There is some unfinished business with brackets and other matters, but before we get into questions and answers, an amplification on the brackets post from Bill Cloud:

I would like to give credit also to Bill Montgomery of The Houston Chronicle, who took part in the presentation and supplied many of the examples, not to mention several people who have written on the subject.

Bill, another worthy colleague from the American Copy Editors Society, gets full marks.

Q. ... it sounds like the professor's proscription is only on interpolations, not on other bracket-y uses, such as citational ellipsis -- ? For example: "To be or not to be [...] ay, there's the rub."

A. In journalistic writing rather than formal academic citation, an ellipsis would be used, but without brackets.

Q. What about [sic]?

A. Once again, [sic] is useful in formal academic writing to indicate that an error has been recognized but preserved in a text. In journalism, which is more conversational than formal, it looks condescending. It is the equivalent of correcting someone’s pronunciation, and therefore we eschew it so as not to look snotty.

Q. ... the proper, consistent, and moderate use of square brackets should alleviate confusion, not cause it. I wonder if the fear of bracketry in any form is a case of underestimating the intelligence of readers.

A. We do try to use brackets when they are essential, and to use them in moderation. But a use such as [former President Bill] Clinton precisely underestimates the reader’s intelligence. That is why, instead of a flat ban, I suggest avoiding brackets whenever possible. And they do look jarring in big type.

Moving on:

Q. What’s the deal with Burma and Myanmar? Why do newspapers choose one or the other?

A. Slate posted a lucid explanation last week, which I recommend. The Sun has used Myanmar for years because that is what the government calls the country. So does the United Nations. We adopted Burkina Faso over Upper Volta for the same reason. Our policy on names, either of persons or of nations, is to go with the person’s or nation’s preference, the name by which each is generally known. The State Department does not like the junta that runs Myanmar and thus sticks with Burma. But it has gone along with other thug regimes (Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc.) without evident qualm. In any event, the State Department does not hold sway over our house style.

Want to pronounce Myanmar? The BBC offers four options. Merriam-Webster has an audio version.

Q. "Pain at the pump" may be trite at this point, but what it's trying to express is done easily, and avoiding it, while it could be better writing, could also lose a reader trying to wade through a phrase twice its length for the same result.

A. The thing about cliches is that while they are instantly recognizable, repetition paradoxically diminishes the effectiveness. I don’t think you need to look at all 638,000 instances of pain at the pump that a Google search turns up to conclude that the impact of the phrase has been dulled. Such a phrase is like the commercial you recognize without recalling what product it pushes.

In the same way, your eyes probably glide over ’tis the season hundreds of times between November and the end of December without registering anything much.

Well, maybe mild irritation.

Posted by John McIntyre at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

A reader of this blog once asked, I hope innocently, “What’s wrong with cliches?”

One answer is provided by Frank Kermode, writing about Martin Amis in Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958-2002:

“The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used thinking. The more positive requirements can be left till later, if only a little later. Cliches are an infallible symptom of used thinking.”

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
                    

Bill Cloud, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has embarked on a campaign to stamp out brackets in journalistic writing, and You Don’t Say wishes him all success in this worthy endeavor.

First off, though, we have to be clear about terms. Brackets, or square brackets, are used to indicate interpolations in text: words or phrases substituted for words actually used, words added to clarify a context or identify a person more fully. These are brackets: [ ]. Many journalists use parentheses — ( ) — when brackets should be used. (Journalists use dashes where parentheses would be appropriate, but dash-happiness is a subject for another post.)

Professor Cloud objects to brackets for two principal reasons: (1) They are visually distracting in text, and particularly irritating in large-type display quotes. (2) They tend to suggest that the publication thinks that the reader is stupid. An example: I saw somewhere recently, perhaps in my own paper, a reference to “[former President Bill] Clinton.” Here’s a link to a PDF with Professor Cloud’s presentation at the recent national conference of the American Copy Editors Society.

Brackets do serve a useful purpose in academic writing, particularly in textual editing. The later journals of [Samuel Johnson biographer James] Boswell,* written when he was ill or distracted or drunk, would be almost impossible to decipher without a battery of typographical marks to indicate a range of editorial interpolations. Not that they are much easier to read with the apparatus.

It is usually easier for the reader, and little trouble for the writer or editor, Professor Cloud rightly says, to establish a context before the quoted matter is introduced and thereby eliminate the need for bracketed matter. There will be cases, particularly when the quotation contains something that is profane, obscene or otherwise offensive, that brackets may be unavoidable, but an editor can surely reduce those instances to the bare minimum.

