Well, it's not technically blogging ...

But I was asked to write a column for my newspaper's Web site on some copy-editing issues -- when readers complain about errors that aren't. I got to cover some of my favorite topics (including "just deserts" and "the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

Check it out at The Morning News' Ask the Editor section.

In which I prove I'm not dead by blogging again

Here goes a few belated recaps from the ACES conference sessions. I'll start with Merrill Perlman's great "If I Knew Only" presentation. It was the perfect way to get the conference going, focusing on nuts-and-bolts editing and some bugaboos writers and editors often miss.

Merill had the perfect example about how the placement of "only" can change the meaning of a sentence. Start with "I hit him in the eye yesterday." Add the world only in different places and watch how the emphasis changes:
Only I hit him in the eye yesterday. (No one else hit him.)
I only hit him in the eye yesterday. (I also considered slapping and poking.)
I hit only him in the eye yesterday. (I could have hit plenty of others.)
I hit him only in the eye yesterday. (Not in the nose or the mouth.)
I hit him in the eye only yesterday. (Ah, what a day that was.)
I hit him in the eye yesterday only. (Had it been two days in a row, then you could be mad.)

One thing I love about Merrill's explanations is that she's not afraid to explain rules in terms we can all understand. We don't need to spout off about "pronoun-antecedent agreement errors" in order to know that a company shares its (not their) earnings report.

Bottom line: She won't make you feel like an idiot for using tricks to remember.

Some of the other staples she covered:

• That vs. which
• Who vs. whom: "If you can switch the sentence around and replace "who" with "he," the "who" is correct. If "him" fits, you want "whom." For example: "Bob, whom they described as snarky..." would switch to "They described him as snarky." "Whom" is right." Another example: "Bob, who they said was snarky..." would switch to "They said he was snarky." "Who" is right.
• Due to vs. because of: A "due to" must point to a noun, not a long noun phrase or ve. For example: "Due to snow, school was cancelled." What is due to the snow? Your answer must be a noun: A cancellation, not a cancelled. So "due to" is wrong in that instance.
• Danglers: You don't want to mislead the reader for even a nanosecond. So even if readers could eventually figure out what the writer meant, that's no reason to lead them down the wrong path. For example: "Fat and sassy, Marlon Brando loves his corgi." Who is fat and sassy -- Brando or his dog? Don't make the reader guess. Another example: "Jennifer said that after picking Brad up for the concert, they went out for ice cream." Who picked Brad up? It wasn't "they." A third example: "The party was called off after running out of food." Who ran out of food? There's no noun here to tell.
• Ellipses in quotes: They are dishonest to the reader, Merrill says. She's against these more than most editors, I'd say, but it's hard to go wrong if you follow her rule. Remember, she reminded us, not all quotes are good quotes. You can -- and should -- paraphrase.

That last point, about quotes, is probably the most important in this post. You can let a few fine grammatical points through a story without disturbing much. But mess with quotes -- or make a reader start wondering what you left out and why -- and you're messing with readers' trust.

I know you'll know some examples

NPR's "On the Media" will be covering the McJob news next week.

n his 1991 novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland coined the term "McJob," to denote – as the OED now defines it – "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects." Now McDonald's is waging a battle to get dictionaries to redefine the term. Of course, McDonald's isn't the only trademarked name to be co-opted in an unflattering way. There's Spam. And Muzak. We'll talk about the phenomenon on the show this weekend, but we'd like your help. Can you think of other examples?

Share them in the comments here and with "On the Media."

McRidicUlous

McDonald's has actually launched a lobbying effort to get the dictionary definition of "McJob" changed.

We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day," wrote David Fairhurst, chief people office in northern Europe, in a letter seeking support for change uncovered by the Financial Times.

"It's time the dictionary definition of 'McJob' changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime."

Not exactly how dictionaries work, but I guess execs don't have the benefit of witty Erin McKean presentations to point that out to them.

Concubining

Via Kottke.org comes this great example of verbing:

The verbing of English nouns continues unabated. A music producer being sentenced for attempted theft tells the court that he's got six children "on the way". The judge thinks he's marrying a women with 6 children but the producer replies, "No, I be concubining".

Read the original, in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

More on verbing from A Capital Idea:
Hoping to podium, despite feeling all Olympic-y
More verbing (or bringing words back from the dead)

Euphemisms galore

Slate has a monthly contest about euphemisms with Barbara Wallraff (who, by the way, is living in Florence, Italy) as curator. She takes reader submissions and shares the best ones in a podcast. This month's contest was for new ways to say "incompetence in the workplace," such as chairwarmer, rock with arms and smooth-brained.

The next contest is for euphemisms for "beautiful," "hot," "very attractive," etc. Should be fun. Send entries here. Wallraff has cataloged past winners here.

But what does it all mean?

I quite enjoyed the New York Times Magazine feature on the OED.

The O.E.D. is unlike any other dictionary, in any language. Not simply because it is the biggest and the best, though it is. Not just because it is the supreme authority. (It wears that role reluctantly: it does not presume, or deign, to say that any particular usage or spelling is correct or incorrect; it aims merely to capture the language people use.) No, what makes the O.E.D. unique is a quality for which it can only strive: completeness. It wants every word, all the lingo: idioms and euphemisms, sacred or profane, dead or alive, the King’s English or the street’s. The O.E.D. is meant to be a perfect record, perfect repository, perfect mirror of the entire language.

Employees are hard at work on the third edition of the dictionary. The third edition! (The first edition was presented in 1928, the second in 1989.) And it's not expected to be done for a couple of decades.

The New Yorker's Nov. 6 edition has a piece I've not yet read on Noah Webster that sounds promising:

There's an equally odd and charming piece by Jill Lepore about the lexicographer Noah Webster, a man who worked alone, unnumbed, for twenty years, literally turning circles inside the hole of his doughnut-shaped desk, consulting volumes of dictionaries of some twenty languages. I would guess he was not much good at meetings.

''Outside his family," Lepore writes, ''nearly everyone who knew him found him insufferable, and strangers who thought they admired him usually didn't: they'd mistaken him for another Webster. (If he had published an autobiography, it would have been called I Am Not Daniel!)''

When Webster first floated the proposal for a dictionary of the American, rather than English, language in 1820, he was drubbed by the critics, who thought the Americanisms were vulgarisms, ''a disgusting collection of idiotic words" (such as ''wigwam" and ''lengthy.'')

By the time the dictionary was published, populism was on the rise-- and with it the love of the words of the common man--so the book became revered.