The key to success in journalism, it appears, is a haircut.

Eric Alterman, in an article in The New Yorker on America’s faltering newspapers, quotes Jonah Peretti of the Huffington Post on the “mullet strategy” that has achieved the Web site’s success: “(‘Business up front, party in the back’ is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) ‘User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,’ Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to ‘argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.’”

Amazing that it could be so simple. Amazing, too, that this strategy could be presented as something novel.

After all, there is an analogous mullet strategy in a magazine like Vanity Fair, which spotlights a few sober-minded articles in each issue to balance the relentless celebrity gossip and high-gloss consumer advertising (a kind of wealth pornography) to be found inside. For that matter, The New Yorker achieves the same balance between the worthy and the frivolous. Don’t you, like me, flip through the magazine to look at the cartoons before settling down to the articles?

The other component, getting content for nothing, is also less than blindingly original. Forty years ago, a tyro at The Flemingsburg Gazette in Flemingsburg, Ky., I edited the country correspondence each week during the summers: social notes sent in from the outlying hamlets by sweet older ladies who received in return nothing more than copy paper, envelopes and stamps. That, and their names, along with the names of relatives and neighbors, printed in the paper. Readers seeing their names in print has always been one of the underpinnings of the small-town newspaper.

It is probably superfluous to repeat Dr. Johnson’s remark, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” since so few appear to heed it.

What the Internet brings to these venerable devices is increased inclusiveness and immediacy.

Any twit with an Internet connection can now become a published writer, and I believe that we are not far from the day when bloggers will discover the same problem with which poets have struggled for decades: more people writing the stuff than reading it.

And we can read it at any time of day or night. None of this laborious editing, formatting, typesetting, printing, packaging, loading onto trucks and distributing that eats up hours and hours before a print product, growing stale faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut in the open air, can be put in your hands. And yet, what do you get when you log on? Last week I printed out the list of top stories from CNN and read the list off to my copy editing class at Loyola. The stories themselves were as routine and dull as the wire service stories in the newspaper, and the headlines were even less inviting. Of more than a dozen stories, only a couple stirred even a flicker of interest among the class.

So I appear to have ruled out dull “official” news and the turgid and ill-thought-out carryings-on of the blogosphere as sufficient to overthrow the long dominance of newspapers. But I think I know what has really worked.

Pictures.

The newspaper industry has spent untold sums for the past 30 years and more to develop the technology of printing high-quality color photography on newsprint. As an ambition, it ranks with an attempt to do calligraphy on toilet paper. And, to a considerable degree, the project has been a success. But it is not enough. It takes four plates on a printing press to produce color on a page, a black plate with text and three color plates, cyan, magenta and yellow. A press will hold a fixed number of plates, which limits the capacity for color in photography and ads. But the Internet has no such limitation on the number of color images it can produce. And video, too. Especially now that we have a couple of generations narcotized on television and video games, adults who find reading text laborious and uninviting, it is not surprising that so many have turned away from the newspaper, just as so many have turned away from books, in favor of images.

If you have read thus far, count yourself, along with me, in a dwindling minority.

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
                    

The Jonathan Borofsky statue in front of Penn Station in Baltimore has been widely ridiculed and denounced. Its defenders, a beleaguered band, have been mainly champions of contemporary art. The public, to judge from the printed and electronic responses, has expressed universal distaste.

And yet, Friday’s post on this blog has coaxed out of hiding a handful of people who admit to a fugitive affection for the work, a reminder that loud voices are not necessarily the only voices.

Posted by John McIntyre at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The dog walkers were among the first to express outrage.

Lee Freeman, a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art and an undergraduate Christo, had got permission from various agencies to temporarily block the park in Mount Vernon Square with gold-painted chain-link fence. It was a conceptual piece intended to stimulate thought about public spaces.

Brother, did it.

An article on the artist by The Sun’s Abigail Tucker has one of the longest tails of comments from readers, and it is the comments, not the work of art, that provoke some thoughts about public discourse. The public is in a snit.

Some of the complaints were reasonable enough. Residents of Mount Vernon were irritated at being deprived, even temporarily of the use of the open space. But then the storm hit. Some of the elements:

We weren’t informed

The fencing project went through channels for approval, and while there were no public hearings, there is some dispute about how widely residents were informed. (My own experience in the newsroom is that people don’t pay much attention to the memos.)

