Possessed, suddenly, for reasons I’ll go into below, of a brand-new copy of Strunk and White’s freshman-English perennial, The Elements of Style, I creased it open and my eyes fell on this paragraph from chapter four, “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused”:
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I expected similar shenanigans from Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing, but it turned out to be a first-rate, extremely rational guide. The book begins with a trenchant look at the difference between “functional” and “dysfunctional” compulsiveness on the part of editors. Plotnik recalls one dysfunctionally compulsive colleague who spent valuable time on deadline “searching for ps with amputated descenders.” By contrast, a functionally compulsive editor will spend deadline time quadruple-checking page proofs–to catch that last 1 percent of errors–and allot “a full ten seconds” to looking over each and every typesetting code. (A single incorrect letter or number in the code can produce thousands of lines of incorrectly set copy–a costly and time-consuming mistake.) Anyone who’s spent any time in the playpens that now pass for newsrooms in many journalistic institutions will find much wisdom in this first chapter alone. The only thing that confuses me is why such a specialized book–Plotnik includes a section on libel and even an editor’s guide to photography–is being offered as a general-interest work. I suspect it was the idea of the same Collier editor who turned The Secretary’s Handbook into The Elements of Grammar.
“Transpire” has been a bugaboo for language cops for about 300 years. As Strunk and White suggest, it originally had the meaning of “leak out,” strictly in the literal sense: gas, for example, would transpire. But soon people started using it metaphorically as well: “Word of his villainy transpired.” Samuel Johnson disapproved of this usage in his dictionary in 1750; 150 years later, the Fowler brothers, in The King’s English, also disapproved of the word’s metaphorical use. But in the interim a new meaning had somehow sprung up–“transpire” for “happen” or “occur,” which is what most nonmartians take the word to mean today. “Transpire” was used in this sense, Merriam-Webster tells us, as early as 1775, in a letter from Abigail Adams to her husband, the future president. The Fowlers campaigned against it in 1906, and now here are Strunk and White fighting the same tired battle 70 years later. That’s called beating a very dead horse and selling it as prime cut to a lot of gullible freshmen.
Linguistics became and has remained a dirty word for many language cops, and to this day many of them, obviously, have a following. But the real battle ended, for all intents and purposes, with the publication of the great Merriam-Webster Third New International Dictionary in 1961. (The Third is the giant-sized unabridged displayed in most libraries.) The Merriams, led by editor Philip Gove, dispensed with most of the prescriptivist nonsense of most dictionaries and made the world safe for “descriptivism”–which maintains that dictionaries should describe how people actually speak and write and not how certain people think other people should speak and write. The publication of the Third occasioned a rather sharp reception from the old guard, but things have calmed down in the last 25 years.
We are all accustomed to taking the word of the language experts: “Oh, I’ve been using it wrong” is a natural response to these commands. But on reflection the business begins to take on an air of surreality. Why, in 1979 (the date of the last revision of the book), is one of the country’s most famous journalists telling his readers not to use the word “fix” to mean “mend,” as in “Hey, Dad, I’ve fixed my bike”?
Now, this is folderol, but so is Strunk and White’s rigid pronouncement. All of these conventions have sprung up for a variety of traditional and typographical reasons, but what matters most is consistency and ease of reading.
