What's wrong with this Bound and Gagged panel?

Posted over on Tumbler this challenge: A good editor knows what is wrong with this Bound and Gagged comic today:

The answer:
The game is Whac-a-Mole (yes, I realize comic strip artists get lots of license - just testing to see how your editor's trivia knowledge is).

Capital - or is that 'Captial'- One Bowl

Oops. Editor needed on Aisle 3.

Headline Oops: Home, home on the range - without a dictionary

Yeah, what can you say  about heds like this?

Update 11/24: As might be expected, when this showed up on my Facebook feed, some folks started getting upset about the state of the media business. I agree. I empathize. But I also wrote this:

Let's be honest. Risk assessment as part of the cost-benefit analysis has always been part of business, and a media company is a business. Please don't read this as an endorsement, but please understand if I don't get all weepy about this kind of stuff. 

The managers of these businesses have made an obvious assessment that they can diminish product quality and still make a dime or two - maybe more than before (though most of this is a stem, not stop, the bleeding strategy). Most newspapers and broadcasters have never been in the Audi or BMW line of business - they've been a higher-end Ford or Chevy at best (maybe occasionally a Buick). 

It's business, folks; get used to it or start your own and prove that quality sells. 

These are not public utilities (whether they should be is another debate). As I used to tell ACES, if you want to make the quality argument, you've got to monetize it -- and the only ones who will do that for you are the libel insurers (or, perhaps eventually, the customers, but I'm not holding my breath on that). Until then, we get to make fun, but don't get all exercised about it beyond that.

Spelling: Use "I" before "E" in this hed

Yes, variation is the spice of life. But when you see "var" or "variant" in the dictionary (especially one considered as liberal as Merriam-Webster), it's usually a signal to professional editors to look for the more standard spelling.

In this case, inflames would have kept this hed from going down in flames ...

Chuck E. Cheese can't spell

Found this on one of those mechanical horse rides at a Chuck E. Cheese in North Little Rock, Ark.

Sigh. Starting them out misspelling* so young. No surprise that when they get to me in college they are confused.

*Look at the last direction. (And whoever did this was so careful to include the periods, too, but missed the big one.)

We're all going to hell in a dictionary

Well, not really. But as usual, the "Scream" crowd is emerging over the latest crop of neologisms to enter the dictionaries (here's Oxford's August list). (Though there is a nagging suspicion in reading this that it may be unnecessarily shrill just to get page views.)


And, as usual, John McIntyre launches a well-placed missile right to the middle of the pomposity and silliness.

One is often reminded of the quote by Samuel Johnson, considered father of the modern dictionary.

Let the weekend begin ...

Edit Fail: Let's 'cache' this error

This blurb from Street Fight Daily today is another case of an error I'm seeing more often. Can you find it (hint - read the post headline):

Under a new partnership being announced with Discover, PayPal is super-sizing the number of merchant locations it will accepted at in the U.S. to more than seven million. Discover may not hold the same cache among consumers as Visa and MasterCard, but it reaches nearly as many merchants, or roughly 95 percent of the two other payment networks combined.

Yeah, there's also the missing "be" in front of "accepted." But the one I had in mind was that the writer used cache when the word needed was cachet. I'm seeing it confused more and more with cache, which is not quite 180 degrees opposite, but close, in that it means to hide something or store it away instead of elevating it in prestige.

(The original AllThingsD article got it right, by the way.)

I think some writers think the word from the French is somehow spelled caché, with the accent acute that tends to be pronounced by English speakers as a long "a." But the word (as does cache) derives from cacher.


So let's be careful out there.

A finger in the what again?

Jordan Kurzweil, in his weekend piece on Tech Crunch retreading all the usual - and important - arguments for why newspapers need to rethink their digital strategies, may also have given us a fine example of why we still need copy editors.

 In case you can't read that: The paywall, whether for Gannett or other publishers, is a finger in the dyke, a cover-up for tectonic shifts in their businesses.

Now, you can argue all you want that "dyke" is an alternate spelling of "dike." But in this case, when "finger" is also involved, a good copy editor would probably have suggested maybe not ...

Merriam-Webster App

Merriam-Webster has a free Android app to access the dictionary and some other goodies like word of the day.

You will get ads, however, the price of free.

Usage: Handing over the 'reigns'

Stumbling over the "rein/reign" usage difference is common as in this sentence this morning from Mediabistro's All Twitter in a story about Twitter co-founder Biz Stone leaving the company:

Now, it seems, Stone is ready to hand over the reigns and begin working on other projects.

