The Wednesday Word Wise Roundup

• About two weeks ago (Feb. 21) Dallas Morning News copy editor Nicole Stockdale came out from behind the curtain to write a piece for the paper about her craft. She notes that while occasionally readers point out to her mistakes that made it through to print, sometimes it’s the complaining readers that are wrong. “Sometimes our job is to contradict fusty rules foisted on kids by a misguided English teachers” she says. Read her thoughts on the art of copy editing here, as well as her responses to these sorts of misguided readers. It will help each of us who work with colleagues or clients who sometimes accuse us of an error when we, uhm, know better.

• John McIntyre, the Baltimore The Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk and a past president of the American Copy Editors Society, calls Bill Walsh, the “panjandrum of the copy desk” at The Washington Post, but disagrees with him about the flip creation of new words – McIntyre brings up “words” like wikify, impactful, and even bootylicious, But, he says, while you may “cordially dislike”  them (ok, I’m rather partial to bootylicious), "if it is comprehensible to another speaker of the language, it is a word.” In other words, get used to it. McIntyre (and Walsh) are both excellent, thoughtful writers themselves and both their sites are worth reading regularly. Check out McIntyre here and Walsh here.