The bandwagon is rolling, and you are welcome to jump on. Here’s Professor Cloud’s slogan: Whip [brackets] now.

* See?

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Oh, you slave over your article or your book, pouring a life’s knowledge into it, sweating blood to achieve shapeliness, like Michelangelo pulling the young David out of a block of marble. It is done. And then you find that some cretinous git, some literal-minded parser, some copy editor has taken your text in his thick fingers and mangled it.

That is pretty much the burden of a recent blog post by someone named Seth Godin:

Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it.

By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical.

If they have licenses for copyeditors, she should have hers revoked.

Unfortunately, Mr. Godin does not supply a single instance of the copy editor’s destructiveness, so it is up for discussion whether he is an injured author or a fulminating boor. (The other texts at his blog do not suggest that revision of his prose would be a cultural catastrophe.)

Of considerably more substance is a comment on a Language Log post, “The food processor of copy editing,” that quotes a letter in which the novelist Joan Aiken complains about a copy editor. “... I have thought quite a number of times about it before I put down ‘“Hark at the wind,” shivered George’ and so have not the least wish to see it changed to ‘“Listen to the wind,” said George with a shiver.’”

A similar indictment was handed up in Jacques Barzun’s “Behind the Blue Pencil” essay, of which I’ve written previously. These are charges that have to be taken seriously.

Of course, this problem is slowly resolving itself as publishers and newspapers shed their copy editors. Who needs them, anyway? They generate no revenue; they just slow things down; they think they have some kind of right to hold an opinion about your work; they always tell you what’s wrong, never what’s right. Besides, they’re a little peculiar.

But it is well to consider that the Princeton University Press has recalled and is reprinting a book by a faculty member of the City University of New York because of an embarrassing quantity of errors in spelling and grammar that were not caught and corrected by the copy editor.

And it might be entered into the discussion that writers are occasionally given to ludicrous effects from which a copy editor can rescue them.

It’s up to the employer — editor, publisher, client — to establish the standards expected of copy editors, including how aggressively the task is to be pursued. It’s up to the copy editor to exercise judgment, not just about the text but also about his or her role.

What have you been commissioned to do? If you’re being told just to check the spelling and keep your opinions to yourself, do that. The kind of shop that tells you that isn’t interested in your opinions anyhow.

What are you working on? Genre counts. If, for example, it’s a novel, you’ll be expected to give the writer more latitude than you would for a newspaper article. Being a copy editor doesn’t mean that you get to sharpen a gross of Eberhard Faber col-erase carmine reds and begin setting Finnegans Wake to rights.

Who’s the author? It matters whether you’re dealing with a veteran or a tyro. God help you if you take the same approach with Jacques Barzun that you do with Seth Godin.

Why aren’t you talking to the writer? You have a telephone, don’t you? E-mail? A desk within a day’s walk of the writer’s? The more extensively you edit, the better it is to maintain some level of contact and consultation with the writer. It’s a working relationship, and relationships require work.

But if you have given these questions due consideration and you’re right, stand your ground. Just remember that no one is always right.

* House style at The Sun discourages even the milder profanities, but I thought that the sentiment expressed here is so universal that the language might be excused.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Surrounding individual words with quotation marks in headlines is tricky — and probably ill-advised. A reader sends in these three headlines, wondering whether quotation marks are apt:

‘Popular’ photojournalism student killed in wreck

Newspaper carrier tells his ‘wonderful’ hero story

Rendleman remembered for being ‘unique’

This is a technique that headline writers use to establish that some source within the article, not the reporter or newspaper itself, is making an evaluative statement. It’s not for the paper to determine who is popular and who is not, how wonderful a story is, or whether someone is properly remembered as unique. Presumably all three words within quotation marks are to be found embedded in quotations in the article.

The problem is that putting single words within quotation marks also has the effect of suggesting that they are open to question. That is, after all, what is meant by the two-handed, double-quotes-in-the-air gesture that people make to express skepticism or outright disbelief. So the first of the three headlines could easily be read as intending to say, “Some people say that the student killed in the wreck was popular, but we have our reservations about that.”

That is why at The Sun we discourage the practice. (We also wish that grocery stores would stop using quotation marks around the names of produce for sale, but that is neither here nor there.)

And by the way, no one asked for comments on the headlines apart from whether individual words should be in quotes, but these three are irredeemably banal. What does “popular” add to a story about a student killed in an accident? Would the paper have skipped the story if the student had been a loner? “Wonderful” story? Is there a flatter adjective? Someone was “unique”? Actually, isn’t everyone?

