John McIntyre, whom James Wolcott called "the Dave Brubeck of the art and craft of copy editing," writes on language, editing, journalism, and random topics. Identifying his errors relieves him of the burden of omniscience. Write to jemcintyre@gmail.com, befriend at Facebook, or follow at Twitter: @johnemcintyre. His original "You Don't Say" blog at The Baltimore Sun ran from 2005 to 2021, and posts on it can sometimes be found at baltimoresun.com through Google searches.
The porch at our front door is small, holding a round table, a small side table, and four chairs. That's the capacity. When I worked, this is where my wife and I shared a bottle of Prosecco and a snack or light supper on my days off. In retirement, this is where I spend much of my time. This porch is where I discovered that the late afternoon light in the summer turns the oak leaves silver. This…
This week someone on Twitter quoted a tweet from a fellow journalist: "Not to be dramatic, but the day @APStylebook made it okay to say 'over' when it should be 'more than' was humanity's worst day." Not to be dramatic, but, hearing the alarm, I reached for my musket to head for Lexington Common. We know where this comes from. An entry in the "Don't List" of James Gordon Bennett at The New York…
On the first day of my editing class at Loyola University Maryland, I asked the students to provide some basic information--class year, hometown, phone number where you can be reached. (I once woke a student with a call in early afternoon to inform that the final examination had started fifteen minutes previously. She showed up and passed.) And, out of idle curiosity, I asked them to give the…
Note to the reader: This post is entirely personal; you may well choose to skip it. Subsequent posts will return to issues of grammar, usage, editing, and journalism. A year ago, traveling with my wife, her sibs, and their spouses through Central Europe, I put in 18,000 steps or more a day in Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, enjoying the pilsner and feeling no ill effects. Later in the summer, my…
Let us acknowledge things about our national anthem. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is mediocre verse set to the tune of an old drinking song that is difficult to sing. Its author, Francis Scott Key, does not have a clean record on the slavery issue (though should we apply our virtues retroactively, who would 'scape whipping?). The third verse is not happy about British efforts to enlist enslaved…
During the fair weather this week I have been reading The Iliad in Emily Wilson's translation on the front porch. My interest in Wilson's translation was piqued by ill-informed criticism of her work online and further stimulated by reading David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens , part art history and part political and cultural history. So to Wilson's Iliad :…
It took many conversations, but my wife, Kathleen Capcara, finally perfected a response. "Kathleen, what does your husband do?" "He's a copy editor for The Cincinnati Enquirer [or] The Baltimore Sun ." "Copy editor? What's that?" "He's kind of an English teacher for the newsroom." Thus she summed up the kinds of things that concern us, the kind of people drawn to this work, and the perception of…
A headline in The Guardian says that the son of a man who was deported is now "graduating high school." We've come a long way. Originally, Bryan Garner points out in Garner's Modern English Usage , graduating was something the school did to the student, and the idiomatic usage was that a student was graduated from the school. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idiom changed to focus on…
I had occasion to get in touch the with Comptroller of Maryland's office with an inquiry about a refund on our state income tax, and I was reminded of the oddity of that word in English. A comptroller is someone who controls, or supervises, accounts and expenditures. It came into English from the French contrerolleur and was originally in English conterroller, naturally morphing into controller .…
If you have not been on Twitter lately, and I know that many of you have left it in disgust, you will not have seen that the silly season is starting early. A handful of people have been fulminating over Emily Wilson's translations of Homer, particularly her Odyssey . They have not held back, freely using terms like "outrageous" and "evil." And they have provoked a backlash from classicists…
My doctor wants an MRI scan of my hip, and his office called and set up an appointment at a nearby location next week. In due time I received a text from a radiology company, asking me to register for the appointment. I tap through the categories at some length, entering miscellaneous pieces of information, coming at last to the discovery that the location for which I am scheduled is not listed.…
Ever unable to help myself, I responded to an online post in which someone was carping about the use of loan as a verb. You may have been taught that loan is only a noun, lend the verb, and the Associated Press Stylebook , bless its heart, continues to prefer that distinction. But like many simple, clear distinctions, it's not so. Even the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler said in 1926 (a century ago,…