That damn kid

Mr. Freeman comes in for considerable abuse in the reader comments: The little twerp, this out-of-town elitist, this snotty college kid, who does he think he is? People scream obscenities at him when he’s in the square. My generation, subjected to hostility toward the young 40 years ago, has matured into ... expressing hostility toward the young. That, of course, oversimplifies; there’s also class resentment about supposedly privileged college students to factor in.

That other stuff

Insofar as the discussion is about aesthetics, and not much of it is, it regularly broadens into ranting about unrelated works, most particularly the Male/Female statue in front of Penn Station.*

The retaliation

There have been denunciations of the Maryland Institute for harboring and encouraging the artist, and I’ve seen at least one vow to withhold contributions from the Walters Art Museum for its encouragement of the project.

There’s a lot of rage out there, and it’s not particularly discriminating in its choice of objects, and not particularly proportionate. I don’t much care for conceptual art, including Christo’s, and, with all respect to Mr. Freeman’s intentions, I find his project puerile. But I’m neither qualified to be nor interested in being a censor of public art. I, too, like to walk in Mount Vernon Square (though I generally have to keep my head down to watch out for all the dog excrement on the sidewalk). But I can tolerate a temporary inconvenience without risking an apoplexy.

It’s as if the nastiness that has marked political discussion for the past generation has spilled over into other areas. And the Internet, including newspapers like The Sun that permit unmoderated or lightly supervised comments by the public, fosters and facilitates expression of such nastiness. I leave it to the psychologists to determine whether giving voice to rage and resentment vents them or stimulates them, but I suspect the latter.

But if you, dear reader, find yourself consumed by anger, I give a practical suggestion for you: Get a ticket to a ball game. The great thing about sports competitions is that they don’t matter. The fate of the Republic is not at stake. One’s standard of living and place in the social order are not at risk. Somebody wins, somebody loses, nobody gets shot, and it all happens again the next day. Moreover — this is the important part — a ball game establishes an environment in which it is both socially acceptable and harmless for people to scream their lungs out, express contempt, utter threats and generally act abusively.

Take in a game. Then go home and see whether you can be civil.

*Actually, though I am not particularly fond of aluminum as an artistic medium, I’ve grown rather to like Male/Female (pictured below), and so has my wife. The glow from it is cheerful when I drive up Charles Street after dark. This appears to be a minority view, given the persistent clamor against the statue since its erection. So, in an exception of my practice of authorizing nearly every comment on this blog, I will carve out a small area of protected expression. If you like Male/Female, you can say so in a comment to this post, and I will suppress any comment attacking you.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
                    

Now it’s the medical profession that’s down on guns. An article in The New England Journal of Medicine, forwarded to me by a medical student, says that gun injuries cost billions in medical expenses annually, that epidemiological studies demonstrate that possession of a gun substantially increases the risk of violent death and that the belief that gun ownership decreases crime is a discredited myth.

Don’t look at me. I’m not a doctor. I already got into enough trouble for imagining that I know something about grammar.

Posted by John McIntyre at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
                    

Our own, our very own Rob Hiaasen has written about residents of Fells Point, the neighborhood that Sun style spells without an apostrophe, who are committed to restoring the punctuation to the name. Usage, historically and currently, has varied, and the newspaper’s stylebook makes the kind of arbitrary choice that stylebooks must make when there are options.

Well, not entirely arbitrary. There is a tendency in English for words to run together and to lose punctuation. Everybody, for example, was written as every body in Jane Austen’s time, and the hyphens in to-day and to-morrow lingered into the 20th century. Apostrophes in place names are particularly likely to drop out — thus the Baltimore County neighborhoods of Turners Station and Bowleys Quarters.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names is historically hostile to the apostrophe, permitting it in a handful of place names officially recognized, such as Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps the board members summer there.

We do keep the apostrophe for Prince George’s County and Queen Anne’s County, which we think are the dominant forms. We omit the apostrophe from Presidents Day but keep it for Defenders’ Day.* We follow British practice with the Court of St. James’s and Earls Court in London. Businesses — Harrods, Starbucks, Marshalls — often shed the apostrophe, though some — Macy’s — retain it.

What this should tell you is that there is no settled naming convention with the apostrophe. Like so much else in English, names are determinedly idiosyncratic, resistant to rules and logic alike.

In case you were wondering, Fells Point stands in The Sun’s stylebook.