Posted by John McIntyre at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

It just will not die. It has been shot down, demolished, exploded and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. It should be as dead as Marley, but it keeps coming back.

It is the baseless prohibition against the split infinitive. Theodore Bernstein said hopefully in Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins (1971) that “within the near future the split-infinitive bugaboo will be finally laid to rest.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes the resistance to the construction as having “established itself in that subculture existing in the popular press and in folk belief.” Garner’s Modern American Usage includes the split infinitive in the entry Superstitions. John Bremner wrote in 1980, “This so-called rule has no foundation in grammar, logic, rhetoric or common sense.” *

Just so. The split infinitive is the thing that many people think about when they think about grammar, even if they are not entirely sure what an infinitive is. “Oh, you’re a copy editor — better watch out and not split any infinitives talking to you, ha-ha.”

In fact, the only reason to avoid splitting infinitives is to escape the uninformed censure of people who think that it is a violation of grammar and usage. Merriam-Webster’s: “The commentators recognize that there is nothing grammatically wrong with the split infinitive, but they are loath to abandon a subject that is so dear to the public at large. Therefore, they tell us to avoid split infinitives except when splitting one improves clarity. Since improved clarity is very often the purpose and result of using a split infinitive, the advice does not amount to much. The upshot is that you can split them when you need to.”

Let me emphasize this Merriam-Webster’s conclusion: “To repeat, the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis.”

I bring this up because Professor Geoffrey Pullum has brought his artillery to bear on a blog, Punctuality Rules, that made some heavy going trying to sort out advice on the split infinitive from Strunk and White — a volume that Professor Pullum and the other Language Log savants particularly despise.**

An examination of E.B. White’s efforts with the split infinitive shows that he is trying to work himself out of the predicament that Merriam-Webster’s describes. He can see perfectly well that splitting infinitives is perfectly natural and appropriate in English, but he is aware of the finger-waggers ready to spring forward. His advice, therefore, is of little use.

I empathize with Professor Pullum’s irritation with people who carry on about Strunk and White, treating it as more a totem than a usage manual. And I have some sympathy for Deb Boyken, the blogger at Punctuality Rules, for having innocently engaged his attention. Her response to his post sounds hurt. At the same time, it’s irritating to see people rushing to her defense with comments calling Geoffrey Pullum a mean man.

Blogging is publication; it’s not circulating the annual Christmas letter among family and friends. It is a public performance, and people who perform in public leave themselves open to evaluation. Heat and kitchens and all that.

Just leave the split infinitive alone and wait for another couple of generations to die.

*In my own humble efforts, I’ve addressed the issue here and here.

 **I have a sentimental attachment to Strunk and White dating from my first encounter with it as a senior in high school, but I no longer consult it as a usage manual.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
                    

Whether you drink soda or pop; whether you order a submarine, a hoagy, a grinder or a po’ boy; whether your pronunciation makes any kind of distinction with marry, merry and Mary — all this will mark you somewhere, sometime as an auslander, not One Of Us.

There is always something in language beyond the literal meaning of the words, something social, something understood (or half-understood) implicitly. One of those unspoken understandings is whether or not you belong in the group.

When I commented last month on the academic enterprise, saying that once you own a grinder you can turn anything into sausage, Mark Liberman undertook to explore the remark at Language Log.* What I was thinking about was the function of jargon or argot as an inescapable tool of scholarship.

When I went off to college in 1969 to be an English major, the grand old Eliotan historico-critical-literary approach was not yet desiccated. But there were other options as well. The twerp under whom I ill-advisedly spent a term studying Shakespeare remarked one day, “Now I don’t want to give you the straight Freud-Jones interpretation of Hamlet,” to which a classmate seated next to me muttered, “No, you just want to dance around it for an hour.” There were also Jungian and Horneyan options in the department. Feminism was on the upswing. There was still some juice in Marxist interpretations as well, and distantly, from France, strange new emanations were registering.

The fullness of semiology, structuralism and post-structuralism sweeping over the academy showed that anything, anything at all, could be run through the mill and deconstructed: comic books as well as the canonical writers, pop songs, television commercials, restaurant menus. Anything could be anatomized, its concealed significances exposed to light and air.