A few days ago an irate reader vented his spleen online over someone who used further to mean at a greater distance. For the civilians in the room, this will require a little explanation. Further , meaning "at or to a greater distance," has been in English since the Plantagenets. It has a number of additional meanings, such as "to or at a more advanced point" and "to a greater degree or extent."…
If you make no other gesture this day toward clarity and economy in prose, deleting ongoing will store up treasure for you in Heaven. It has been a while--think of the late John Bremner forty-plus years ago--since anyone has denounced ongoing as a faddish and disagreeable substitute for continuing . It has sunk its roots deep into the journalistic vocabulary, where it continues to flower. The…
Perhaps your introduction to American history through high school was like mine: the discovery by white people from Europe of a vast land to be their own continental manifest destiny (once the current inhabitants were edged out); yes, there was slavery for a while, but it was ended a long time ago by a civil war in which both sides were gallant; nothing much past the First World War; in short, a…
50th: This, in 1826, is the one everyone remembers because Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died coincidentally on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Their simultaneous deaths on the anniversary of nationhood were widely seen as a Providential endorsement of the Republic. The president at the time was John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, who had failed to…
To the reader: I wrote this for The Sun in 2012, headed "Take me to your leadership." The plaque mentioned in the opening paragraph was discarded when the paper moved out of its Calvert Street offices, and I left in 2021, but the rest of the article remains valid. At one end of a shelf in my office at the paragraph factory a plaque collects dust, through which it can be seen that John E. McIntyre…
In yesterday's unseasonable warmth I spent part of the afternoon on the porch, reading The Private Patient (P.D. James's final Adam Dalgliesh novel, which I had unaccountably missed), watching the mockingbird that frequents the viburnum in the yard, greeting neighbors walking their dogs. Later, as the air cooled, I watched the dark clouds slide in as the cold front and the storms approached. The…
Let me be clear. I do not want to disparage Karen Hao, to whose Empire of AI I have turned for information on the despicable tech bros who appear to be dismantling civilization for their profit. But I do want to question the abilities of the people at Penguin Press to whom she entrusted the editing of her book. I settle for the moment on a single sentence. One of the things I discover day after…
On a weekday afternoon in a quiet bar, a glass of Smithwick's is one of the benisons of retirement. I was pondering a second pint when a wild-eyed character burst in, ordered a shot of whiskey, threw it back, and pounded on the bar with his glass for another. "Rough day"" I asked. "Rough day? Rough day? " he answered, knocking back another shot. "You know what day it is?" "It was March fourth this…
Last week I lost a friend of forty years. Steve Auerweck died Friday at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, where he was being treated for pneumonia. He had been in seriously deteriorating health for more than a year. It was in the fall of 1986 that I began work at The Baltimore Sun and met Steve. He too had been a copy editor before The Sun , recognizing his expertise with computers as well as…
When you are supplying attribution to a direct quote, it's best to follow two simple patterns. The first: If the attribution is a name only, put said after the name. " Said suffices," John McIntyre said. The second: If the name is paired with an explanatory phrase, put said before the name. "Don't go all Tom Swifty on me," said John McIntyre, the author of The Old Editor Says . The reason for this…
Groundhog Day, Candlemas, Valentine's Day, Super Bowl, and Presidents Day are not the February days I find most important. It was on the 7th of February in 1980 that I interviewed with Jim Schottelkotte, the managing editor of The Cincinnati Enquirer , and Denny Dressman, the assistant managing editor, and was offered a three-week paid tryout on the copy desk, beginning on the 8th. The tryout went…
We all have opinions, and many of them are about words or constructions that we dislike intensely.* But I, as a professional editor, must keep my idiosyncratic preferences under restraint. Thus it becomes necessary to rationalize my crotchets to give them some color of authority. Take, for example, ongoing . To you it's likely innocuous; to me it is irritating because the context is almost always…
As an undergraduate I aimed to become a writer of fiction. Experience proved that I lack imagination. But for nonfiction prose--articles, letters, memos--I can tell you things you need to know. Don't be afraid of revising. You may need time to puzzle out what you mean to say, and then how to say it effectively. You may need to take an entirely different approach than your first one. You may decide…