*Defenders’ Day in Baltimore commemorates the failure of the British army and navy to take the city in the Battle of Baltimore in 1814. General Ross, the British commander, vowed to dine in Baltimore or in hell. He did not dine in Baltimore, and the Royal Navy never got past Fort McHenry.

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)
                    

I told you that I’m not going back to the Second Amendment. Instead, I’ll take time to respond to readers.

Patricia Witkin wonders about presently: “I had it drilled into my head that presently=soon, not "at present," which is how I see/hear it (mis)used all the time. People seem to think it sounds fancier than "currently" or, better yet, "now." The only time I encounter the correct usage is when I'm watching old movies, leading me to wonder if this is one of those things that has become forgotten/abused/discarded over time, to the point where the two words are accepted as interchangeable.”

Merriam-Webster’s finds that presently has a long history in both senses, right now and sometime soon, and suggests indulgently that the meaning can usually be inferred from context. Garner’s suggests avoiding the word because of potential confusion. My sense is that you are right in suspecting that the sometime soon sense is increasingly dated and is being supplanted by the now sense. (And yes, it is a windy and pompous substitution, of the sort one finds in office memos.)

For my own part, as a son of Appalachia, I prefer directly, pronounced as my grandmother, Clara Rhodes Early said it, something between d’rectly and dreckly. It is roughly equivalent of manana: “Yes, Kathleen, I’ll put the book down and rake those remaining leaves from last fall directly.”

Steve Merelman writes in annoyance about a headline in a paper published 40 miles south of here ”Bearest Thy Musket.” He’s right; the est suffix in archaic English is properly limited to the second-person singular, as the eth suffix is limited to the third-person singular. And it is not the imperative form. Tsk.

A reader submitted a complaint to my boss, Paul Moore, about a passage in one of our articles, “Chief Legal Council Karen Hornig and Deputy Legal Counsel Ronald M. Levitan,” saying, rightly, that the word is counsel and wondering how we got it right in one place and wrong in one place in the same sentence. Inattention to detail.

Moreover, chief legal counsel and deputy legal counsel are job descriptions, not formal titles, and have no business being capitalized. It doesn’t matter that every Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief likes a massed formation of capital letters before his name; we don’t have to do it.

And, by the way, it was a reader of this blog, one Bryan, saying, “I enjoy your blog tremendously and count myself among the (usually) silent majority that appreciate the good fight your regular job entails,” who made the suggestion that I explore the sense of the word militia in the context of the Second Amendment. Ah, life in the crosshairs.

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
                    

The reason not to worry overmuch about the way people talk or write in e-mails or other casual contexts is summed up aptly in a short passage from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which I have been reading in short takes at lunch for several weeks.

The aspect of language that is most worth changing is the clarity and style of written prose. Expository writing requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it was biologically designed to do. Inconsistencies caused by limitations of short-term memory and planning, unnoticed in conversation, are not as tolerable when preserved on a page that is to be perused more leisurely. Also, unlike a conversational partner, a reader will rarely share enough background assumptions to interpolate all the missing premises that make language comprehensible. Overcoming one’s natural egocentrism and trying to anticipate the knowledge state of a generic reader at every stage of the exposition is one of the most important tasks in writing well. All this makes writing a difficult craft that must be mastered through practice, feedback, and—probably most important—exposure to good examples.

Editors, copy editors, mavens and scolds, focus on what’s most important.

Posted by John McIntyre at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

This gun business is getting tiresome. (Posts and comments here and here.) Today a comment has the cheek to question my honesty as a citizen.

First, a response to a couple of the posted comments.

Whatever you think about guns and public order, you do not want me on the street. I do not own a gun and have fired one only once in my life — and that something like 40 years ago, missing the target widely. A weapon in my hands would make me a hazard to myself and others. Do you who talk about the militia including all adult citizens seriously want a horde of untrained civilians going about armed during some general crisis? Do you think that the police and National Guard would see that as assistance rather than an additional danger to public safety?

The suggestion that we should substitute some other noun for arms to dissipate the emotional charge of the discussion will not take us far. Arms are weapons, weapons are serious things, and the necessary concern of governments about who has weapons and for what purposes is one of the reasons that this amendment was written in the first place.

The commas in the amendment that fascinate one commentator are of no particular significance to the meaning. The first two set off a phrase, and the third separates the subject from the predicate — all commonplace in 18th-century English.

