I can't keep up with spaces rules [which sounds almost like specious rules] nor with the whole s' or 's. I refuse to type Moses's Jesus's--it offends my eyes, whatever CMOS thinks. The good thing is that I'm retired, so it matters less, though one of my writing partners does try to explain the possessive stuff. I'm glad you're writing this substack. J.D. Vance makes me think of a huckster, Elmer Gantry perhaps. Vance, Vann's, vantz...
Last year I learned that there is a population in (at least) the Belgrade Lakes region of Maine that calls themselves Phoebe. Presumably because their small and somewhat limited vocal tract can’t pronounce “Sayornis”. We always call them back by their preferred name when they call it out from the trees.
Oh, B.D., how I adore your writing and especially your wordplay: right out of the gate, “copyeditorial trade” the first nugget among many. Your treatise on how we treat initials in personal names, and exceptions to those norms, brought to mind two further points.
From CMOS 10.12:
If an entire name is abbreviated, spaces and periods can usually be omitted.
FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
MJ (Michael Jordan)
JLo (Jennifer Lopez)
[Also: JFK, MLK]
On the technical side, thoughtful editors and compositors will insert a non-breaking space between spaced initials as well as initials and surname, to avoid unfortunate line breaks.
Give us all of it! I don’t share your love of old movies and Broadway musicals, so I scan-read those bits. Other readers may glaze over when faced with a discourse about periods and spacing and why they *matter*. For those of us who crave more, you employ footnotes to great effect.
I'm a fan of non-breaking spaces for just this reason but when I suggest them to my students all but maybe one or two of them look at me like I'm crazy.
Just by the bye, and I'm saying this down here for your benefit and for the benefit of anyone else who's already read this piece in its original incarnation: I've just learned that though "nom de plume" of course looks like French, it's not actually French, and I've adjusted the text accordingly.
Most laypeople have no idea about the nuances of typesetting and line breaking. That only comes with a grounding in some form of traditional publishing. In digital and epub, line breaks are pretty much irrelevant because of different displays.
I, on the other hand, came up in the before times, and whether I’m working in QuarkXPress, InDesign, or even Word docs that get flowed into InDesign, I insert the appropriate special characters wherever they’re needed.
I’m about to copy-edit some medical content with all sorts of numbers and metric units, mathematical operators in statistics, word spaces as separators in 10 000s and up, and two-word abbreviations that need to be kept together. I relish whipping through the files with global searches to ensure that no number or abbreviation gets orphaned.
Oh, same. Legal citation uses lot of section symbols and pilcrows and I believe these should never be the last thing on a line of text. So it's very satisfying to do a find and replace that ensures they are not.
The final shot of All About Eve is among my favorite shots in any movie ever. (I often like to speculate: to whom did Margo give the Eve Harrington treatment on her way up? And what do we think she was called before she invented "Margo Channing"? And what of Birdie?)
I've never thought of Margo's climb to fame, and now that I'm thinking of it, perhaps I'd like to believe that she did it without stabbing anyone in the back. (If she had so stabbed, wouldn't someone at some point at least insinuate it, particularly Addison?) And yes, the eternal question "What of Birdie?" Perhaps Eve murdered her and forged a note suggesting that she, Birdie, had gone on an extended vacation. Or perhaps she's simply hanging out somewhere with Lear's Fool.
Good point about Addison. I take the endless duplication of Phoebe in the final shot to suggest it's all been done a million times before (and will be done a million more times), which could be seen as an invitation to wonder about Margo's rise.
There are, to be sure, any number of stories about musical theater performers—usually actresses, even ones we love a lot—clipping the wings of upstart ingenues by having their songs cut, or actually appropriating them for their leading-lady selves. Jacqueline Susann wasn't just making stuff up.
Oh, I’ve long thought that the hidden villain of the piece (to the extent it’s not Karen Richards) may be the deceptively benign old lady—played, of course, by the immortal Miss Bess Flowers—who coos “I’m so happy for you, Eve” at the end of the Sarah Siddons banquet.
She may be the wife of the Agéd Actor, but to me she is in her own right a onetime Siddons awardee whose career was sidelined by someone only recently named Margo Channing. I fantasize that she somehow happened upon Gertrude Slescynski (perhaps she volunteers for Travelers Aid) and set the whole thing in motion.
Just by the way, for those of you nosing around down here in the comments, did you know that if you commit wee typos and are obsessive about it, like some people I might name, you can clean them up post-posting by tapping on those three dots just to your right? (Or such is my experience.)
According to Addison, Margot has been a star since she was a child and played a fairy in a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. However, Margot says she had to work behind a notions counter rather than go to Radcliffe.