It should be hand over the reins, not reigns. It flows from the same idea as "free rein," and "rein in," not "reign."

Whenever you come across these, remember, they all come from the days when horses were common and reins were the leather straps you used to control them: You reined in the horse (or gave it free rein), handed over the reins, etc.

Nothing to do with royalty here, unless you tend to equate royalty with the working end of a horse ...

Three things on English you should read

 This replaces an earlier blog post that for some reason did not get published with the Gerald Grow material at the end.

Three successive blog posts by John McIntyre, "resident drudge" (formal title "night content production manager" - gotta love corp-speak) at the Baltimore Sun and longtime friend through the American Copy Editors Society.



First is his "I almost give up" monologue on trying to teach lay vs. lie. Indeed, this one, by the end of the decade, will probably be in the dead-distinction bin.



Second is his excellent essay that again tackles the gulf between descriptivists and prescriptivists, built around his reading of Robert Lane Greene's You Are What You Speak.* Makes me want to get the book and tell the rest of the world to go away while I devour it.

Mr. Greene would have you think of language not a box, with sharp borders and clearly defined “correct” rules inside, but as a cloud, fluid, shifting, and unavoidably messy. Rather like reality.

In my case, abandoning hard-shell prescriptivism has been liberating. No longer responsible for regulating other people’s speech and signage, I can be a snob about things that don’t really matter much (bourbon and martinis) while employing prescriptivism where it is legitimate, in editing. Editors uphold the (admittedly arbitrary) standards of their publications, making judgments on the basis of subject, context, and audience rather than an inflexible set of Rules, and respecting the variety and originality of the language.

Finally, there is his excellent commentary on that long decried subject - teaching of high school English - built on a Salon article by Kim Brooks, Death to high school English.

I have no particular advice to give to high school English teachers, who are trapped. Save this. If you do give advice on grammar and usage, stop giving bad advice and promulgating zombie rules. If you have a student who shows promise, don’t steer her toward Strunk and White; recommend Joseph Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

If you are a student, ill-served by a defective education and ambitious to become an accomplished writer, I do have some advice.

Item: You are going to have to do this on your own. Even if you were lucky enough to have a few good teachers, you must make yourself a writer.

Item: Start reading, and stop reading crap. Identify prose stylists whose clarity and effectiveness you admire. Examine them closely. Try to imitate their diction, their syntax, their cadences, their metaphors. John McPhee’s books may impress, and the other New Yorker writers are worth attention. But find the writers who speak to you, in newspapers, magazine, books, and online.

Item: Get yourself informed about language. You need to understand the tools in your toolbox. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and other manuals will help you to achieve greater precision.

Item: Write, and revise. Writing is a craft you learn by doing the work. When you have a first draft, put it aside. Come back to it a few hours later, or better, the next day. Manage your embarrassment at how shoddy it is and get to work at tightening it, sharpening the focus, selecting more effective words.

Item: Get advice. Find an outlet other than your private journal. Blog if you have to. Better still, get paid for it. Seek responses from your readers. Find someone whose taste and judgment you trust, and ask him or her to be frank about your work. Your mother may want to frame your every scribble, but you need someone who will tell you what you need to hear to keep you from making an ass of yourself in public.

Item: Settle in for the long term. The headline on this post is one of my favorite lines from Chaucer, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The life so short, the craft so long to learn. So get at it.

There is not much more to be said, but I  also recommend an earlier article (2006 - PDF) by Gerald Grow that has an excellent review of the various forces at work in teaching English and grammar and the tug of war that this poses for journalism teachers:

By contrast, journalism in any given year is dominated by the prescriptive grammar that governs practitioners at that time — embodied in stylebooks and specific reference works. To journalism teachers, it is fine for students to develop a broad, relativistic understanding of the changing nature of

language, and for English teachers to teach this. But our students also have to master the standard grammar of the time — however arbitrary some of it may be — and many things about grammar are arbitrary.

Three things on English you should read

Three successive blog posts by John McIntyre, "resident drudge" (formal title "night content production manager" - gotta love corp-speak) at the Baltimore Sun and longtime friend through the American Copy Editors Society.

First is his "I almost give up" monologue on trying to teach lay vs. lie. Indeed, this one, by the end of the decade, will probably be in the dead-distinction bin.

Second is his excellent essay that again tackles the gulf between descriptivists and prescriptivists, built around his reading of Robert Lane Greene's You Are What You Speak.* Makes me want to get the book and tell the rest of the world to go away while I devour it.

