To the editors:
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The Style Book is a compilation nobody outside the newspaper building ever sees. It would be easier to lay hands on the first edition of the Index Expurgatorius. On the sole occasion I heard an editor refer to it he did so with the reverence a junior commissar would have given to Mikhail Suslov over a knotty point in Marxist theology. And its star interpreters are the Adverb Man and the Brackets Woman.
There is, I have good reason to believe, more than one journalist who chases these crackpot rubricians down to the loading bays the moment they lay their itching hands on any piece of civilized English he or she happens to have written. But such rebels are in the minority, and it curiously is the case that they aren’t getting any support from James J. Kilpatrick, William Safire, or other oracles whose targets don’t normally include the semantic antics of Style Book contributors. (Possibly because they have to defer to a Style Book themselves.)
Then, too, there is the hunk of doggerel described as a poem, the shepherd who becomes a sheepherder, the Hindu an East Indian, and the scatterbrained ten-year-old schoolgirl a student. As for the political campaign called a race, if these tedious longueurs are races, what has A.J. Foyt been doing all these years?
And here is Princess Di caught speeding. May I be struck dead this minute, but here’s how it came out. “The [officer] followed the car, which entered Kensington Palace, and [gave] a verbal warning.”