To be respectable, an academic discipline must display a terminology that the layperson has difficulty understanding. Mastering the lingo demonstrates that one is among the elect. The other disciplines must envy physics above all: Not only does it have concepts that are hard to understand, but also it requires a grasp of arcane mathematics. Mathematics is the perfect marker; it shuts out nearly everyone, and it is actually essential and of use. Other disciplines — I won’t say education, but you can probably supply some — require the invention of obscurantist terms to conceal what would otherwise appear straightforward or even obvious.

The complication, and the thing that led Mr. Liberman to pick up on the snide tone in the “grinder” remark, is that the jargon, the machinery may well express some valuable concept or insight, but it might equally well conceal that the writer is unoriginal, misguided or befuddled. It can eat away at an afternoon in a carrel to determine that the article in the learned journal before you is, well, stupid. It established that the writer is in the club and helped get the writer promotion or tenure, but it is an utter waste of your limited time on this side of the ground.

There’s the hazard. Whatever you say or write has multiple meanings. Sometimes, and not just in the academy, you have to detect that the secondary meaning has overwhelmed the primary.

*They’ve put You Don’t Say on the blogroll at Language Log, which suggests, I think, that I am In.

Posted by John McIntyre at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Writers are not necessarily the best judges of their own work.

Nowhere do lapses in judgment become more apparent than in the use of metaphor. Everyone prefers vivid writing, and everyone knows that literary tropes can be wielded effectively to sharpen a point or illuminate a concept. But it is very easy to go awry.

Dead metaphors, for example, can be particularly treacherous. The language is full of expressions that were originally metaphoric but have been worn so smooth by repetition that they go unrecognized as such. That is why free rein, a metaphor from horseback riding, often turns up as free reign.

Failure to associate a stock expression with its original sense can lead to jarring incongruities, such as this one:

They’ll be shaking and rattling, rocking and rolling, but it will all be for a good cause as the annual [Placename] radiothon for cerebral palsy kicks into high gear.

Excessive enthusiasm for metaphor, combined with inattention, yields mixed metaphors, as in this opening paragraph to a business story:

The world’s largest spice producer, insulated by an armor of takeover safeguards adopted this summer, is sitting comfortably on the sidelines awaiting the fallout from the takeover free-for-all embroiling the nation’s food industry.

Let’s do a metaphor census. The world’s largest spice producer:

1. Wears armor.

2. Sits down.

3. At an athletic competition (sidelines).

4. Exposed to nuclear radiation (fallout).

5. During a street brawl (free-for-all).

If you are a typical reader, you are so distracted by this piling-up of inconsistent images that you have no idea what the meaning of the sentence is. If you as a writer want to use a metaphor, hit it once, briefly, and move on.

Finally, there is the metaphor that is grotesquely inappropriate:

If [Firstname Lastname] wanted to walk from the chocolate shop where she works to grab coffee at a McDonald’s in [Placename], she would have to cross a 10-foot-wide drainage ditch, four lanes of traffic, a median strip, then four more lanes of cars. So she drives instead.

But like well-fed thighs stuffed into too-tight pants, the road needs room to spread.

The author stubbornly insisted on retaining the simile when the copy editor questioned it. After all, it was a product of the writer’s imagination and originality; the copy desk was once again trying to drain the life from the story. And the assigning editor sided with the author. (Too often the assigning editor, rather than serving as an editor for the writer, acts as a lobbyist for the writer.)

In this case, I jumped a couple of layers of authority and went straight to the editor of the newspaper, who, after uttering a sentence even more offensive than the one in the article, ordered the passage excised.

Two pieces of advice:

1. Visualize what a depiction of your metaphor would look like. Is that what you want?

2. Get yourself an editor — or someone you trust to be both knowledgeable and honest — to tell you what works and what doesn’t. Follow the advice.

Posted by John McIntyre at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
                    

If you read these posts only when they first show up — and by all means keep doing so — you miss the comments that people add as they go rummaging through the archive. I wish that you could enjoy them as much as I do. T

his just in today for Roberta, to a post from last September on decimate:

My favorite sentence that uses decimate in its literal etymological sense is "Tithing to the church has decimated my income." Yes, I'm probably going straight to hell.

Posted by John McIntyre at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

Saints preserve us from an election year, enduring, in addition to the usual rodomontade, attacks from all sides on people’s patriotism and personal integrity, the whole spectacle coarsened further by intemperance and ignorance magnified on the Internet.

Take a deep, cleansing breath and remember what William James said a century ago. Louis Menand quotes James in The Metaphysical Club as saying that a nation is saved “by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.”

Make an allowance for a degree of progress over sexism in the past hundred years and the advice for citizens holds true.

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)