"Because, of course, one respects how people wish to be known, from their multiple aliases to their preferences re initials to their, oh, say, pronouns, doesn’t one."
Yet another example of why I'm so happy to support you on Substack.
There is indeed a story. When we adopted her, her name was Callie, short for, apparently, Calliope. Well, that just wasn't going to do. Apparently if you're renaming a dog that has some notion of its own name, you're supposed to use something that sounds similar. So Sallie it very easily was. (Also, apparently the best names for all dogs are two syllables, one of them long. I guess they recognize those sounds as meaning their name...?) And thank you, yes, she's an angel. She's seven and a half, if you were wondering.
Totally inadvertent! (Which is to say: I don't know what word I used that qualifies as a hint.) The only thing I know about today's Spelling Bee is that it rejected "hoyden," and everyone is pissed off.
P.S. Aha, now I know what it is. (I looked up today's Bee answers; I almost never play anymore.) Completely inadvertent. And had I been playing the Bee today, I bet I wouldn't have thought to play even the acceptable version of the word in question.
I briefly, as a young man, attended school with a fellow who went by the name B. J., as his first and middle names were "Billy Joel." It was sensible, as his father was an associate of the estimable Mr. Joel's, but still.
(by "young," I mean this was first and second grade)
Unrelated to punctuation, but: My Bluesky pal Glenn Fleishman informs us that Vance (vantz) means “bedbug” in Yiddish.
It does indeed. Often rendered as "vontz," but the point remains.
I giggled.
👍🏻
I can't keep up with spaces rules [which sounds almost like specious rules] nor with the whole s' or 's. I refuse to type Moses's Jesus's--it offends my eyes, whatever CMOS thinks. The good thing is that I'm retired, so it matters less, though one of my writing partners does try to explain the possessive stuff. I'm glad you're writing this substack. J.D. Vance makes me think of a huckster, Elmer Gantry perhaps. Vance, Vann's, vantz...
Last year I learned that there is a population in (at least) the Belgrade Lakes region of Maine that calls themselves Phoebe. Presumably because their small and somewhat limited vocal tract can’t pronounce “Sayornis”. We always call them back by their preferred name when they call it out from the trees.
Birds. Whaddya gonna do.
Oh, B.D., how I adore your writing and especially your wordplay: right out of the gate, “copyeditorial trade” the first nugget among many. Your treatise on how we treat initials in personal names, and exceptions to those norms, brought to mind two further points.
From CMOS 10.12:
If an entire name is abbreviated, spaces and periods can usually be omitted.
FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
MJ (Michael Jordan)
JLo (Jennifer Lopez)
[Also: JFK, MLK]
On the technical side, thoughtful editors and compositors will insert a non-breaking space between spaced initials as well as initials and surname, to avoid unfortunate line breaks.
Oh, thank you, Pamela. There was indeed a lot more rabbit holing I might have dived or even dove down, but one doesn’t want to wear out one’s welcome.
But, again, thank you for being such a kindly attentive reader and thoughtful correspondent. I appreciate it!
Give us all of it! I don’t share your love of old movies and Broadway musicals, so I scan-read those bits. Other readers may glaze over when faced with a discourse about periods and spacing and why they *matter*. For those of us who crave more, you employ footnotes to great effect.
I'm a fan of non-breaking spaces for just this reason but when I suggest them to my students all but maybe one or two of them look at me like I'm crazy.
Which presumably you are not.
I think I'm not, but my therapist, my students, and above all my exes may hold a different opinion.
Just by the bye, and I'm saying this down here for your benefit and for the benefit of anyone else who's already read this piece in its original incarnation: I've just learned that though "nom de plume" of course looks like French, it's not actually French, and I've adjusted the text accordingly.
Another nugget: “domesticated into English,” much more interesting than “anglicized”!
Oh, thank you (again). It's fun to have fun. Much more fun than not having fun.
Most laypeople have no idea about the nuances of typesetting and line breaking. That only comes with a grounding in some form of traditional publishing. In digital and epub, line breaks are pretty much irrelevant because of different displays.
I, on the other hand, came up in the before times, and whether I’m working in QuarkXPress, InDesign, or even Word docs that get flowed into InDesign, I insert the appropriate special characters wherever they’re needed.
I’m about to copy-edit some medical content with all sorts of numbers and metric units, mathematical operators in statistics, word spaces as separators in 10 000s and up, and two-word abbreviations that need to be kept together. I relish whipping through the files with global searches to ensure that no number or abbreviation gets orphaned.