Second, a return to the original point, and I will put it in boldface in hopes of avoiding further misreading:

It was a mistake in the first post to use the word govern to describe the relationship of that initial absolute phrase to the main clause. That was too strong. But it does — it must — modify the main clause. The First Amendment states bluntly that “Congress shall make no law” about free exercise of religion, speech, the press, etc. It has no explanatory qualifier. So there is something about the right to bear arms that demands that introductory phrase, or so Mr. Madison thought.

That qualifier puts the right to bear arms in the context of the need for a “well regulated Militia.” That makes it necessary to understand how the concept of a militia was understood in the 18th century, and how it has evolved in the present. And, mind you, it specifies a “well regulated” militia, not a crowd of American bashi-bazouks.* It doesn’t seem outrageous to suggest that this amendment connects the bearing of arms with some form of supervised military training.

(I’m not even going to venture to suggest that to bear arms carries the connotation of some kind of military service, rather than simple private ownership.)

It is up to the justices to interpret that language and how to apply it to contemporary circumstances. I haven’t suggested how they should. I’ve only identified two points that are relevant to the argument.

And finally, I have no plans to write on this subject again. I’ll continue to authorize such comments as fall within the furthest bounds of civility. Back to business tomorrow.

*The bashi-bazouks were the notoriously brutal and ill-disciplined irregular troops of the Ottoman Turkish army in the 19th century.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)
                    

The reader who commented that I brought it on myself yesterday by writing about the Second Amendment was right. Oh, it could have been worse; the Red Dawn loonies and those who think that 24 should be the basis for public policy could have zeroed in. I escaped with no more than a couple of misinterpretations and adolescent-level insults. But at the risk of drawing further fire, I’m going back in.

Yesterday’s post was limited to two points, that that absolute phrase at the beginning of the amendment, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” has something to do with the meaning of the amendment, and that some understanding of what militia means is required.

A couple of respondents apparently think that their understanding of the sense of the amendment requires that opening phrase to be ignored. This was one:

“It can be made abundantly clear that the first clause of the Second Amendment does *not* "govern" the rest in any way. Simply change the wording, but keep the same grammatical construction. An example:

"’Cold Beer, being essential to a balanced diet, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’

“That first phrase is actually completely irrelevant and the Second Amendment would mean exactly the same thing even if it were deleted entirely.”

Well, no. Not exactly. Not at all. Syntax implies relationships. When you put things together in a sentence, you are saying that there is some logical relationship between them. Otherwise, as in the “cold beer” example above, you are constructing a non sequitur. I don’t think that Mr. Madison was making a non sequitur. That opening absolute phrase in some way modifies, limits, puts into a context the clause that follows. The question is not whether it does so — otherwise language is just noise — but how it is to be understood.

Then, for one respondent, interpreting militia appears to require that everyone is in the militia and therefore should have guns. I hope that he is not counting on my competence to “suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” Do you really want every citizen to be packing heat? Everybody?

One reason that political discourse in this country is so tedious and sterile is that just about everyone, left and right, bends principle to fit preferences in specific cases. (Some such people appear to sit on the Supreme Court.)

Those people who would like to see every handgun in the United States melted down into slag and dumped in the Mariana Trench insist on the narrowest possible reading of the Second Amendment, that the right of bearing arms is limited to the militia, which is now the National Guard. Many of them are the same people who want to give the First Amendment its broadest reading to protect the widest range of free expression. For them, the understanding of the First Amendment has broadened and expanded over the past two centuries, but that of the Second has not.

And those people who want to eliminate restrictions on gun ownership must, as we saw above, strain to eliminate some fairly plain language.

Not every person who advocates widespread gun ownership is crouching with his semiautomatic weapons amid the canned goods, listening for the black helicopters. Not every person who advocates limits on personal possession of firearms is a witless dupe of a totalitarian oppressor. There is a constitutional right to bear arms, but the dispute over how to understand that right has not been edifying.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
                    

Let’s hope that as the justices of the Supreme Court consider the language of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v Heller, they will keep in mind the understanding of English grammar prevalent among the Latinate-minded Founders.

The opening phrase of the amendment, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” is, as Dennis Baron points out, an absolute, a phrase governing the rest of the sentence. Or so Mr. Madison would have understood it. The right to bear arms therefore has a direct connection to the establishment of a militia.

