Miles's blog

People have asked me: “Shouldn’t your blog be called ‘Miles’ Blog’ and not “Miles’s Blog’?” No.

This is from the Elements of Style:

And no, mine is not an ancient proper name. (Keep your comments to yourself.)

This is actually the very first rule in the Elements of Style, but one which is often disregarded. The Elements of Style have a special place in my heart. In my first year as a journalism major at Boston University, I took a magazine writing class. The professor was a venerable veteran of the magazine business named Tim Cohane. He would have been about 60 at that time, but he seemed older than invention of the printing press. Professor Cohane had been sport editor of Look Magazine for over 20 years. Most people now have no memory of Look, but for a time it rivaled Life Magazine as a publishing force. Cohane knew everyone in the sports world. He had written about Vince Lombardi as a player, Jackie Robinson as a rookie, and Muhammad Ali as a amateur. For an aspiring sports writer Cohane spoke from Mt. Olympus. (Really, you have to know what that is.)

While most of us journalism majors wanted to write with style and flair like Jimmy Breslin, Cohane came from an older school. And, like most old schoolers he believed in the fundamentals (for example not starting a sentence with the word “and”). The fundamentals were The Elements of Style. Not only did he drill that book into our heads, we had a test on it every Monday. This is why I will never forget rules like “In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.” And why I will never misuse the word “comprise.” (A zoo comprises animals, animals constitute a zoo.) People who have seen me edit their work have heard these sorts of things come out of my mouth. I am a disciple of Cohane, the Elements are gospel.

(Excluding of course rule 9 in the chapter on “An Approach to Style”: “Do not affect a breezy manner.” This is one I could never agree with. I would summarize my style as “breezy.” A big problem. Here is what Strunk and White say about a breezy style.

“The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.”

Oww. The truth hurts. But I think exceptions can be made for blogs and similar kinds of personal expositions. However, I cannot deny the accuracy of the analysis.)

At any rate, I went to college completely lacking in the fundamentals of grammar. In the 60s, primary and high schools deemphasized grammar in favor of content. It mattered not how you said what you had to say, educators placed importance on the merit of your position. Writers like e.e. cummings and James Joyce had thrown away grammar and were hailed as geniuses. Educators, desiring, I suppose, to show how enlightened they were, jumped on the no-grammar bandwagon, allowing us fledgling cummingses to flounder around in the English language like a child thrown into the deep end for his first swimming lesson.

One of my English teachers, a Mrs. Benade, herself a seeming old battle-axe in my memory, but probably in her early 50s, refused to accept the modern school and tried to inject grammar into her class. Refused the right to fail the garbage her students regurgitated, she gave use split grades, one for content, one for grammar. I would consistently get A/F. I passed, we all laughed. To this day I can’t diagram a sentence to save my life.

This stopped being funny when I went to journalism school. Professional journalism in those days, before Chris Berman had reduced sports writing and broadcasting to little more than a frat party, still rested on a foundation of fundamentals. e.e. cummings never made a living writing for Look Magazine. I still hear Cohane in my head when I write—don’t use passive verbs, use strong verbs, and my favorite, “too many ‘ing’ and the copy no sing.” He would always laugh when he said that. I remember distinctly one day he was waxing poetic about something or another, which he did regularly becoming more entertainer than instructor, and he referred to the “blue empyrean.” Yeah, I didn’t know what it meant either. In fact, nobody in the class knew what it meant. For you young people, remember that in 1973 we could not immediately use our cell phones to look words up on the internet. We all scrambled for a dictionary the first chance we got.

Every journalism major in the school took that class. Everyone who worked on the school paper was a journalism major. We would sit around editing the paper repeating the Elements rules like a religious mantra. So when I called it Miles’s Blog, I knew what I was doing.

Astonishingly to me, however, is the consistent misuse of the apostrophe. For some confounding reason people seem to have utterly lost conception of how to use the thing. I consistently see words in the plural written with “ ‘s.” I would read police reports, for example, and the officer would write “We arrested the suspect’s.” On occasion I would read legal writing with the same impediment.

Whatever has caused it seems to have warped the minds of people in both directions. Not only are they adding the apostrophe when improper, but they seem to have forgotten it is necessary in abbreviations, for example “what’s up?” (I know, the terms “what’s up” has been replaced by “sup” or some such rap abbreviation. I attribute the loss of grammar skills primarily to modern music groups which seem to revel in misspelling words and fracturing grammar.) The apostrophe is necessary in “what’s up” because it is an abbreviation of “what is up.”

Someone at Old Navy failed to grasp this fundamental concept in their new t-shirt line. Old Navy produced and offered for sale shirts tied to college football programs. The shirts sought to show support for the teams by using the phrase “Lets go USC Trojans” and the like. You caught the problem, right? “Lets go” is what someone does when they have been hanging onto a chin-up bar too long. “Let’s go” is how someone implores their gridiron warriors to press for victory, being an abbreviation for “let us go.” (I realize no one would say “let us go Trojans” except perhaps their prisoners, but “let’s go” is a colloquialism.) Of all things to screw up, t-shirts for college football. Had they been t-shirts for gansta rappers no one would have noticed. Old Navy has to recall thousands of these. You can bet whoever made this mistake never had a class from Tim Cohane.