Mr. Greene would have you think of language not a box, with sharp borders and clearly defined “correct” rules inside, but as a cloud, fluid, shifting, and unavoidably messy. Rather like reality.
In my case, abandoning hard-shell prescriptivism has been liberating. No longer responsible for regulating other people’s speech and signage, I can be a snob about things that don’t really matter much (bourbon and martinis) while employing prescriptivism where it is legitimate, in editing. Editors uphold the (admittedly arbitrary) standards of their publications, making judgments on the basis of subject, context, and audience rather than an inflexible set of Rules, and respecting the variety and originality of the language.

Finally, there is his excellent commentary on that long decried subject - teaching of high school English - built on a Salon article by Kim Brooks, Death to high school English.

I have no particular advice to give to high school English teachers, who are trapped. Save this. If you do give advice on grammar and usage, stop giving bad advice and promulgating zombie rules. If you have a student who shows promise, don’t steer her toward Strunk and White; recommend Joseph Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
If you are a student, ill-served by a defective education and ambitious to become an accomplished writer, I do have some advice.
Item: You are going to have to do this on your own. Even if you were lucky enough to have a few good teachers, you must make yourself a writer.
Item: Start reading, and stop reading crap. Identify prose stylists whose clarity and effectiveness you admire. Examine them closely. Try to imitate their diction, their syntax, their cadences, their metaphors. John McPhee’s books may impress, and the other New Yorker writers are worth attention. But find the writers who speak to you, in newspapers, magazine, books, and online.
Item: Get yourself informed about language. You need to understand the tools in your toolbox. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and other manuals will help you to achieve greater precision.
Item: Write, and revise. Writing is a craft you learn by doing the work. When you have a first draft, put it aside. Come back to it a few hours later, or better, the next day. Manage your embarrassment at how shoddy it is and get to work at tightening it, sharpening the focus, selecting more effective words.
Item: Get advice. Find an outlet other than your private journal. Blog if you have to. Better still, get paid for it. Seek responses from your readers. Find someone whose taste and judgment you trust, and ask him or her to be frank about your work. Your mother may want to frame your every scribble, but you need someone who will tell you what you need to hear to keep you from making an ass of yourself in public.
Item: Settle in for the long term. The headline on this post is one of my favorite lines from Chaucer, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The life so short, the craft so long to learn. So get at it.

There is not much more to be said.

AP Style - one you safely should ignore

AP is out with some new style updates, and there's one you can safely ignore, if you choose to:

flood plain - two words

But that easily gets flooded out by "floodplain" as one word. While the Random House Dictionary at Dictionary.com shows it as two words, even the two other references cited there show it as one. Merriam-Webster shows it as one, American Heritage (through Yahoo) shows it as preferably one, and the New Oxford on my Mac also shows it as one.

Webster's New World 4, the dictionary tied to the AP Stylebook, shows it as two words, with the single word alternative, but I increasingly find WNW4 falling out of step with common usage and increasingly turn to American Heritage, which steers a more moderate path between the conservative WNW4 and the liberal M-W. (For example, look up gauntlet and gantlet in the "big three." AHD is probably right in its reasoning that usage has shifted to gauntlet, as in run the gauntlet, even though I grimace.)

Most federal and state agencies I can find use it as one word.

And, while not definitive, a Google search for the two-word version, returns 2 million (with some overlap from reference works showing "floodplain" as first choice but the two words as second), while the one word version returns 20 million.

This is one I won't be insisting students learn.

Some other style updates:

• hand-washing (prediction, the hyphen form goes away quixkly
• "don't ask, don't tell" - settling the various uppercase/lowercase, quote/no-quote versions out there. However, I think after you use the quotes once in a story, you should be able to safely drop them on subsequent use. Otherwise, it can start looking like you're being snarky.
• check-in as noun and adjective, but checkout
  

And useful reminders that:

• The preferred term is dwarf because some people find midget offensive
• Iran is not an Arab country

AP Style - bedbug

For those of you keeping score at home, AP has now decreed "bedbug" as one word to be the style.

There had been a bit of a scuffle over this, as Michael Quinion discussed recently in World Wide Words, with some folks taking the etomological position that since these were true "bugs," it should be a two-word name.

But as Quinion observed:

The rule about inserting spaces in insect common names seems to be a modern creation, an informal way of using the spelling of these names as an aide memoire to distinguish Diptera or Hemiptera species from other little beasties. It’s highly unlikely ever to affect the usual spelling of bedbug, since the tendency in modern English is to amalgamate multi-word terms into single words, not split them apart. The spelling has long since become standard for everybody except professional entomologists.

Spell check on Aisle 3

Of course, this would have gotten through spell check anyhow.

