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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,909 posts)
Wed May 3, 2017, 12:11 PM May 2017

Bill Walsh, copy editor and witty authority on language, dies at 55

Last edited Wed May 3, 2017, 12:50 PM - Edit history (1)

I love the obits. I'm going through a pile of them. There's no hurry; the subjects will be just as dead.

The comments are grate great.

Bill Walsh, copy editor and witty authority on language, dies at 55



[font size=1]Washington Post copy editor and author Bill Walsh. (Jacqueline Dupree)[/font]

By Adam Bernstein March 15

Bill Walsh, a Washington Post copy editor who wrote three irreverent books about his craft, noting evolutions and devolutions of language, the indispensability of hyphens and his hostility toward semicolons, and distinctions — for the sake of clarity — between Playboy Playmates and Playboy Bunnies, died March 15 at a hospice center in Arlington, Va. He was 55. ... The cause was complications from bile-duct cancer, said his wife, Jacqueline Dupree, a Post informational technology specialist.

In the hurly-burly of a newsroom, where even the best reporters have widely varying degrees of grammatical competence, copy editors are the often unheralded guardians of language and common sense. They are the front-line mud soldiers in an endless war against bad spelling, ill-considered sentence construction and factual errors. ... They prevent English teachers everywhere from wincing. They save behinds. ... By many accounts, Mr. Walsh stood at the zenith of his profession.
....

The publication American Journalism Review once described Mr. Walsh as “the undisputed king of copy bloggers.” He dubbed his long-running editing and grammar website The Slot, after the nickname for the central location the copy chief traditionally occupied in the newsroom. In the era before computers, rank-and-file copy editors sat along the edge, or “rim,” of the copy desk, tossing headlines and stories to the chief in the center, or “slot.” ... Among other positions during his 20 years at The Post, Mr. Walsh served as the copy chief of the National and Business desks.

Mr. Walsh wrote three volumes about copy editing, “Lapsing Into a Comma” (2000); “The Elephants of Style” (2004), which punned off William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s ubiquitous grammar handbook “The Elements of Style”; and “Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk” (2013). ... Mr. Walsh relished playing the part of a curmudgeon, writing from the perspective of “some past-his-prime newspaper guy . . . yelling at you.”
....

Adam Bernstein has spent his career putting the "post" in Washington Post, first as an obituary writer and then as editor. The American Society of Newspaper Editors recognized Bernstein’s ability to exhume “the small details and anecdotes that get at the essence of the person” and to write stories that are “complex yet stylish.”

Sample comment:

PaulinMaryland

3/16/2017 1:50 PM EDT

George Will once wrote that one of his heroes was the grammarian whose final words were, "I am about to--or am going to--die. Either expression is correct."
I wouldn't be surprised if Bill Walsh's final words were a facetious remark about words.

Obit about someone equally fastidious:

Robert Silvers, a founding editor of New York Review of Books, dies at 87

By Matt Schudel March 21 

Late in 1962, New York City’s seven daily newspapers were shut down by a strike of their printers. With the papers’ book-review sections idled during the 114-day strike, several enterprising intellectuals came up with an idea to publish their own journals about books. ... On Feb. 1, 1963, the New York Review of Books hit the newsstands and quickly sold out its print run of 100,000 copies. The editors were Barbara Epstein and Robert B. Silvers, who left their jobs at other publications to put out the new journal’s first issue.

“You’ll be back in a month,” Mr. Silvers’s boss at Harper’s magazine told him. ... Fifty-four years later, Mr. Silvers was still editing the New York Review, which he and Epstein built into what Esquire magazine called “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language.”
....

“There is only one story you need to know about Bob,” contributing writer Timothy Garton Ash told the Guardan in 2004. “ ‘Four o’clock on Christmas Day: the family is gathered around the turkey, and the phone rings. It’s Bob. ‘Tim,’ he says, ‘How are you doing? On column six of the third galley, there’s a dangling modifier.’?”
....

Robert Benjamin Silvers was born Dec. 31, 1929, in Mineola, N.Y. His father was a businessman, and his mother was a music critic for the New York Globe. ... Mr. Silvers entered the University of Chicago at 15 and graduated in 1947, when he was 17. He attended Yale Law School, then worked as press secretary to Connecticut Gov. Chester Bowles (D) and served in the Army with a unit attached to NATO in Paris. ... He was an editor of the Paris Review, lived on a yacht on the Seine (with pianist Peter Duchin) and studied at the Sorbonne and the Paris Institute of Political Sciences. He returned to New York in 1958 to work at Harper’s magazine, where he edited an article by writer Elizabeth Hardwick critical of the state of book reviewing at newspapers.
....

Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.

And a comment:

Samuel Silvers

3/22/2017 12:14 AM EDT

Dear Washington Post, I am Robert Silvers' nephew. I can offer a few corrections about biographical details in this obituary. First, Uncle Bob did not "grow up on a farm in Huntington, on Long Island". The family moved from Mineola to Farmingdale to Rockville Centre, Long Island by the time Bob was 9 years old, and he stayed in Rockville Centre until college. Bob was born just as the Depression began. His mother, Rose, had left her jobs as the first female RCA radio host and as a music critic in the 1920s to have a family, and his father, James "Jack" Silvers, owned small businesses at various times, including a restaurant. Both of Bob's parents were the children of immigrants of modest means. Bob's father was, at one point during Bob's childhood, the part owner of a small chicken farm that Bob's uncle Harry ran and that Bob and his brother Edwin visited in the summers. But Bob's father worked, after WWII, as a salesman for Pitney Bowes and had a modest home. The family was not "wealthy", and though Bob's father was a gentleman, he was not a "gentleman farmer". Jack and Rose maintained a middle-class lifestyle through the depression and sent their children to college, which was admirable enough. Bob left Yale Law School without graduating; the law was not sufficiently interesting to him. He did live for a year on a small boat in the Seine, but you could not call it a "yacht". I hope this is helpful. Samuel Silvers
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