Dreyer's English

by Benjamin Dreyer

  To cite one majestically apposite instance: In July 2017, the writer Colin Dickey stumbled upon a 2013 tweet from the elder daughter of the person who would, eventually, assume the presidency of the United States:

  “If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  As Dickey then himself tweeted, “That Einstein never said any such thing only makes this tweet that much more perfect.”

  And indeed and in fact, and no matter the hundreds of Google hits suggesting otherwise, the quip had not ever emerged from the mouth or pen of Albert Einstein. It’s simply a bit of unattributable pseudo-cleverness assigned, presumably to lend it weightiness and importance, to someone who, particularly in this case, would never have said it.

  Einstein is only one of the pin-the-wisdom-on-the-maven targets. Five’ll get you ten that a quote you find attributed, particularly without reference to a published source, to Abraham Lincoln is inauthentic; the same goes for Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde (and with the thousands of witticisms Wilde uttered, why would anyone put words into his mouth?), Winston Churchill, or Dorothy Parker (like Wilde, an industrial-strength generator of cleverness).*3

  There are any number of ways to verify or debunk quotes:

  Wikiquote, with individual entries for just about everyone who ever picked up a pen, not only lists a writer’s greatest hits but helpfully links you to the published sources of said hits and, perhaps even more helpfully, includes reliable sections on disputed and misattributed quotes.

  If you want to explore on your own, make use of the highly searchable books.google.com. If you can’t, with a modicum of effort, find a published source for a quote, the odds are at least reasonable that it’s a sham.

  I also commend to you the work of the doggedly thorough Garson O’Toole, who runs the Quote Investigator website (access it via quoteinvestigator.com, to be sure) and tweets as @QuoteResearch, and who specializes in not only debunking fake or misattributed quotes but time-traveling backward through the archives to discern, if he can, how and when the fakeries and misattributions first occurred.

  Now, what has any of this to do with writing?

  Lazy writers, particularly of business and self-help books,*4 often litter their manuscripts with allegedly uplifting epigraphs they’ve plucked from either the Internet or the works of their equally lazy business and self-help predecessors, and thus the manure gets spread.

  At Random House, copy editors are mandated to search for and either verify or call into question all such quotes. If some days this feels tantamount to warding off a plague of locusts with a fly swatter, well, one can do only what one can do.

  In an era redolent to the high heavens with lies passed off as truths—often by career perjurers rabidly eager to condemn as fabrications facts they find inconvenient—I beg you not to continue to perpetrate and perpetuate these fortune-cookie hoaxes, which in their often insipid vapidity are as demeaning to the spirit as in their inauthenticity they are insulting to the history of the written word.

  May I make a suggestion?

  Build yourself, on either a virtual or a paper tablet, what’s known as a commonplace book—someplace you can copy down bits of writing you encounter and find clever and/or meaningful—and keep it handy for future use, even if that future use is simply your own edification. (Don’t forget to make note of where you found the stuff.) Then at least, should you find yourself in a position to share with the world your own wisdom and want to periodically sprinkle it with others’ smarts, you’ll at least have something fresh and heartfelt to offer.

  12.

  Title case is the convention of capitalizing, in titles of works (books, book chapters, plays, movies—you get the idea) and, often though not always, in newspaper and magazine headlines, the first letter of all the important words.

  Which are the important words of a title?

  the first word and the last word

  all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs

  Which are the words that don’t make the capital cut?

  articles (“a,” “an,” “the”)

  conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “if,” “or,” etc.)

  Then clarity goes to heck.

  What about prepositions?

  If you say “prepositions are invariably to be lowercased,” as some indeed say, you’re going to be up against titles like Seven against Thebes or I Served alongside Rommel, and that certainly won’t do. The cleverer people endorse lowercasing the shorter prepositions, of which there are many, including “at,” “by,” “but,” “from,” “into,” “of,” “to,” and “with,” and capping the longer ones, like “despite,” “during,” and “toward.” I’ll admit that the four-letter prepositions can cause puzzlement—I’d certainly never cap “with,” but a lowercase “over” can look a little underrespected.

  Which leads to the next confusion: Did you notice that, above, I listed “but” as both a conjunction and a preposition? That’s because, depending on how you use it, it can indeed be a conjunction or a preposition. Fine enough, as in either case it would be lowercased. But “but” can also be an adverb (in the sense of “merely,” as in “he is but a stripling”) or a noun (as in “no ifs, ands, or buts about it”), which means that if you were using the word in that capacity in a title it would require a cap. Similarly, the word “over” also serves as both preposition and adverb (and, in cricket, noun). I can assure you that the trip to the dictionary to discern whether that “off” or “near” you’re contemplating capping is a preposition or an adverb (or an adjective or a verb) may well be unilluminating to the point of headache-inducing. (You’ll also note that some dictionaries haul out terms like “particle” and “determiner,” which doesn’t make things easier.) Loath as I am to shrug and concede “When in doubt, do what your eye tells you to do,” that’s nevertheless what I’m saying. And when someone attempts to correct you, look that person square in the eye and say, “I’m using it as an adverb,” then walk away quickly. Works every time.