The revolutionary generation distrusted standing armies, which their reading of Roman history warned them could subvert the civilian government, and which their experience with George III taught them that the soldiery could be an instrument of royal tyranny. (Besides, the early national government taxed so lightly, mainly from customs duties, that it lacked the money to fund an army.)

Maintenance of public order depended largely on the militia, and in the colonial and Federal eras, the militia was made up, not of any yahoo who could touch off a flintlock, but of a group of adult male citizens who met more or less regularly for some level of military training.

The militia was an arm of the government, not an independent collection of citizens, as Article 1 of the Constitution indicates by giving Congress the power

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress. ...

(The effectiveness of such forces was highly variable. You may recall that the citizen soldiers of the militia crumbled before the British regulars at Bladensburg in 1814, leaving the way open for the occupation of the District of Columbia and the burning of the White House and Capitol.)

Not being learned in the law, I am unable to say whether this constitutional context grants residents of the District of Columbia a right to keep an arsenal of firearms under the bed. It will be interesting to see what the exponents on the court of Original Intent will make of all this.

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)
                    

Some people were rattled on National Grammar Day by my remark on the Dan Rodricks show on WYPR-FM that between is not limited to use with two parties. (“Heresy! Heresy! He’s gone over to the Other Side! He’s in the pay of Geoffrey Pullum! Stop him! He’s destroying the language!”)

But just the other day I came across a passage in Robert Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger that illustrates the exception to the between/among distinction: “Between February 25 and March 4, Kissinger resumed his shuttle diplomacy, traveling between Damascus, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh, and Bonn, before his return to the United States.”

He did not travel among those six cities; he traveled between one and another seriatim. Bryan Garner quotes Ernest Gowers quoting the Oxford English Dictionary:

Between “is still the only word available to express the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually; among expresses a relation to them collectively and vaguely: we should not say the space lying among the three points or a treaty among three Powers.”

Posted by John McIntyre at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

I was once directly subordinate to an editor who, for the two years that the editor was theoretically in charge of the copy desk, did not trouble to learn who all the copy editors were by name or by sight.

For a supervising editor, this may not be seen as a drawback — though a supervising editor who did not know all the reporters would be considered eccentric, if not incompetent — but for the copy desk itself, ticking along in obscurity has been customary, the mind of man remembereth not to the contrary.

But for a colleague such as an assigning editor or reporter, knowing who has hands on the copy is useful, perhaps even vital.

It would make unlikely the sort of scene, noted just this week, when a reporter* carried on volubly about the nasty, suspicious-minded copy editor who had the temerity to point out that he had gotten a person’s name wrong in his story — without realizing that he was standing next to that very copy editor.

*Don’t ask; I’m not telling.

Posted by John McIntyre at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
                    

One of my fellow Testy Copy Editors begs to be told that wikify — presumably to construct as a wiki or incorporate into or adapt for a wiki — is not a word. I fear that there’s no help.

Whether something “is or is not a word” exercises many commentators on language and the people who pose questions to them. But that’s not the right question. The blunt fact is, and the linguists are right about this, that if it is comprehensible to another speaker of the language, it is a word. You may not care for impact as a verb, or worse, impactful, and you may hold up bootylicious between two fingers as you would pick up a slug from the sidewalk, but they are all words, and it is idle to contest that status.

Over at the blog Headsup, FEV points out that “the general philosophy around here is that it's best not to lose too much sleep banning new words and usages. Don't get us wrong; there are lots of them we cordially dislike, and if you want help in ridding yourself of verbs like ‘impact’ and ‘reference,’ we're here for you. (I'm starting to get exercised about ‘do-over,’ myself.) But we won't exile you for using the damn things. Just try not to do it in front of the kitties.”

The principles of evolution apply to language as well as to biology. Language is constantly throwing up variations and novelties, most of which perish after a brief span, but some of which endure. Look at the ever-entertaining Slang and Euphemism by Richard A. Spears. Take a word — we’ll try oaf, one of the more innocuous entries — and examine the richness of defunct vocabulary: 

Addle-brain, bake-head, balatron, beanhead, beetle-brain, blockhead, blubberbrain, Boeotian, booberkin, Boobus americanus, butterball, cabbagehead, calf-lolly, chawbacon, chuff, clabber-head, cockscomb, cod, Country Jake, diddle-head, dillypot, dimbo, dink., doddypate, dodunk, donk, dooble, doof, dorbel, dorf, dorkmunder, Dorkus maximus, dromedary, drongo, droud, drube, and a full two and a half columns of close print to go.

