If you enjoy that sort of thing, at the Web site Regret the Error, Craig Silverman republishes the daily corrections of the news media, along with an annual summary of plagiarisms and other misdeeds.

We don’t typically run corrections of typographical errors or slips in grammar and usage (Complaints about the latter categories tend to be funneled to me); instead we correct errors of fact or omissions. I recall a correction from many years ago about a recipe for hearty cheese soup that had omitted the instruction to add half a gallon of warm water. Anyone who attempted the recipe as originally published is probably receiving high colonics to this day.

Superstitions accrue to newspapers like barnacles to the hull of a ship.* The superstition about corrections is that one must not repeat the original error. This, too, probably has a legal root, out of apprehension that republishing the error could widen exposure to a lawsuit. But observing this superstition leads to opaque corrections like this one from The Sun, one of my favorites:

In early editions of The Sun yesterday, the wrong sea turtle was pictured being released in Virginia.

It was corrections like this that led a former editor to issue a firm instruction that the error may be repeated in a correction whenever it is necessary for clarity.

I wish newspapers had more editors firmly insisting on clarity.

*Probably the most widespread superstition is the prohibition on whistling in the newsroom. I was told when just a tyro that it originated because someone was whistling in the newsroom of a San Francisco newspaper at the moment of the great earthquake of 1906.

The means of production

Copy editors have always been the hinge between writing/editing and the physical production of newspapers and books. The great change that occurred on copy desks during the last quarter of the 20th century was the elimination of printers in composing rooms and the transfer of formatting and typesetting production to copy desks. Mention CCI., SSI,. DTI, Harris or Unisys to a group of copy editors, and you can watch the blood drain from their faces.

The process has accelerated in this century, with production of electronic copy added to the production of print copy. The new inspiration is the editing of "platform-neutral" copy: text that can then be manipulated for print and electronic publication.

The effect has been that as staffing on copy desks has declined, more and more time has been taken up by formatting and coding for production purposes, with less and less time allowed for the editing. The struggle to maintain the standards of factual accuracy, grammatical precision, and clarity remains.

One side effect: Because writers, most editors and many managers remain determinedly ignorant of the details of production, lest they lose caste, the copy desk’s immersion in these details has not generated an improved reputation for copy editors.

The schooling of editors

It’s impressive that some journalism programs are investing in state-of-the-art equipment for the training of their majors, but they will probably find that keeping the equipment state-of-the-art is an expensive and losing battle. But it’s likely that the young will embrace new technology — Facebook, Twitter and whatever will succeed them — faster than their elders.

What continues to be lacking in journalism education is a thorough grounding in the use of the language. Many Journalism majors have the sketchiest grasp of English grammar and usage, and much of what they do think they know consists of superstitions and bad advice. (Imagine a medical student who had either no training in anatomy or, worse, Galen’s.)

They have also had very little training in the structural analysis of texts. I don’t mean what used to be called structuralism, but the ability to identify the focus in a text, to anatomize its structure, to examine how effectively the elements are organized in that structure, to comment with authority on metaphor and the use of other rhetorical devices.

The future of editing

So long as people have difficulty writing with precision and clarity, copy editing will be useful. Whether that usefulness will be recognized, however, is questionable. The “dead-tree media” — newspapers, magazines, books — are dismissing their copy editors at an alarming rate to cut costs. Electronic media have never invested all that heavily in editors to begin with. These developments have been accompanied by a great deal of asinine rationalization to the effect that writers don’t really require all that much editing.

So, you smart young people who want to get into the paragraph game, who show some ability and enthusiasm for the act of editing, there is an enormous need for your services. The potential inner satisfactions of taking low-grade prose and turning it into something clearer, more forceful, and more precise have never been greater. Unfortunately, you may not be able to land a job, and any job you land is unlikely to lead to prosperity. For you, going into editing will be like following a monastic vocation. God bless you, and don’t forget to write.

Of my own comments on the matter, I have only this to add. I have a sentimental recollection of encountering The Elements of Style at 18. But like many of the other delights one may recollect from youth — first loves, kir royales, amateur guitar playing — it does not hold up well on repeated encounter.

Robert V. Remini’s biography of Henry Clay includes this little nugget from the presidential election of 1844:

[W]hat many of Clay’s critics held against him, it seemed, was his outstanding ability. They did not want a statesman in the White House. They preferred men of lesser talents. Clay “may be a more brilliant orator” than Polk, conceded the Richmond Enquirer on October 28, “but we do not want splendid eloquence to conduct the executive department." He may be a “more dashing politician” than his opponent, “but we do not want any high flying and daring politician, who soars beyond the constitution” in pursuit of some “extravagant object. ... We want no aspiring ‘moon-reaching’ president.

The Republic will sometimes, luckily, place a Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt or some other exceptional person in the White House, but a look at that dim group between Jackson and Lincoln, or most of the chief magistrates between Lincoln and the first Roosevelt, among others, points to a strong recurring preference for unthreatening, genial mediocrity.