  Furthermore:

  Particularly don’t forget that some terribly important words are terribly short. Make sure you’ve capped that “It” (to say nothing of that “He,” that “She,” that “His,” and that “Hers”), and especially make sure you’ve capped those big leaguers “Is” and “Be,” the lowercasing*5 of which is as close to a title-case capital crime as I can think of.

  Oh, and:

  There’s a thing called a phrasal verb, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a verb in the form of a phrase, often including a preposition and/or an adverb, and when one of these shows up in a title, both its bits get capped, as in, say:

  Hold On to Your Hats!

  (whereas the “on” in The Mill on the Floss is lowercased)

  or

  Stand By for Updates

  (whereas the “by” in The House by the Lake is lowercased).

  Not to mention:

  Some people choose to capitalize each of the words in an off-the-cuff hyphenated compound but capitalize only the first word in a permanent compound, only that might lead to something like

  My Mother-in-law Enjoyed a Death-Defying Ride on a Merry-go-round

  which may strike you as a bit lumpy-looking. You will not be faulted if for the sake of visual euphony you choose, in this case, to cap “law,” “go,” and “round” (though not, to be sure, “in”).

  In conclusion:

  There’s many a day I’m sympathetic to the title-case policy of capping every damn word and the hell with it, but then I see a headline like

  The Fault Is Not In Our Stars But In Our Stars’ Salaries

  and I cringe and change my mind.

  13.


  Q. What do you have to say about the increasing use of “woman” as an adjective, rather than “female,” as in “woman candidate” instead of “female candidate”? It’s not as if anyone ever says “man candidate.”

  A. People don’t often say “male candidate,” either; they just say “candidate.” I suppose that brevity goes back to the peculiar notion that a default human being is a male.*6 Or a man. I, like you, do increasingly see “woman” used as an adjective; I wonder if it’s because to some the word “female” looks particularly biological, as if a “female cashier,” say, totes up your purchases with her uterus. That said, the use of “woman” as an adjective isn’t particularly new. Even as I type this I’m looking at a reference to “your women guests” in Peg Bracken’s wonderfully subversive 1960 The I Hate to Cook Book. You want to be especially careful, though, not to turn the tables and refer to a woman as “a female.” “Female” as a noun is rarely meant as a compliment, and it’s unlikely to be taken as one.

  Here, from Clare Boothe Luce’s play The Women:

  SYLVIA: Why should I be jealous of Mary?

  NANCY: Because she’s contented. Contented to be what she is.

  SYLVIA: Which is what?

  NANCY: A woman.

  EDITH: And what, in the name of my revolting condition,*7 am I?

  NANCY: A female.*8

  And, I must emphasize: Whether you choose to characterize professionals by gender is not my business. How you do it is. Dammit, Jim, I’m a copy editor, not a sociologist.

  14.

  A button-down shirt is a shirt whose collar points fasten to buttons on the upper-chestal zone of the shirt. It is not any old shirt that buttons from neck to waist. Call that a dress shirt, if it happens to be one (there’s no need, by the way, ever to refer to something as a “long-sleeve dress shirt,” because there is no such thing as a “short-sleeve dress shirt”), or a button-front shirt, or a button-up shirt, I don’t really care.

  15.

  You don’t tow the line. You toe it.

  16.

  The approving ejaculation*9 is not “Here, here!” but “Hear, hear!”

  17.

  Streets lit by gaslight are gaslit.

  The past tense of the verb “gaslight”—as in that which Charles Boyer does to Ingrid Bergman in the eponymous 1944 MGM thriller by undermining her belief in reality to the point she believes she’s going mad—is “gaslighted.”

  18.

  Something that is well established down to the marrow is not “deep-seeded,” which may sound as if it makes sense but, I’m assured by people who know how plants work, doesn’t. It is, rather, “deep-seated.”

  19.

  In an emergency you call 911.

  The similarly numbered day of catastrophe was 9/11. (In the rest of the world it’s 11/9, but we Americans are alarmingly stubborn in our date styling.)

  20.

  They’re not Brussel sprouts. They’re Brussels sprouts.

  21.

  A reversal is a total 180.*10 If you do a total 360, you’re facing the same direction as when you began.

