John Whale: R.I.P.

Once upon a time there were more grammarians on our newspapers than writers.

Today everyone must be a writer - and 'grammarian' is not even a word, still less a person, much employed.

When John Whale died yesterday, the TLS lost a great friend and a drily smiling contributor on the history of religion.

The Sunday Times lost a little part of its history, the man who in the nineteen seventies, as well as writing leaders and leading arguments, prowled the offices for neglected proofs on which he could lay his pen, selecting from time to time the excessively liberated prose of the future editor of the TLS.

With John's death everyone has lost a link to a disappearing age, that of the restraining eye, the necessary pedant, the punctuation artist who can transform a paragraph with a semicolon, the proof-prowler who expects no thanks and normally gets none.

R.I.P.

Comments

[Bill Hilton]

I am in full agreement with Dion Per Sona (above) that standards are slipping and, thus, that more pedantry is in order.

With that in mind, Dion, I'd respectfully suggest that in seeking to quote Cicero accurately you should be using the nominative plural of 'tempus' rather than the ablative singular: 'tempora' rather than 'tempore'.

[Dion Per Sona]

There is a place where apostrophes go,
Though on the web you'd not think it was so.
Should there be any?
One, some (or many)?
Ownership, quantity, talk will all show.

From the front page of 3 July edition of The Times:

Reed kick-start's auction with a loan.

O tempore! O mores!

[Clayton Burns]

Sir Peter, your illustrations have a slight blur problem. Perhaps you could write a short narrative about Moby-Dick with just those marks, or compose a little opera as in TierneyLab at nytimes.com. This would be an excellent subject for a poem by Dion Per Sona.

You may have been following the fascinating dispute about grammar in The Australian. Remarkably, the UK, American, and Australian English language fiirestorms appear to blaze out of control in a very parochial way.

I would rate The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, part of the issue in The Australian, as an extremely useful reference book at the top of the food chain.

However, what I find strangest in grammar is that our good friend Rupert Murdoch has not been able fully to grasp the potential in COBUILD, myspace.com, and his various media properties, to perfect the corpus revolution in Linguistics.

There are now brilliant word books that we had no access to when we were growing up--the COBUILD and Oxford student's and advanced learner's dictionaries, the Oxford collocations dictionary, and the Longman Language Activator come to mind as outstanding examples--but the best advance has been in the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar and English Grammar.

It seems to have gone unnoticed in the schools that COBUILD grammars, because of the word lists, and corpus dictionaries, because they explain grammar patterns so well, can be powerfully integrated with texts such as "Great Expectations" and "No Country For Old Men" to teach conditions, for example. The first is full of counterfactuals.

Unfortunately we do not have what could be the most interesting dictionary of all: the Spectra Dictionary. Let's take the spectrum "alienated--adjusted--indoctrinated." With a huge corpus, we could revolutionize and fine tune learning of meaning so that students would be an order of magnitude better at abstraction by the time they entered university.

Editorial work is lapsing into unconsciousness. I could give you examples--another time--that would raise your every hair.

The biggest editorial fault is not missing a comma but just being totally unaware of the facts. For example, we have to set grammar teaching in the context of the massive global counterfeit English business, larger than the $350 Billion American revenues of Wal-Mart. The question is, how could this fraud go virtually invisible? Why don't we see international studies in The Australian, the WSJ, and The TLS on this issue?

[Susan Balée]

An acquaintance went to the newly opened "Newseum" in D.C. Where, he wondered, was the section devoted to copy editors? There wasn't one.