I'm betting she was unfazed. It's bad enough to make this mistake in copy. In a headline? Indefensible.

Must have been a bad day on the desk.

Minor annoyances from the retail world

As seen on a Kmart receipt:

Any purchase payed for by check has a 10 day grace period.

Is there a copy editor in the house? And while they're making that "paid," maybe they can grab a hypen and make it "10-day."

---

So when the Kroger gas pump fails to spit out a receipt and tells you to see the attendant, why is it that if you have paid by credit card, the card number does not show on the duplicate receipt? It's on the one at the pump.

So if you have multiple cards, you have to remember which one you used, or you have to fumble for a pen and write it down on the duplicate receipt (which you probably wouldn't have needed to get anyway had the attendant put new paper in the pump printer). C'mon Kroger, show some smarts and concern for your customers here. How hard can this be?

As seen in the paper ...

From our campus daily newspaper on a column telling braggers to learn humility:

"Those who advertize accomplishments appear conceited, alienate peers"

Well, no need to worry about that if you're "advertizing" things. If you were advertising them, on the other hand ...

AP Style - it will be "website" and spell out state names

Update, 4/23/2014: AP now reinstitutes the spell out state names style.
 
Update 4/16/2010: AP confirms website, but holds off on state names. See details.
 
AP is set to make some major changes in the upcoming stylebook. One of the most heatedly debated over the years is the spelling of "Web site" (AP) or "website" (as much of the online community does).

I've now been told that as of May 15, AP will switch to "website." It's one of the changes we'll hear more about today at the ACES 2010 conference in Philadelphia when AP editors Darrell Christian and David Minthorn appear. Still to be seen is whether AP adopts "email."

It hasn't been overly publicized, but for some time AP has been soliciting suggestions for changes it should make vis a vis social media in the upcoming stylebook, which usually comes out in May or early June. Conforming to "website" seems by far to be the biggest suggestion/gripe.

I don't know that the Web site/website change has gotten much attention, but another change coming May 15 has gotten some discussion. AP will start spelling out all state names. It also will start using "Canada" instead of the province, after Canadian cities.

It's a case where the demands of the digital age are overtaking the previous demands for brevity. In other words, when people search they are more likely to search for the full name than the arcane AP abbreviation (or they might search for the postal abbreviation). And since most media is now global media, the thought is that people overseas will know California better than Calif. But one commenter questions this, observing: "This strikes me as a lot of churn that will not generate a net gain in clarity and explicitness that perhaps the AP is hoping for.  And applying state names only to the US certainly isn’t going to improve consistency."


Of just as much interest to me is how many publications will follow AP.  On one hand, there remains a stubborn individuality. But on the other is the push toward editing hubs and standardization. (In an ACES session I participated in Thursday, some recent grads said we need to teach more about working in such hubs, and they complained about how many papers being brought into those hubs were resisting standardization of some basic style points, such as how to refer to colleges and universities (UVA vs. Virginia, for example).)

The adoption rate is of some interest to those of us who teach the craft, since our students' future employers still seem to express some interest in their knowing style. Question these days is, whose and what style?

Some other suggestions for AP:
- change "work force" to "workforce" as many publications have. Update Feb 2012: Since this post draws so many results in Google, please note that AP has now updated to one word.
- give up "under way" and follow the lead of publications such as the Washington Post and use "underway."
- Simplify the maddening number style so that figures are used only when there is a dollar sign or similar symbol ($3 million), for a fraction greater than one (he had 9 1/2 bottles of milk), or in things like recipes. Otherwise, spell out from one through nine: he's six feet tall, three million miles, etc.

Finally, create an advisory panel to discuss such things so you get more reaction as to how it will affect members' operations. And this should be done through ACES because copy editors are your natural stakeholders, not as an offshoot of APME.

Do you eat it, or shoot it?

Spotted in a restaurant ad in our local "Zipsheet":

Toppings:
Hummas ($1.00)

You know, that famous terrorist group seeking to free the chickpea and establish the Republic of Garbanzo ...

I say weblog, you say ...

To celebrate his first anniversary of "Notes from the Copy Editor," Dan Holbrook reminds us that "blog" comes from "weblog," not "Web log." (More from Jason Kottke's 2003 post that he links to.)

I've been guilty of that in the days when AP enforced a style on it. Of course, now it's not even in the AP stylebook anymore -- a reminder of how quickly things change. "Blog" isn't even in AP anymore either -- basically it's a nonissue. And to think that just four years ago there was all this hootin' and hollerin' about whether them blog things was even legit. ...