Currently, I’m reading the marvelous history of The Telegraph, The House the Berrys Built: Inside the Telegraph, 1928 – 1986. The book is full of interesting anecdotes about the paper, its founders, and its colorful assortment of writers and editors. I’m mostly interested in its early years and, in particular, the evolution of its style guide and, as a consequence, I found the opening lines delightful:

Late in the 1950s the actress Elizabeth Taylor flew to London for a holiday. Then at the height of her beauty, if not yet at the peak of her notoriety, she had come to recuperate after an illness, and at Heathrow Airport she was besieged by reporters firing questions. ‘How are you?’ they cried. ‘How are you doing?’ To which she replied, ‘I’m feeling like a million dollars.’

Next morning, in dozens of different newspapers, the remark was published the length and breadth of Great Britain. Only The Daily Telegraph saw fit to render it as ‘I’m feeling like a million dollars (£357,000)’. Only The Daily Telegraph, in slavish devotion to its house rules, could have published anything so absurd. No other national paper could have made itself so ridiculous without noticing.

The moral of the story is, no matter how much editors might like a good style guide (I think I enjoy them more than most), sometimes we have to get out of the way!

Like many millennials, I was a prolific blogger once. I’m not sure that I had anything especially important or unique to say, but the landscape of social media seemed at the time (and maybe still today) to privilege that something was said over its particular importance. But whether it was important or not, blogging about issues like religion and politics increased my interest in argumentation and sharpened my skills in prose writing, both of which have served me well, especially as I went on to write and edit professionally in academia.

I don’t have many regrets about leaving the professoriate in 2021–I did so of my own accord, after all–but I do miss spending my days writing and talking about writing. I still write for publication, and I am (supposed to be) working on a book about the history of style guides. But I have less time in the day to dedicate to my own writing, and I don’t spend hours each day talking to students about the writing process like I once did. So perhaps that’s my excuse reason for starting a blog now, two decades after the heyday of blogging gave way to the onslaught of social media.

There’s no particular agenda for this space, though since I use the domain as a way to advertise my copyediting services, I hope to spend a fair amount of time blogging about writing, editing, and language in general. Maybe I’ll engage in the style guide wars a bit, or maybe I’ll write about odd style guides I’ve picked up in library dumpsters (I collect them)¹, or maybe I’ll rail against dictionaries or against the people who rail against dictionaries. Maybe I’ll catastrophize about A.I., or maybe I’ll catastrophize about people who use words like “catastrophize.”

To be continued…

1. Style guides, not dumpsters. ↩︎