The cowardice of the manager

Steve Buttry has been posting a series of articles at The Buttry Diary offering advice to top editors. All are instructive, but the latest, on dealing firmly with staff problems, is particularly valuable. If you are a manager at any level, you would do well to examine how he lays out various situations and how he suggests dealing with them.

Picking and choosing

I have in hand an appeal on Twitter from @TheBaltimoreChop: "if you could do a column on 'has been named' vs. 'has been hired as' I'd RT that every day for a week. Pretty please?"

Generals at the brink of disaster

Some people read military history for the technical details--why General X failed to match Hanibal's pincer movement at Cannae. Others, like me, dip into it to see how individuals and societies respond to circumstances of immense stress.

In a word: ersatz

Joke of the week: "Circulation of the Blood"

Gang a-gley

The plan was simple: Kathleen and I would drive to Canuga, the Episcopal summer camp in western North Carolina, where for a week she would conduct workshops on  Godly Play storytelling and I would listen to people talk theology and liturgy or read through a stack of books.

What sort of person reads "You Don't Say"?

Having commented repeatedly on the literacy and exclusivity of the audience for this blog, I'd like to turn today to some particulars. Assuming, I think reasonably, that people who follow me as @johnemcintyre on Twitter are also likely readers of this blog, I present some recent followers and their self-descriptions.

The essence of editing

Wrapping it up in a single sentence, Alexander McCall Smith writes in The Right Attitude to Rain, his third novel about journal editor and philosopher Isabel Dalhousie:

Editing as a portable skill

Loyola University Maryland has sent me the student evaluations from the semester just past, and there it is again, the sentence that has cropped up in more or less the same form over thirty-five semesters: "I have learned more from this class than any other class I have taken at Loyola."

Joke of the week: "Ole and Lela's Honeymoon"

An undisclosed location

For the next week and a little more the lights will be out at Wordville as the mayor takes a little time off, to sit on his ass and read books, mark the setting of the sun with the benison of bourbon, and maybe even try one more time to like Henry James.

Days of our guiding light

The 2013 edition of the Associated Press Stylebook arrived in the mail yesterday, the sixtieth consecutive annual publication of the stylebook, and frankly, I am at a loss to understand its appeal. 

The more things change

Commenting on yesterday's post, "Letting down the side," our naturalized Wordvillean Picky had this to say about my remark that the shall/will distinction I was taught in elementary school has largely vanished from American English:

Letting down the side

Last week, when I suggested that the career/careen distinction is, for practical purposes, extinct in American English, Stephen Busemeyer wrote this response:

In a word: plebiscite

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

Joke of the week: "Tea for Two"

Moving fast, tilting over

A page proof came back to me last night with this sentence marked: "A freight train smacked into a truck carrying garbage and careened off the tracks in Rosedale Tuesday afternoon, triggering an explosion felt throughout the region and sending up a plume of black smoke visible for miles." The suggestion was to change careened to careered. 

In a word: obsequies

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

Joke of the week: "The Plaque on the Wall"

Preposition nonsense

On the Internet, that storehouse of dubious advice, you can still find statements about grammar and usage like this one: "One is still officially supposed to avoid ending sentences with prepositions. In most cases, this is not hard to do: 'Who are you going with?' becomes 'With whom are you going?' Or, 'I was making cake and decided to put chocolate chips in' becomes 'I was making cake and decided to add chocolate chips.' "

One size does not fit all

On Facebook, Peter K. Fallon responded to my guest post on dictionary fundamentalism at Merriam-Webster's A Thing About Words with this comment:

You want prescriptivism, I'll give you prescriptivism

At HeadsUp Fred Vultee writes, more in sorrow than in anger, that the Detroit Free Press not only allowed an "It's official" lead to run but repeated it in the headline. Somewhere in Michigan an editor knows no shame.

Peeving about peevers

I saw a remark the other day that the folks at Language Log are given to peeving about peevers, and it occurred to me afresh how much misunderstanding remains among evidently educated people about what linguists are up to when they expose bogus prescriptivism and peevery.

In a word: "blandishment"

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

Joke of the week: "The Honest Lawyer"

A short guide to online discourse

In disputing an article, follow these simple steps: 

The most famous umbrella since Neville Chamberlain went to Munich

The public appetite for trivial distraction has always extended to our chief executives.

Godspeed to a graduate

As I write, members of the Class of 2013 at Loyola University Maryland are receiving their diplomas, and I would like to mention one of them.