Nancy Friedman has gotten some attention with a delightful send-up of Maureen Dowd on Twitter, “Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone.” In doing so, she reminds us of the multiplicity of these threats to Civilization as We Know It.

There was also radio (“Red Rubber Ball” as a specimen of the richness of metaphor in pop music). There was broadcast television insidiously weakening the minds of the American public (Gilligan’s Island). Now we have cable television accelerating the rot (reality shows, Donald Trump). And Facebook. (Of the “five most” quiz selections, the one that appeals the most is the Five People I Want to Punch in the Face, but, unfortunately, I do not know the identity of the inventor of Facebook’s “five most” quizzes.)

Twitter, like the telephone, radio, television and Internet, affords multiple opportunities for wasting valuable time with inane stuff, and, like the telephone, radio, television and the Internet, it is useful within limits. It’s up to people to arrive at sensible limits. People who waste their time and yours on Twitter would, lacking Twitter, waste their time and yours in some other manner.

I thought that the silly season fell in the summer, but perhaps global climate change has sent it out of whack. In addition to the nonsense about Twitter, we have the governor of Texas apparently advocating secession — an issue we thought was settled one April morning 144 years ago at a little town in Virginia. We have Rod Blagojevich talking about starring in a reality TV show, which would out-Trump Trump. We have George Will carrying on about the evil cultural influence of denim — and providing fodder for Stephen Colbert and half the bloggers in the known world.

Take a break, people. Close this page. Get out of the basement. Turn off the TV. Make yourself a cup of tea. Pick up a book. The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell’s breezy account of our half-loony Puritan forebears, can give you a little perspective. You need it.

... Protestantism’s shedding away of authority ... inspires self-reliance—along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy—namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about.

Not that I am saying that Protestantism, self-reliance and democracy are Bad Things — I endorse all of them, and the Internet too. But we should keep our wits about us and be conscious of the limitations and dangers inherent in them.

The Abbeville Manual of Style blog reports in "Supreme Court Shakespeare Screw-Up!" on the decision by a group of venerable jurists, inveigled into one of those inane mock trials of historical issues, that William Shakespeare was not the author of the plays of William Shakespeare.

Anti-Stratfordism has been a magnet for cranks since the 19th century, and their numbers appear to be annually replenished. It appears to draw people who are screwy about credentials, since Shakespeare lacked the two, noble blood and university education, that appear to matter to them.

That Shakespeare was widely acknowledged as the author in his own time, that the cranks have to resort to ingenious manipulations of known chronology (Christopher Marlowe and the Earl of Oxford having inconveniently died before all the Shakespeare plays were produced), or that they can only establish alternative authorship through bizarre and unproved (and unprovable) conspiracy theories does not give them pause.

And why should it? The Internet is a real big tent, and it can accommodate many freak shows. And that publishers continue to bring out the occasional anti-Stratfordian book indicates that the easily gulled remain, as ever, a lucrative market.

This way to the egress.

...a refusal to arrive at agreed-upon facts. Like the existence of weapons of mass destruction? A refusal to agree on that kind of fiction would certainly seem to be something to be thankful for. In any case, I am less than convinced about the "discourse" you say people used to seek in newspapers, as almost all news consumers seem to select the sources which most closely reflect their prejudices. Internet is not really different in that way, but it is at least less susceptible to the kind of deliberate distorsion we have come to expect from the Murdochs, Berlusconis and Hearsts of this world. A little grafitti-level discourse is a small price to pay, at worst a nuisance, like spam in your email (and sometimes even spam can be entertaining).

The initial rhetorical question is an allusion to The New York Times, which the comment subsequently equates with the Murdoch and Berlusconi publications. The first thing that irritates me is this leveling, this shrugging that all newspapers are equally biased and unreliable as well as obsolete.

Surely there are distinctions. When the Jayson Blair scandal blew up, the editor of The Times lost his job. The newspaper published its findings in an investigation that I cite each semester in my copy-editing class; the printout runs to 17 pages. When the Jack Kelley scandal hit USA Today, the paper published a front-page account that ran to two full pages inside the section. It would have been a good thing had editors raised more questions about those gentlemen, and if the questions that were raised had been heeded, but it was responsible for the two papers to confront the lapses squarely.

And there are distinctions to be made. There are good reasons that so many people read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, even if they happen to disagree with the editorial positions of the papers. One of those reasons is that the two papers are rigorous in their editing, in their determination to verify the information they publish and to present it in clear and comprehensible English. That the results can fall short of the goal is a given in human experience, but it does not mean that the effort is pointless.

That effort, the struggle by editors, including copy editors, to make it right and make it clear is the second ground of my irritation. There are hundreds and thousands of copy editors still at newspapers and magazines and even some Web sites who are struggling every day to accomplish that feat of making the publication right and making it clear. I have worked alongside such people for nearly 30 years; I know how hard they work, and I know how much they accomplish. That our masters in these three decades have made boneheaded business decisions — for which we have had front-row seats — and that a changing business climate is decimating our ranks does not in any way detract from the effort and the accomplishment.

