Copy Desk

In September 1986 I took a seat on the copy desk of The Baltimore Sun . It was only a few months previously that Times Mirror had bought the paper, so the newspaper I worked on that first night and the colleagues who produced it were still those of the A.S. Abell company. It is a vanished era, seeming nearly as remote as that four-page penny paper produced by A.S. Abell for the first time on this date in 1837. Today is The Sun 's 175th anniversary. You can call it the dodransbicentennial, or the septaquintaquinquecentennial,or some of the other coinages.

Commenting from Albion, the estimable Picky recently wrote: "As I look back on a very privileged life I note that although the language I spoke mostly as a child was that of the London streets, my parents (typically of the upper working class in those days they enriched English by reading Dickens and Trollope and Austen to each other in the evenings - anyone do that nowadays?) and my school together provided me also with something very close to standard English, and I traded on that, essentially made my living from it, for the rest of my life.

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 successfully participated in The Times Mirror Leadership Institute for Managers. Twelve years ago, when there was still such a thing as Times Mirror.  Having been selected, I was given a choice of seances in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Huntington Beach, California. Not being entirely dim, I packed for the West Coast.  The Leadership Institute for Managers turned out to be a kind of summer camp for grown-ups.

Reactions to Robert Lane Greene's post at Johnson  on split infinitives  got me to thinking about the One Way Only crowd.  Specifically, it was a comment by David M. Rowe: Yes, avoiding split infinitives at all cost can be labored and pedantic. Making them the default usage, however, reduces an authors tone to the level of over-hyped consultants' jargon. ("Our model allows you to rapidly, effectively and inexpensively improve your forecasts. " Ugh!

Carol Saller has a disturbing post at Lingua Franca on difficult writers. It's quite a stunner. My experience has been almost exclusively with newspaper reporters, who display none of the obnoxious characteristics Ms. Saller describes. On the contrary, newspaper reporters understand that the standards and purposes of the publication trump their personal preferences. They do not allow their egos to stand in the way of the work. They are collegial and cooperative with the copy desk, grateful, sometimes almost pathetically so, for the copy editor's efforts to correct error and smooth out rough prose.

As copy desks gradually pass into history at the hands of sharp-pencil corporate functionaries who do not believe in editing, let us spare a moment to rescue from You Don't Say 's archives a handful of the heroic moments of the craft.     GREAT MOMENTS IN COPY DESK HISTORY I   On an otherwise uneventful evening in May 1982, the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer was at work on the first edition. Webb Matthews was following the wire services.

Now that we're well and truly launched on 2012, we'll see no more of those tedious retrospectives about 2011 - high points, low points, deaths, regrets. For my part, my only regret, apart from not being a Powerball winner, is that “spritzing the bonobos” as an expression of futility did not catch on last year. I should mention to you, though, in case you got an early start on Hogmanay, Friday's post on why you should pay no attention to cranks complaining that this, that, or the other is “ruining” the language.

I think it's fair to say that Benjamin J. Marrison, editor of The Columbus Dispatch , is forthright. Here is what he said in an article in yesterday's editions: “Thursday's front page made me want to vomit.” Thursday's front page misspelled the first name of the president of the United States, twice. And Mr. Marrison went on to recount other instances of embarrassing errors creeping into his pages. I'm not going to badmouth The Dispatch , where I have been a guest on a couple of occasions, and some of whose copy editors I have known for years and whose chagrin I can share.

Yesterday, winter arrived in Baltimore, with the sun shining and temperatures in the middle sixties. I really should have gone outside to rake up the remaining oak leaves from our neighbor's trees and do something about all those damned Higgs bosons, but I had holiday preparations to do. And today dawns Festivus. The aluminum pole is up in the living room. I am putting off the Feats of Strength, because later I will go to the paragraph factory to sit as the supervising editor on the news desk and shepherd through (and do a goodly amount of primary copy editing on)

A side effect of journalism on its practitioners is their stoic acceptance of the tragedies they often encounter. Reporters and editors aren't alone in this, of course. Like police officers and emergency room doctors, journalists instinctively adopt attitudes of dispassionate professionalism in the face of human pain. But as with all human beings, that pain can break through the toughest of protective shields. So it was on Dec. 6 when journalists coming to work at The Sun learned from their newsroom colleagues that the family of Steve Young, the newspaper's deputy copy desk chief, had been devastated by an early morning home fire.