Oh, same. Legal citation uses lot of section symbols and pilcrows and I believe these should never be the last thing on a line of text. So it's very satisfying to do a find and replace that ensures they are not.
The final shot of All About Eve is among my favorite shots in any movie ever. (I often like to speculate: to whom did Margo give the Eve Harrington treatment on her way up? And what do we think she was called before she invented "Margo Channing"? And what of Birdie?)
I've never thought of Margo's climb to fame, and now that I'm thinking of it, perhaps I'd like to believe that she did it without stabbing anyone in the back. (If she had so stabbed, wouldn't someone at some point at least insinuate it, particularly Addison?) And yes, the eternal question "What of Birdie?" Perhaps Eve murdered her and forged a note suggesting that she, Birdie, had gone on an extended vacation. Or perhaps she's simply hanging out somewhere with Lear's Fool.
Good point about Addison. I take the endless duplication of Phoebe in the final shot to suggest it's all been done a million times before (and will be done a million more times), which could be seen as an invitation to wonder about Margo's rise.
There are, to be sure, any number of stories about musical theater performers—usually actresses, even ones we love a lot—clipping the wings of upstart ingenues by having their songs cut, or actually appropriating them for their leading-lady selves. Jacqueline Susann wasn't just making stuff up.
Birdie didn't get to close the first half for eleven years by letting up-and-coming nobodies have the good songs.
Oh, I’ve long thought that the hidden villain of the piece (to the extent it’s not Karen Richards) may be the deceptively benign old lady—played, of course, by the immortal Miss Bess Flowers—who coos “I’m so happy for you, Eve” at the end of the Sarah Siddons banquet.
She may be the wife of the Agéd Actor, but to me she is in her own right a onetime Siddons awardee whose career was sidelined by someone only recently named Margo Channing. I fantasize that she somehow happened upon Gertrude Slescynski (perhaps she volunteers for Travelers Aid) and set the whole thing in motion.
I smell prequel.
Just by the way, for those of you nosing around down here in the comments, did you know that if you commit wee typos and are obsessive about it, like some people I might name, you can clean them up post-posting by tapping on those three dots just to your right? (Or such is my experience.)
You can fix your own typos, that is. Not mine. And I can't fix yours either.
I have been editing my typos here all day.
According to Addison, Margot has been a star since she was a child and played a fairy in a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. However, Margot says she had to work behind a notions counter rather than go to Radcliffe.
"Because, of course, one respects how people wish to be known, from their multiple aliases to their preferences re initials to their, oh, say, pronouns, doesn’t one."
Yet another example of why I'm so happy to support you on Substack.
Thank you. I’m always happy to have the opportunity to make and remake that particular point, and I like to try to do it without a sledgehammer.
Though…
Never mind.
Giggling ❤️
Is there a story behind Sallie's name and its spelling? Regardless, she is lovey-dovey.
There is indeed a story. When we adopted her, her name was Callie, short for, apparently, Calliope. Well, that just wasn't going to do. Apparently if you're renaming a dog that has some notion of its own name, you're supposed to use something that sounds similar. So Sallie it very easily was. (Also, apparently the best names for all dogs are two syllables, one of them long. I guess they recognize those sounds as meaning their name...?) And thank you, yes, she's an angel. She's seven and a half, if you were wondering.
"As always, context and good judgment should prevail over absolute uniformity."
Thank you. Nothing I enjoy more than a little authorised wiggle room.
And thank you for the (inadvertent?) Spelling Bee hint—even if it wouldn’t accept the past tense version of the word you used.
Totally inadvertent! (Which is to say: I don't know what word I used that qualifies as a hint.) The only thing I know about today's Spelling Bee is that it rejected "hoyden," and everyone is pissed off.
P.S. Aha, now I know what it is. (I looked up today's Bee answers; I almost never play anymore.) Completely inadvertent. And had I been playing the Bee today, I bet I wouldn't have thought to play even the acceptable version of the word in question.
I briefly, as a young man, attended school with a fellow who went by the name B. J., as his first and middle names were "Billy Joel." It was sensible, as his father was an associate of the estimable Mr. Joel's, but still.
(by "young," I mean this was first and second grade)
Not the point of your excellent piece, but goodness gracious, that evening cape of Eve’s that Phoebe puts on is GORE JUS.
Oh, it's an amazing garment.
And, who knows, perhaps I wrote the whole piece just to post that photo?
Sad to learn that all four of my Kentucky grandparents share their names with JD’s. Mamaws and Papaws, all. (Yes, I read the footnote.)
I’m sure they wear it well.
CHRISTMAS!!
Ha ha ha! Yes!
Eloquent. Thank you.