When you find yourself fighting the same battle over and over again, and it’s about something of no real importance, and you’re battling someone you really shouldn’t be at war with, and you never win, you just reactivate the painful scars of previous fighting and set up for the next pointless round, it’s time to get counseling. You need to break the cycle.
Philip Corbett, associate managing editor for standards over at The New York Times, is locked into an iterative dispute with the writers for the paper. Not about some important domestic matter, like who keeps forgetting to leave the toilet seat down, but about a tiny matter of optional inflection. Required as he is to enforce the edicts of the paper’s style manual, he feels he has to struggle to stop writers using a very familiar stylistic option.
This relationship needs help. Let me try to offer a little therapy.
Corbett is…