Joyce Maynard and me

I have had a long-term relationship with Joyce Maynard. It goes back to the 1970’s. Joyce does not know me and has no idea as to who I am. Yet she has influenced my life and thinking for over forty years.

I first became acquainted with Joyce shortly after I graduated from Pitzer College in 1975. It was not long after I went to work at B. Dalton Bookseller when I read her 1973 book Looking Back: A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties, expanded from an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. I felt an immediate and deep connection with her and recognized that we shared many of the same values about growing up, leaving home, and heading out into the world. The book touched me deeply as I was leaving the sheltered world of academia and figuring out how to buy my own groceries and pay my own rent. At that time I had no clue that she was the 18-year-old who had moved in with J.D. Salinger.

I was disappointed, therefore, to hear Joyce’s commentaries for the Spectrum series on CBS radio. Back in those days CBS radio had a rotating group of commentators who offered short audio essays on current affairs. Joyce always took the conservative perspective, very much at odds with her viewpoint in Looking Back. I was further disappointed, devastated, and hurt, I felt stabbed in the back, when I read a piece of hers, I don’t remember where, in which she wrote that what she said in Looking Back was not what she really felt but what she believed readers of the era wanted to see. Joyce, how could you?

In spite of this betrayal I paid attention when I saw her name, and I was compelled to buy and read her 1998 “tell-all” book about her life with Salinger, At Home in the World. I felt sympathy for her naiveté and ineptness, but she wrote nothing to heal the original betrayal.

Joyce resurfaced recently, when I turned the page of the September 9 New York Times Book Review and saw her name on a full-page essay. She notes that twenty years have passed since the publication of At Home in the World. She reminds me that we are very close to the same age (there’s only three months difference, in fact). She writes of being ostracized by the literary community for the perceived betrayal of Salinger in her book, and about how, after all these years and after all of the novels and other books she has written over the decades, she is still most remembered, by some at least, for her brief relationship with Salinger.

I feel a certain sympathy, even some empathy for her. But Joyce, you still betrayed me more than forty years ago. I should be over all that, I know. The truth, nonetheless, is that I hardly knew ye.

California Supreme Court contractor definition may affect independent editorial professionals

The California Supreme Court recently issued a unanimous decision on how an independent contractor is defined. The definition was not a ruling in a particular case, but was intended to provide guidance to lower courts in pending cases. There are a number of fields where an individual's status as a contractor is being questioned. These fields include ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft, as well as other industries. Construction firms, for example, often bring in workers as contractors rather than as employees. The result is that individuals are deprived of benefits and state and federal governments miss out on payroll taxes.

While the definition was not focused on independent writers and editors, I certainly see an impact there, and this in a field where independent editorial professionals have in fact long been legitimately considered contractors. Certainly I have concerns about my own work, more on the writing than on the web development side.  

In order to bring on an individual as a contractor the supreme court definition states a business must show that:

1. the worker is free from the control and direction of the employer
2. performs work that is outside the hirer's core business
3. customarily engages in “an independently established trade, occupation or business.”

Numbers 1 and 3 are fine, but the kicker is number 2. I recently did a web site for an attorney, so no problem there. But last year I wrote a number of case studies for a corporate advocacy firm. Since that kind of work is very much the company's core business I would (so it appears) have to be an employee to do that sort of work for them in the future.

Here is the original story as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

The state of Massachusetts defines a contractor in an almost identical fashion, and I have seen a couple of anecdotal indications that there may have been a negative impact on independent editorial professionals there.

I'm not sure what the impact of this definition will be on the ability of writers and editors in California to get contract work, but it's not going to make it any easier.

 

finding the correct word (or phrase)

I wrote recently about avoiding words with fluid or ambiguous meanings. I focused on the word "fulsome," whose usage has changed over the decades and which has conflicting definitions across dictionaries.

Sometimes, however, a word has a very specific meaning and is still used incorrectly. If you've seen the movie The Princess Bride you may remember the scene in which the Wallace Shawn character is told that he is being followed. He responds more than once saying, "inconceivable!" Finally one of his henchmen says, "I don't think you know what that word means, boss."

Even if one feels compelled to use jargon, most jargon terms have specific meanings.

I once had a manager nearly twenty years ago who picked up jargon like a chameleon adapts to its surroundings. We worked with a lot of engineers based in India and he picked up their the phrase, "at the earliest." That is a highly non-grammatical construct used by engineers whose first language is not English. It means, as you might surmise, "as soon as possible." Once in my performance review this manager used the phrase "just in time" regarding my providing feedback to an employee. That phrase has to do with the manufacturing process and getting parts to the factory right before assembly, and not any earlier, to save on inventory costs.

That’s obviously not what he meant. He meant I should provide feedback to this employee promptly, and simply stating "prompt feedback" would have made a lot more sense.

A little thought can frequently eliminate such simple errors.