If you think otherwise, have a look at what you get without editors. I look at some of the offal available on the Web and marvel at the suggestion that the Internet is less given to distortion than the daily press. The writing is not necessarily any better, either.

Those of us in the dwindling ranks of copy editors are not engaged to sit at the desk for eight hours admiring the work. Our specialty is pathology; we are looking for things that have gone wrong. So the suggestion that this blog should feature writing worth praise and admiration poses a difficulty. Panegyric doesn’t come easily to us.

Oh, there have been some occasional mentions, such as Robertson Davies on language in The Rebel Angels: “Funny how languages break down and turn into something else. Latin was rubbed away until it degenerated into dreadful lingos like French and Italian and Spanish, and lo! people found out that quite new things could be said in those degenerate languages — things nobody had ever thought of in Latin. English is breaking down now in the same way — becoming a world language that every Tom Dick and Harry must learn, and speak in a way that would give Doctor Johnson the jim-jams.”

I once cited my favorite passage from Nabokov’s Pnin and on another occasion admired Bill Glauber’s elegant opening to an article on the funeral of one of the Kray brothers.

I’ve been quoting Mencken since high school, and in light of the past week’s brouhaha over The Web Site That shall Not Be Named, this seemed apposite: “Here [in the United States] the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy.”

When I was in graduate school, Lytton Strachey on the scholar’s lot struck a chord: “In the early years of the eighteenth century the life of learning was agitated, violent, and full of extremes. ... One sat, bent nearly double, surrounded by four circles of folios, living to edit Hesychius and confound Dr. Hody, and dying at the last with a stomach half full of sand.”

Mr. Cross was kind enough to suggest a couple of examples by Louis Menand from The New Yorker:

An example from one of my favorites, Louis Menand:

"Jean-Paul Sartre preferred the company of women."

This guy knows how to write an intro.

Another Menand favorite, albeit a mite clunky:

"The first punctuation mistake in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there."

Perhaps you would like to suggest some favorite passages.

Many of the complaints that come in from readers of The Sun point out embarrassing lapses in our print and electronic editions, but many also fall into the categories that Professor Zwicky describes. And it is typically the people who are wrong who are most stubborn and intemperate, most resistant to explanation.

Particularly tedious are the people who imagine that English is in decline and that “correct” English needs some kind of official “protection” from the barbarians who are destroying it. This belief, which has cropped up regularly for at least the past five centuries, displays a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the language and its operation.

The only way we are going to get to an intelligent discussion of grammar and usage — particularly in the area of concern for this blog, the ways that standard American English can be written most effectively — is to become willing to examine our own preconceptions and prejudices, with an eye to adjusting them to the realities of the language.

If, in the process, we could avoid tirades and denunciations, that, too, would be progress.

Professor Zwicky has closed the comments on his post, but you can feel free to respond here.

It’s all there: the relaxation of inhibitions afforded by anonymity; the indulgence in prejudice, hostility, anger and contempt; the hyper-masculinity*; and even an occasional lone flash of imagination and wit.

My estimable colleague, David Sullivan of The Philadelphia Inquirer, recently contrasted that kind of discourse with the kind people used to seek in newspapers: “Newspapers — which exist in a world of ‘Let us tell you something we have determined to be right and you do not know and realistically you could never find out on your own’ — simply can't compete with ‘Let me show you what a dude I am.’ "**

This coarsening of public discussion appears to go hand in hand with a refusal to arrive at agreed-upon facts. It is not just that there are differences of opinion being aired; one expects vigorous disagreement over aesthetic judgments and political views. What is disturbing is that if you differ from my perception of reality, I will simply heap personal abuse on you.

The phenomenon itself is not novel — one recalls the vicious pamphleteering between Protestants and Roman Catholics during the 16th and 17th centuries or the scurrilous accusations that have marked American politics from the earliest days of the Republic.

But the sheer volume of it — volume in both senses, quantity and decibel level — is disturbing. It crowds out much of what attempts to be reasonable.

*Observation suggests that men who are assured in their masculinity see no particular need to comment on the masculinity of others.

**These comments should in no way be construed as a reflection on a certain popular Web site whose members — many of whom, I am assured, hold the Ph.D. — engage in freewheeling discussion, genial banter and amusing personal remarks.

But walking around Fells Point’s Privateer Day with my daughter this afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a possible future for us.

In the 18th century (good times), nations that came up short on naval resources resorted to privateers, essentially pirates who were licensed to plunder and, at least officially, limited in their targets. For our beached copy editors, the role of privateer could open up fresh possibilities for employment.

Some official organization — a logical one being the American Copy Editors Society, perhaps at its forthcoming national conference in Minneapolis — would issue letters of marque authorizing copy-editing privateers to board offending publications, seize texts and deal with them appropriately.

Some technical details — the precise wording of the letter of marque, the design of the flag under which copy-editing privateers would operate — remain to be worked out. But a fleet could be operational in comparatively short order.

For those of you who imagine that your writing is pristine and that readers will long for unmediated contact with you: Heave to and prepare to be boarded.