It’s not up to the copy desk to legislate for the language, which is going to go where it wants to, throwing up and altering and discarding words with merry abandon. But we do get to have opinions about what is clear, what is precise, what is appropriate in context, and even, sometimes, what is elegant. Say otherwise, and risk being termed a looby.

Posted by John McIntyre at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)
                    

Much as I hesitate to disagree with Bill Walsh, valued colleague, pioneer of blogging on the copy editor’s role, and panjandrum of the copy desk at a newspaper 40 miles to the south, I can’t endorse his latest stricture on usage: “If you can't fix a broken leg, I'm not calling you ‘doctor.’"

Brother Walsh takes the hard-line view that only people with medical degrees get to be called “doctor.” That is largely in keeping with the emphasis in the Associated Press Stylebook, which says that Dr. in first reference should be limited to people with degrees in dental surgery, medicine, optometry, osteopathy or podiatric medicine. Its reasoning is that the public tends to identify the title only with physicians.

But then the AP gets weasely, saying that if it is “appropriate within the context,” the title may be used with the names of people who hold other doctoral degrees — but not honorary doctorates.

The New York Times has essayed further on that slippery slope, saying in its stylebook: “Others with earned doctorates, like Ph.D. degrees, may choose to use the title or not; follow their preference.” Perhaps The Times writes about, and is read by, more people with earned doctorates.

The major point, and it is a difficult one for some copy editors, is that house style follows usage. Newspapers, for example, put in a long resistance to the use of gay as a synonym for homosexual. That resistance is over, because the usage has become established.

And the multiplication of people with advanced degrees since the university boom days of the 1950s and 1960s means that there are a lot more non-physicians out there who like the sound of doctor before their names. A friend who worked at the Harvard Coop years ago while completing his own dissertation was quietly amused at the pathetic vanity of the customers who had insisted on having “Ph.D.” appended to their names on their charge cards.

I did know a member of the Syracuse faculty, Paul Theiner, a Chaucerian, who disdained being called doctor. Doctors, he said, were people who probed into other people’s orifices for a living. He was Professor Theiner.

We may have thrown over British rule and rejected hereditary aristocracy, but as Americans we have never shed a love of titles and minor distinctions. The lurid and flamboyant titles that members of lodges and fraternal orders bestow upon one another come to mind. The tendency of retired military officers and public officials to hold on to General, Colonel, Senator, Governor and Ambassador is another mark of our non-egalitarian tendencies. Keep in mind as well the procession of notables who harvest honorary degrees by the bushel in exchange for numbingly platitudinous commencement speeches.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1946: “I simply can't imagine any man of dignity accepting Pulitzer Prizes, honorary degrees or other such fripperies. Nine-tenths of them go to obvious quacks. Getting one is like being elected to the Elks.”

But since people do earn doctorates, and like to use doctor with their names, and circulate among people who also like the sound of titles, the reasonable course is to follow the practice that The Times recommends: Use the title when the person has an earned degree and the holding of that degree is relevant to the context of the article.

For the record: I was a graduate student at Syracuse, 1973-1979, leaving without completing a Ph.D. in English. I am also one of the few living Kentuckians who is not a Kentucky Colonel.

Posted by John McIntyre at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
                    

Over at The Editor’s Desk, Andy Bechtel has pointed out an entry in Paper Cuts, a blog on books at The New York Times, inviting readers to contribute a specimen passage from a beloved book. Naturally, the response has been enthusiastic, and it is getting a little crowded over there. So I offer you a short selection from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin.

The novel recounts the adventures and misadventures of Timofey Pnin, a Russian expatriate with a precarious position at Waindell College, a provincial institution that offers Nabokov many opportunities to mock American academic life. The novel is funny and satirical and deeply humane, a nearly perfect comic novel. I reread it with pleasure every few years; and if you do not know it, I grieve for your loss.

Professor Michael Koppisch read this passage to me with great relish 35 years ago at Michigan State, and acquaintance with this book is but one of many debts of gratitude I owe him.