 

words and their (sometimes elusive) meanings

Most people who love words and the English language are familiar with the book Alice in Wonderland and the character Humpty Dumpty. They are well acquainted with Humpty's arrogant perspective on words:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

Most of us are not so presumptuous, but words can be tricky sometimes. I often think of the 2017 column about the word "fulsome" by Ben Yagoda in the Lingua Franca blog. Yagoda writes that the word at one time meant "excessive flattery," but has now taken on a positive connotation.

Indeed, the Merriam-Webster Unabridged online dictionary lists the first meaning as "very full and abundant," providing "copious" as a synonym. The second meaning is "notably or appealingly full or rounded in shape." Only further down the list do the more negative meanings appear.

The more conservative online American Heritage Dictionary, on the other hand, lists the first meaning as, "excessively flattering or insincerely earnest," offering "unctuous" as a synonym. The second meaning is "disgusting or offensive."

Confusing.

The the approach of the online Oxford Living Dictionaries is to take the middle road, offering "complimentary or flattering to an excessive degree" as the first meaning and "of large size or quantity; generous or abundant" for the second definition.

All three dictionaries include usage notes which discuss the changing and ambiguous nature of the word.

My approach in such circumstances: avoid the word altogether. I will find a different word that conveys more precisely what I am trying to express.

 

staying in style

I had the privilege for several months of writing customer success stories for an agency in Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed the work. It was interesting and it kept me on my toes. I also had to keep in mind which client I was writing for. All of the agency's clients except for one used the Associated Press Stylebook (AP). The one holdout client used the Chicago Manual of Style, which I prefer.

There are differences between the two styles. Chicago supports the serial comma and says to spell out numbers under one hundred. AP tells us to omit the serial comma and to spell out numbers one through ten.

There are other style guides, of course. The Modern Language Association has its own style guide, but that is followed mostly in the academic world and not so much in business writing. The Council of Scientific Editors publishes the Scientific Style and Format guide, which I am told states that numbers are never spelled out.

There is much that all agree on with respect to proper grammar and syntax. It’s important to maintain those standards. But not everything is set in stone. As I hear from many experts, the important thing is to be consistent within a given work. I am partial to Chicago, but I can write to AP and I do.

I admit to being something of a style and grammar nerd. But then I enjoy being a style and grammar nerd.

 

my dictionary dilemma

I wrote a while back about having subscribed to the unabridged Merriam-Webster (M-W) dictionary online. It made sense, given the freelance writing work that I am doing. But then the thought occurred to me: have I gone over to the Dark Side?

I have been an advocate of the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) for decades. I have long loved its more prescriptive as opposed to descriptive approach (though that is a serious oversimplification). The usage notes with the AHD usage panel can be very helpful. In my B. Dalton Bookseller days in the 1970s and 1980s I was able to singlehandedly skew the sales reports in the stores in which I worked, increasing AHD sales at the expense of the whatever-current-at-the-time edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. I would chortle with delight when I saw those reports.

Even today the AHD sometimes includes details not found in the M-W unabridged. When looking up the word "bake-off" for a piece I was writing both M-W and AHD capitalized the phrase and said that it was a Service Mark. But only AHD added the note that it was sometimes used lower case and generically. Similarly, the M-W unabridged does not list "podiatric," while AHD does list it as an adjective under podiatry.

The problem is that it is not clear to me how much in the way of resources are being put into the AHD these days and whether we'll see another edition after the current 5th, given that its publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is a struggling firm. M-W seems to have effectively made the transition to the digital world and appears to be healthily surviving if not thriving.

Yes, I paid for my subscription to the unabridged M-W and that was the Right Thing to do given the work I am doing. But I can't shake the feeling that I am cheating on a long-time faithful lover.

 

compiling a dictionary: an art, not a science

I have been enjoying Kory Stamper's new book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. She writes about her life as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. The book is thoroughly delightful.

Stamper quotes an article discussing a fundraiser held by Barbara Streisand at her home. The article hyphenates "fund-raiser." Kory writes that this is an example of the transition of a phrase from an open compound to a hyphenated compound.

But wait. I always thought of fundraiser as a single word. I confirmed that by checking out my go-to dictionary, the American Heritage. One word. Then I checked the free online Merriam-Webster, which is based on the M-W Collegiate Dictionary. It showed only the hyphenated version.

hmmm....

I had occasion to sign up and pay for the full, unabridged Merriam-Webster, not on account of this quest, but because of  of the work I was doing for a client. I looked up the word in the unabridged. It is an interesting entry. The main spelling is two words. The second spelling is one word. The third spelling is hyphenated.

This reinforced for me something that I have long known but which I often forget. Dictionaries are not created by some omnipotent Language Being. They are compiled by real people making human decisions. While each dictionary publisher has its own rigorous rules and guidelines, producing a dictionary is an art, not a science.