Last week as I was adding to the chorus endorsing singular they, a reader commented on Facebook: "I'm still trying to get over the 'over/more than' issue. I was floored when the editors changed that. No way I can get on board with a 'singular they.' I'm old school on both."
The editors of the Associated Press Stylebook dropped the unfounded over/more than distinction a year ago. That editors are still whining about it invites speculation on the psychology of the copy editor.
The over/more than "rule" is a superstition, a belief rising from ignorance.* The distinction was invented by a newspaper editor for newspapers, and common use so thoroughly ignores it that even the AP Stylebook editors had to acknowledge reality. It is also a shibboleth, a marker identifying a copy editor's professionalism.
But the intensity of the reaction to the stylebook change suggests something more powerful than a superstition or a shibboleth: a fetish.
For the purposes of this post, we'll ignore the sexual sense of the term; nothing in the AP Stylebook leads to arousal. But fetish, in Merriam-Webster's sense of "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion," as a component of the cult of copy editing, helps us to zero in on the emotional intensity.
But first, those of you who are civilians should understand that for many years copy editors were accustomed to be the butt of scorn from writers and reporters, dismissed as comma jockeys obsessing over details too trivial to trouble colleagues of the higher caste. Standing up to this attitude was one reason for the formation of the American Copy Editors Society in 1997. (Merv Aubespin of the Louisville Courier-Journal, the "godfather" of ACES, once remarked that though he had never worked as a copy editor, he supported copy editors out of his "sympathy for oppressed peoples everywhere.")
The details of spelling, punctuation, grammar, usage, and AP style being our portion—at some publications copy editors were forbidden to raise substantive questions (!)—we made them our passion. Mastery of stylebook arcana elevated us from apprentice to journeyman, and participation in hairsplitting debates over grammar and style became the badge of the master craftsman.
When this concern for detail becomes a central component of one's professional identity, the impulse to fetishize stylebook rules grows strong, blurring the ability to distinguish what is important from what is not. And failure to respect a fetish takes on the dimensions of a personal attack.
So imagine that you, a copy editor, have been dutifully changing over to more than for years—decades—and the AP Stylebook editors announce that what you have been doing is pointless. Your entire career could be a waste of time, your claim to professional expertise an illusion. If over/more than can go, anything can go. Everything can go. One tiny breach in the dike, and the next thing you know, all Holland is underwater.
I understand the psychology of copy editor fetishism from the inside, because, I, too, am old school: teacher's pet, insufferable adolescent prig, graduate-school pedant, and three-plus-decade copy editor. It is a hard lesson to discover that one's fetishes are merely personal preferences, many of them on shaky foundations.
But being an effective editor, establishing clarity and precision instead of mechanically applying rules, some of them imaginary, means examining authorities, examining evidence, examining oneself.
*Will Rogers: "It ain't what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that ain't so."