You Don't Say

 Fifty years ago I imagined that I might be a poet, but when Syracuse University turned me down for the creative writing program, then called to offer me a fellowship in the academic program in ...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/05/prosy-verse.html

My Facebook feed has been cluttered this week with people posting this remark attributed to the late Joseph Sobran: "In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high schools to tea...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/bemoan-bemoan-bemoan.html

 It has been the custom of the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook to announce their annual revisions at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, presumably because those...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/not-unusual.html

A fellow editor writes to ask if I, as a resident of Baltimore, can attest that there has been a Roman Catholic presence in the city since the latter part of the 13th century.  He refers to an...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/not-during-reign-of-edward-longshanks.html

An old friend asked me on Facebook if I could recommend some nonfiction books, so I put together a list of the ones I've liked most in two and a half years of retirement:   Isabel Wilkinson, ...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/04/once-bookworm-always-bookworm.html

Imagine a collection of short detective stories in which no case is solved.  I was four pages into Anatoly Liberman’s discussion of the origin of the word finger — including multiple Germa...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/03/in-beginning-was-word.html

 Once you hang up the green eyeshade, nobody pays you any longer for finding fault and you have to think up other things to do. Sometimes, on afternoons before the bar opens, you go to the libra...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-practice-of-lexis-can-lead-to-tsuris.html

Making my way through the thousand pages of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis, professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and published by the Oxford Uni...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/language-sneaks-up-on-you.html

 February 8 marked forty-four years since I began work as a copy editor.  The Cincinnati Enquirer took a risk in hiring a fugitive graduate student for the copy desk, where I absorbed the pr...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/my-life-as-drudge.html

 The following text is an article on U.S. involvement in Kosovo during the Clinton administration, compiled by an editor at The Baltimore Sun from the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/so-you-want-to-be-editor.html

 Today Kathleen baked sour cream cookies from my grandmother's recipe. They were the great treat of my childhood, the batter alone tasting better than any other cookie batter I have sampled. I h...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/cookies-you-need-cookies.html

Yesterday Armstrong Williams, co-owner of The Baltimore Sun, deplored the singing of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" at the Super Bowl: "It is an anthem created for one race, and one race only. Playi...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/um-about-that-anthem.html

Language is the most democratic thing we have: Each English speaker gets one vote, and the language becomes what we collectively make of it over time.  Some people do have influence, but it is...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/02/nothings-more-democratic-than-english.html

The reputation of editors, particularly copy editors, has not been enviable. There is a long tradition of writers affecting to believe that if we were only rid of these petty, pedantic, literal-m...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-editors-hand.html

 For more than thirty-seven years, thirty-three of them on the staff, I have been a daily subscriber to The Baltimore Sun. The announcement that the newspaper has been purchased by a conservativ...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/i-subscribe-to-baltimore-sun-for-now.html

 It was the 1990s. I was chief of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. One day a senior editor came into my office, closed the door, and sat down. "What's up?" I asked.  He said, " is comp...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-plot-against-copy-desk.html

We know, because we have looked at the internet, that few people can write effectively, and we also know that all human beings are prone to error. Engaging an editor compensates for this state of...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/yeah-you-probably-need-editor.html

Editors are human beings, though you may have been told otherwise, as susceptible to idiosyncratic preferences about language as anyone else. Even the most scrupulous can be tempted to impose a c...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2024/01/editor-control-your-crotchets.html

Despite having vigorously defended the work of copy editors for decades, I concede that not all that we were called upon to perform had the best effect. Here's a recollection.  When I began wo...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/12/a-chronicle-of-time-wasted.html

On Thanksgiving I posted that Kathleen had made my mother's corn pudding as one of the side dishes at dinner, and a couple of people asked for the recipe. Here it is.  MARIAN EARLY MCINTYRE'S ...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/you-can-still-make-corn-pudding-for.html

 A couple of weeks ago I posted "Give up the ship,"  in which I argued to abandon, or at least consider abandoning, a handful of long-established usage rules. One reader commented, "My teaching...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/let-unlearning-be-unconfined.html

That monosyllable go turns out to contribute to highly expressive phrases.  It can mean to cooperate, as when one goes along or goes with the flow. That is, to use another idiom, to follow t...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/where-things-go.html

 In 1986, when we moved to Baltimore so that I could begin work on The Sun's copy desk, we rented an apartment in Towson while we looked for a house in the city.  A couple in a nearby apartme...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/baltimore-greatest-city-in-america.html

I grumped this morning about that article that used refuted in a context plainly indicating that the sense was "disputed" or "rebutted," and someone reminded me that those senses of refute have...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/dont-dispute-refute.html

 During more than forty years as a copy editor, part of my job was to make copy clean and correct. Another part of the job was to determine when things previously thought correct no longer appli...

http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2023/11/give-up-ship.html