Mondays with Mike: My inner Esther

My mom, Esther Knezovich, nee Latini, taught school for decades. Mostly first and second grade. And she never took her teacher hat off.

The Great Santini? The Great Latini. Somewhere she’s watching, and ready to point out a typo in this post.

If she heard something ungrammatical on a commercial, or if a news anchor used a bad sentence structure, or say, her son used the wrong word, well, she was never shy. She yelled at the TV or she was quick to correct my poor diction.

Not sure if I’m sorry or glad to have inherited her finickyness about language. It’s served me well in my professional life. But in recent times, as in, pretty much since the internet, the language police gene just gives me a headache. As in, why bother? Or I GIVE UP!

Back in the day when I walked barefoot through snowdrifts to get to my unheated school house … actually, back in the day when I was working in the publications department at the University of Illinois, designers cut and pasted colored paper to create a mocked-up design called a comp (for comprehensive sketch). Once we agreed on a design, they’d give us word counts for every single item in the publication.

We used IBM PCs with WordPress to write our stuff. We’d print pieces out in typewriter font, and then a copyeditor would mark it up. We’d enter the changes and send it to service bureau, and that company would send back nice, slick, typeset copy. If the copy was clean after proofreading, the designers would cut the type and pasted it onto sheets that would be shot photographically and converted to printing plates.

If the typeset copy was NOT clean, we sent it back to the service bureau for what was called author’s alterations. That is, it was our mistake, not theirs, so the author paid. Well, our university department paid.

That painstaking process and the literal cost of error seems mindboggling in retrospect, but it enforced a disciplined carefulness.

Welp, desktop publishing, web sites, instant messaging, social media—fuhgeddaboudit carefulness. We’ve all seen bad typos from the most respected online publications. The ability to change things on the fly or fix them on the fly has eroded whatever it was I learned at my Illinois job.

But still I persist. And gripe. For example, one thing that drives me loopy is people using postal abbreviations for state names in the middle of text. For example:

Betsy first lived in Reno, NV, but moved to Springfield, IL. Now she wants to move again.

No, no, no.

Better to use the AP’s updated guidance and simply spell out names of states, whether or not they’re used in conjunction with a city name. Chicago Style also now spells out state names. They differ, I think, in when abbreviations can be used (lists, tables, etc.). The postal codes should only be used in…postal addresses!

Inner Esther still lives.