Safire comma

[Kathleen E. Miller]

It hasn't been rejected by the Times. Safire likes to use what the Times'
editors call "false titles." In my copy, and after my proof, the piece
read, "Etymologist Barry Popik..." Since the gurus at 43rd street wont let
him do this, they changed it to "Barry Popik, an etymologist..." and the
second comma was inadvertently left out by the copy editor in New York. I
rarely get to see the final proof down here in the little old DC bureau, so
I didn't have time to catch it.

Kathleen E. Miller
Research Assistant to William Safire
The New York Times





At 07:07 PM 12/15/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>On Sat, 14 Dec 2002, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> > Nice to see the credit for Barry.   I did notice one typo (or, if you
> > prefer, type-o) just afterward, a missing comma ("Barry Popik, an
> > etymologist has found..."), but (slightly) more substantively,
>
>That second comma, the one after an appositive or even a relative clause,
>seems to have been rejected wholesale by the media in general. The
>sentence that Larry cites above reads as if the author were addressing
>Barry directly, informing him that some etymologist has found...
>
>Are pixels and electrons in such short supply these days?
>
>Less substantively,
>
>PR