Item: In case you had not heard, registration is open for the nineteenth annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society, scheduled for March 26-28, 2015, in Pittsburgh.
Item: But wait—there’s more. The Editors’ Association of Canada is conducting its first international conference of editors in Toronto on June 12-14.
The program has not been announced, but a preliminary list of speakers has been posted at the EAC website, among them [cough] me.*
Item: Word of the Year hoopla is kicking off today with the announcement of Oxford Dictionary’s choice. To be among the first to know, look at the OxfordWords blog at 7:01 p.m. Eastern. But pace yourself. The American Dialect Society, Merriam-Webster, and the Global Language Monitor are yet to weigh in.
Item: For the last time the traditional Christmas greetings are hanging above the copy desk of The Cincinnati Enquirer: a snarling Santa saying, “Merry Christmas to the copy desk … from the copy desk” and the other, a woeful Santa sporting a bandage on his nose and saying, “Punch A Friend For Christmas.” This is the last time because The Enquirer is dismantling its copy desk, where I got my start in the business in 1980. In her giddy announcement about how grand things are going to be after the paper’s reorganization, the editor, Carolyn Washburn, omits to mention that the copy editors, along with some of the paper's most experienced editors, have been left at the curb.
Item: The Very Rev. Gary Hall, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in the City and Diocese of Washington, gave me great pleasure on Friday by opening the doors of the cathedral to a Muslim prayer service, not the least because of the degree to which this has confounded all manner of bigots. If you have the stomach for the comments on the article in The Washington Post, you will be treated to fellow citizens eager to demonstrate that their lack of information about Christianity is very nearly as complete as their incomprehension of Islam.
