in the office microwave. Don’t forget to take a handkerchief to work.

Scorpio (Oct. 23--Nov. 21) — An upgrade in the office computer system will leave you dead in the water for four hours.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) — You will edit a company announcement explaining that reductions in content, coverage, and staff will improve the reader’s experience. Control your gag reflex.

Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) — The human resources staff at the company where you have applied for a job will reject your application. Next time you submit a resume, leave off the dates of your college graduation and employment.

Aquarius (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) — The company’s holiday party, in the break room, will feature food that you will prepare and bring in at your own expense. You will have to clean up the break room afterward.

Pisces (Feb. 19-March 20) — Your boss will beckon you into his office. Before you go, make sure that you have enough cartons at your desk to hold your personal effects.

The good student

At the library, leafing through A Mathematician’s Lament, Paul Lockhart’s jeremiad about the incompetent teaching of math in our schools, I was stopped by this sentence:

Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told that they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following instructions.

Though never particularly adept at math myself, I was always a good student, an “A” student, an honor roll student. I was a teacher’s pet, because I wanted to please my teachers. Most of my fellow students thought me odd — probably still do — and some of them bullied me. I was a bookworm and uninterested in sports.* My teachers were more my friends than my fellow students, and I wanted to please them. The way to please them was to give the right answer.

That was the pedagogy I grew up under: There is always one right answer to be discovered, and the purpose of education is to produce students who get the right answers. It works for things that are susceptible to rote learning. Spelling, for example. You can teach phonics and instruct students in the general principles of spelling, but English is such a promiscuous, mongrel language that its numerous maddening exceptions simply have to be memorized, like Chinese characters.

Rote learning is not, however, of much use in teaching students how to think. If you keep giving the right answers long enough, you get to college, and you can skate a long time there on right answers. But I got as far as graduate school without fully understanding that scholarship is more about framing the right questions.

One day in my second or third year of graduate school in English at Syracuse, Professor Peter Mortenson — almost as an aside — described to my class that scholarship is a conversation. Trying to arrive at a deeper understanding of a text, you look at what previous scholars and critics have said about it. You notice something that has been overlooked, or you see something that is mistaken that you can try to refute; thus you enter into the continuing conversation on that text or that issue. Another student said afterward that it was the first time that any of his teachers had explained so lucidly what the enterprise of criticism was.

In retrospect, I see that that was the beginning of my discovery that, as much as I liked books and talking about them, I was not cut out to be a literary scholar. I had gotten to be pretty good at sussing out the answers the teachers wanted to hear, but without much talent for forming those questions myself.**

Fortunately, I found a career an editor, where what analytical ability I do have is put to use. And I try in my classes on editing to train my students to frame questions. But analytical thinking is hard to start with, and many students appear to come to college after a dozen years of conditioning to guess what answer the teacher expects to hear. That is why my students discover every semester that if they just look blankly at me long enough, I will break down and tell them what I see in the text. I hold out as long as I can.

I invite you to write in comments on this post about your own experiences in school, and to speculate on the reasons for the inadequacies. Does get-the-right-answer pedagogy persist simply because it is easy? Or are there deeper reasons for it — perhaps that we don’t want to train the young to be analytical thinkers because they will question us and grow up to be troublemakers rather than docile employees? Do we value learning, or do we merely admire credentials? Over to you.



*I still loathe all known forms of sport.

**To suss (largely a British usage, is to realize something or figure it out. It derives from to suspect.)


DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:

If a reader of this blog should order a copy of the book listed below from Amazon.com, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.

Real or Onion?

It is not an easy matter to determine the point at which the United States of America transcended satire, but it is a simple matter to identify phenomena that should have the editors of the Onion reaching for a consolatory bottle of gin.

Viz.:

Item: Texans eager to forestall any possibility of the legalization of marriage or civil unions between gay people, adopted in 2005 a constitutional amendment so sloppily drafted that it appears to make all forms of marriage illegal:

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Language Log has a full account.

Item: You can buy T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaiming “Pray for Obama Psalm 109.8” The verse cited reads (in the Authorized Version): “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Some apologists are saying that it merely calls for limit to his tenure in office rather than his death. Of course, those familiar with Scripture are aware that the next verse reads: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

See how these Christians love one another?

Item: Fox News, skewered by Jon Stewart for using wrong crowd footage on Hannity to exaggerate size of protest, now gets caught using wrong crowd footage to exaggerate response to publication of Sarah Palin’s book.

Item: A Minnesota man speaks Klingon exclusively to his son during the child’s first three years of life: “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.”

Item: Veteran editor/writer/blogger/teacher/administrator/trainer John E. McIntyre remains unemployed.

Is this a great country, or what?

Devoted to grammar

Let’s suppose you are an aspirant to the Priesthood of All Grammarians. You will, of course, have the sacred texts, MWDEU, Garner on Usage, perhaps First Fowler and Second Fowler (also known as the Revised Standard Fowler). But you will also be in need of a breviary for your daily devotions.

Now there is one. Mignon Fogarty, whom you may already know as Grammar Girl, has just published The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl (Henry Holt, 234 pages, $15).

Like her previous book, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, the Devotional is more a collection of tapas dishes than entrees: whether you should use a comma or not with too (OK for particular emphasis, otherwise not), short quizzes (peak, peek, or pique?), word search games (find the paired British and American spellings). All good fun. (Not as fond, myself, of the whimsical cartoon illustrations of Squiggly and Aardvark, her examplars in illustrative sentences, but you could have guessed that from my congenital crankiness.)

On some points, Ms. Fogarty is standing firm. She holds the line on distinguishing between due to and because of. She wants enormity understood as a great evil rather than just a big thing. If you are dangling at the end of a rope, she says, you have been hanged.

But she is not rigid, and she describes available options, depending on how fastidious you want to be. On lend and loan, for example, she points out that in American English, “most language experts consider the words interchangeable,” but “some sticklers disagree.”

There is a lot of fine miscellaneous information: a short history of sentence diagramming, tributes to Samuel Johnson and James Murray and other “language rock stars,” a list of the order of adjectives in English (opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose).

It is all, as she says forthrightly, “quick and dirty.” For further explanation, you will have to turn to the sacred texts. But if you are, for example, an English teacher, The Grammar Devotional would be a handy book to have in the classroom for those occasions on which you have to summon up a quick response. And, since Ms. Fogarty is admirably clear and direct for a non-specialist reader, The Grammar Devotional would be an apt choice at Christmas for the student or aspiring writer in your house.



DISCLAIMER FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION:

I received a review copy of The Grammar Devotional from the publisher. In addition, if a reader of this blog should order a copy of it or the other books listed below from Amazon.com, I will eventually receive a minuscule portion of the proceeds.