As the old saying goes, you can take the girl out of copy editing, but you can’t stop her from judging you for spelling it “judgement.” This Canary blog series explores common errors and quick lessons I’ve gathered from years of experience as a former copy editor who made a living correcting other people’s mistakes. Don’t let these things happen to you!
Every editor has a Banishment List — a collection of words, phrases and expressions that ought to be exiled based on uselessness, triteness, falseness or just sounding dumb. Former New York magazine editor/current Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen’s Banishment List, what he called “Words We Don’t Say,” is among the most famous because of how well it holds up even 16 years after it was written. (I think we can all agree that zeitgeists are still as irritating as they were in the ’90s.)
According to Hugo Lindgren, who took over for Andersen in 1997, the list contained “words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine.” Lindgren continues in this 2011 Times blog post, “It’s still a pretty useful list of phoney-baloney vocabulary that editors are well-advised to excise from stories.”
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