  22.

  “Stupider” and “stupidest” are too words.

  23.

  I’m well aware that my job is not to copyedit your day-to-day speech, but I’d be grateful if in responding to, say:

  “Do you mind if I sit beside you?”

  you would answer not, as everyone seems to nowadays:

  “Yes! Please do!”

  but

  “Of course not! Please do!”

  24.

  I once, in a U.K. manuscript, encountered this bit of dialogue:

  “Oh, well, tomato, to-may-to.”

  I stared at it for a full thirty seconds before I understood what I was looking at.

  For the record, though the Brits do indeed pronounce “tomato” with an “ah” in the middle, they pronounce “potato” the same way we do, with an “ay” in the middle. Ira Gershwin—“You like potato and I like po-tah-to / You like tomato and I like to-mah-to”—was being terribly clever, but also a cheat.

  Also by the way, that old story about unwitting English singers commencing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” by singing, “You say eyether and I say eyether / You say nyther and I say nyther” is, at least according to Ira Gershwin in Lyrics on Several Occasions, true. Grain of salt.

  25.

  I note that, increasingly often, some people refer to other people referring to themselves as “we” as “speaking in the second person.” Nope. Speaking of oneself as “we”—which unless you’re Queen Victoria you oughtn’t—is speaking in the first person plural. The second person is “you,” as in, as a writer once wrote, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of morning.”

  26.

  The line from Hamlet is not “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”; it’s “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Also, if you haven’t been dead for four hundred years and are planning on using the word “methinks” in the spirit of roguish cleverness, please don’t.

  27.

  “Pulchritudinous” is a not very attractive word for “beautiful.” At some point when people like me weren’t paying proper attention it attempted, with some success, to redefine itself as “buxom”—“zaftig,” if you will, and even if you won’t—which, I suppose, if you prefer your women on the plumply bosomy side, makes a sort of sense.*11 But lately I’m seeing it increasingly often used as a synonym, and a pejorative one at that, for “fat,” and OK let’s please stop with the redefining. There are any number of synonyms, some nicer than others, for “fat”—including “bovine,” “stout,” and (one of my favorites, since an art history professor applied it to a Renoir nude) “fubsy”—and we don’t, I think, need another one.

  *1  This also applies to the temporal use of “just” and the difference between writing, say, “I almost just tripped on the stairs,” which sounds perfectly natural, and “I just almost tripped on the stairs,” which makes a bit more sense. If I’ve inspired you to give it an extra thought every time you’re about to write or say the words “only” and “just,” I feel I’ve done my job.

  *2  Copy editor’s addendum: “For me, it was candles ‘guttering’ and ‘tang’ used for smell; both were used so often in literary fiction, I’d begun to think they were handed out with the MFA.”

  *3  Also, in no particular order, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltaire, Mahatma Gandhi, and (impudently and absurdly, given how easily traceable every word he ever wrote is) William Shakespeare.

  *4  “The very existence of self-help books is all the evidence you need that they don’t work,” a former colleague of mine once quipped—perhaps more cleverly than truthfully, but the quip business is built more on rat-a-tat effectiveness than on strict accuracy.

  *5  Did You Know? Capital (majuscule) letters are called uppercase letters, and the smaller (minuscule) letters are called lowercase letters, because in the era of movable type (manual typesetting, that is) the capital letters, less frequently used, lived in the case set above the case that held the rest of the letters. “Uppercase” is not to be confused with “top-drawer,” which derives from domestic furniture and is where you store your better things.

  *6  At the dawn of my career I frequently encountered in manuscripts the unspoken notion that a default human being was white. That is, only nonwhite characters would ever have their race specifically called out. One still often runs into the notion that the unmodified use of “man”—as in articles about what men do or don’t like about women—inarguably means “heterosexual man.” It doesn’t.

  *7  Pregnant, that is. Don’t shoot the messenger.

  *8  OK, let’s balance that sourness with a little swinging, romantic Cole Porter, from Sil
k Stockings: “When the electromagnetic of the he-male / meets the electromagnetic of the female / If right away she should say ‘This is the male’ / it’s a chemical reaction, that’s all.”

  *9  Whatever.

  *10  Is the term “full 180” tautological? Isn’t it enough to say “I did a 180”? Sure, and sure. And yet.

  *11  In Yiddish, pulkes are thighs, particularly as admired on a baby (or a chicken) for being plump. Perhaps some well-meaning Jewish linguist—don’t look at me—got pulkes and pulchritude mixed up, and this is the result.

  I think perhaps you don’t finish writing a book. You stop writing it.

  My favorite last line in all literature has long been this, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

  It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.