From Pnin:

Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French. This did not prevent him from traveling tremendous distances to attend Modern Language conventions, at which he would flaunt his ineptitude as if it were some majestic whim, and parry with great thrusts of healthy lodge humor any attempt to inveigle him into the subtleties of the parley-voo. A highly esteemed money-getter, he had recently induced a rich old man, whom three great universities had courted in vain, to promote with a fantastic endowment a riot of research conducted by graduates under the direction of Dr. Slavski, a Canadian, toward the erection on a hill near Waindell, of a “French Village,” two streets and a square, to be copied from those of the ancient little burg of Vandel in the Dordogne. Despite the grandiose element always present in his administrative illuminations, Blorenge was personally a man of ascetic tastes. He had happened to go to school with Sam Poore, Waindell’s President, and for many years, regularly, even after the latter had lost his sight, the two would go fishing together on a bleak, wind-raked lake, at the end of a gravel lane lined with fireweed, seventy miles north of Waindell, in the kind of dreary brush country—scrub oak and nursery pine—that, in terms of nature, is the counterpart of a slum. His wife, a sweet woman of simple antecedents, referred to him at her club as “Professor Blorenge.” He gave a course entitled “Great Frenchmen,” which he had had his secretary copy out from a set of The Hastings Historical and Philosophical Magazine for 1882-94, discovered by him in an attic and not represented in the College Library.

Posted by John McIntyre at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Tomorrow being the Feast of St. Patrick, you will want to refer to it — if you go in for that sort of jocular informality — with the Irish diminutive for Patrick, St. Paddy’s Day. If you should, as some invariably do, refer to St. Patty’s Day, you would be suggesting something about the saint not supported by the skimpy historical record.

Slainte.*

* Pronounced SLAWN-cha.

Posted by John McIntyre at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
                    

In their typically fumbling fashion, the people’s representatives in the Maryland General Assembly have been trying to figure out what to do about proposals to legalize gay marriage, set up civil unions, enact some limited version of the latter, reaffirm one-man-one-woman marriage, or just repair to the bar and forget about the whole thing.

Before the abusive automatic responses kick in, let me try to be clear about the essentials. I’m not interested in church so much as state.

Religious denominations determine whether marriages can be performed by their adherents. The Roman Catholic Church continues to decide whether a man and a woman can marry within the church and, divorce being ruled out, whether that marriage can subsequently be annulled. The Episcopal Church and the Southern Baptists can do the same. Synagogues, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, will or will not countenance individual unions solemnized by rabbis, as they see fit. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarian-Universalists, Wiccans and the Universal Life Church’s mail-order clergy are equally free to go about their business. This is America, and the state doesn’t meddle.

(In Britain, having an established church has made things a little more complicated. In the 19th century, the Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage act forbade a husband to marry the sister of his deceased wife, on the prohibitions of marriage within consanguinity of canon law and the Church of England’s ecclesiastical law. The Deceased Wife’s Sister act was not repealed until the early 20th century.)

I would, however, like to look at the frequently repeated statement that marriage has always involved just one man and one woman and therefore always should. If memory serves, the patriarchs and monarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures often maintained domestic arrangements that, if attempted today, might involve criminal prosecution and would certainly tie things up in probate longer than Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. *

The anthropological literature includes descriptions of numerous societies in which polygamy or polygyny has been practiced.

And contemporary sociologists coined the term serial monogamy, also sometimes called serial polygamy, to describe the exuberant careers of successive marriages and divorces that people increasingly undertake. (Repeat quietly to yourself: Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Warner Fortensky.) And let’s not even get started on the Henrickson family of HBO’s Big Love.

Even more, I’d like put up for examination another uninformed view that crops up occasionally: that the state has no business regulating marriage.

The state regulates marriage, for one, because marriage is and always has been about the orderly conveyance of property, and anyone who thinks otherwise has plainly never read Jane Austen. The law, as a relic of the practice of providing a dowry for a wife, used to hold that the woman’s property passed entirely into the man’s control at marriage. The state made that law; and when social circumstances changed, the state unmade that law.

The state also has an interest in protecting the welfare of its citizens, including those citizens who are minor children. So as part of the law of marriage and divorce, the state determines custody questions. Religious marriage involves principles of theology. Secular marriage involves the state’s maintenance of public order by the regulation of property and supervision of the welfare of children.

Maintaining civil public discourse doesn’t require people to hold one view or another about the terms of marriage and civil unions, but it does require them to be clear about the terms of the debate.

* Look it up yourself. Bleak House is in the bookstores. If you’re insane, you can read all 600-plus pages on Google.

Posted by John McIntyre at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)