[originally published June 9, 2024]
AGNES: Apologize! To her? To Claire? I have spent my adult life apologizing for her; I will not double my humiliation by apologizing to her.
TOBIAS (mocking an epigram): One does not apologize to those for whom one must?
AGNES (winking slowly): Neat.
TOBIAS: Succinct, but one of the rules of an aphorism . . .
AGNES: An epigram, I thought.
TOBIAS (small smile): An epigram is usually satiric, and you . . .
AGNES: . . . and I am grimly serious. Yes?
TOBIAS: I fear so.—Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance
Don’t mind me. I’m simply depositing a few recent copyeditorial observations here so that I don’t lose track of them.
(You’re welcome to read and heed them, though.)
“The fact that” can often be clipped to “that,” but if you find that your sentence doesn’t work thus clipped, or if you’ve spent more than 37 seconds trying to figure out how to otherwise rework the sentence and it won’t (re)work, leave the “the fact that” in place and move on.
P.S. Some people find a sentence beginning, for instance, “That you feel this way” rather than “The fact that you feel this way” brusque and/or pretentious. I don’t know that I agree, but I suppose it’s something to be borne in mind.
Not every “whether or not” can be trimmed, as some folk insist, to “whether,” and “whether or not” is not inherently redundant.
“Whether or not you like musical theater, I think you’ll enjoy this production of Company.”
So there.
self-conscious
unselfconscious
🤷🏻♂️
One more time:
He is fourteen years old.
He is a fourteen-year-old boy.
He is a fourteen-year-old.
He is interested in fourteen-year-old-boy things.
Improbable amounts should be expressed in, as with emojis, odd numbers, and preferably without repetition of digits.
“I’ve watched this movie 873 times” means “I’ve watched this movie a lot.”
“I’ve watched this movie 44 times” means “I’ve watched this movie 44 times.”
Even the best writers will attempt, every now and then, “She thought to herself.”
Be a better best writer.
beside = next to (sit beside me)
besides = other than (I might have played four words on line 5 of today’s Wordle besides the one I played)
People sometimes hesitate to use “besides,” thinking it’s a downmarket error (like “anyways”). It's not.
If you have a great insight, are you onto something or on to something?
I think that the latter is nicer.
Speaking of “latter,” I was once told by someone in a position to know that a certain great metropolitan newspaper discourages the use of “former” and “latter,” believing that they confuse readers.
That gave me a sad.
If what you mean is “I can’t overstate the importance of,” be careful not to write “I can’t understate the importance of.”
And vicey versey.
The wise copy editor, encountering “chaise lounge” in a manuscript, comments something like:
“The traditional (French-derived) construction would be chaise longue, but many (most?) Americans would say, as you’ve said, chaise lounge.”
Don’t judge.
Inform.
Let the writer decide.
For those of you who, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, enjoy pictures and conversations, here’s a helpful Google Ngram readout of the progress of “chaise lounge” in the United States, displaying its distinct “They’re coming to get you, Barbara” energy:
Meanwhile, over on the east side of the Atlantic, the threat is distinctly less acute:
And if you’re writing or copyediting a novel set, say, on the North Shore of Long Island in the late 1960s, odds are extremely good that what’s intended, meant, and appropriate is “chaise lounge.” Trust me on this.
T-shirt, please, rather than t-shirt, unless, I suppose, there’s a beheaded neck sticking out of the top.
Yes, it’s call a T-shirt because it’s shaped like a T. You know that.
Tee, if you must. (Must you?)
It’s become virtually impossible in our VR world to use the word “virtually” to mean “nearly,” I think.
The sight of the phrase “grassy knoll” in a manuscript not concerned with Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 still raises my eyebrows, but I’m increasingly An Old. Sometimes, I suppose, a grassy knoll is just a cigar.
“I tend to visualize the action of novels, and hear it.”
This is an example of what my beloved Edmund Morris always referred to as a “luftpause comma,” a midpredicate comma that is not at all grammatically called for and yet does a little something.
Such commas should be used wisely and sparingly. (Even Edmund, one of the most appropriately self-confident writers I’ve ever known, could be persuaded that he’d gone to the well once too often.)
Edmund’s Theodore Roosevelt trilogy is a widely appreciated marvel. His final book, Edison, is perhaps less known, and I think it’s enthralling. Also, it runs backward, like Merrily We Roll Along.
Sentences beginning “Guess what” are not questions, and thus don’t end with question marks.
Ditto sentences beginning “I wonder.”
If you’re talking about the protesting laborers of the early nineteenth century, cap it: Luddite.
If you’re talking about someone nowadays who doesn’t like newfangled gadgets, lowercase it: luddite.
The word “newfangled” doesn’t require a hyphen.
See also “highfalutin,” which requires neither hyphen nor concluding apostrophe.
She is a registered nurse, but an RN.
Pronunciation doesn’t always dictate orthography, but sometimes it does.
“RN” may stand for “registered nurse,” but it isn’t “registered nurse.” It’s “RN.” If you want to write out “registered nurse,” you have to actually write it out.
If you love something vigorously, you love it no end. To love something “to no end” would be to love it pointlessly, and if that’s indeed what you mean, go for it. And I’m sorry.
I fervently believe that the kids are all right.
I’ve become increasingly comfortable with “alright” in the sense of “Alright already, I’ll be down in a second, hold your freakin’ horses,” but that’s as far as I’ll go.
I’ve occasionally been heard to say that people who go red, purple, and blue in the face over “I could care less” simply don’t like the way Jews talk.
But of course I’m only joking.1
Writers: You can’t control how people read your writing. You can’t even guarantee that they’ll read it even as they’re reading it.
The bit of Albee text up top is, I just realized, an epigraph about epigrams.
I’m not joking.
Luftpause comma. My friend, I am relieved to have a name for you other than an exasperated “but, I need you there!”
Oy. This Jew won’t turn colors, but it makes me cringe. My grandmother might have added, “Cringing, she was!”