Oh so trendy

I returned today from a vacation of relaxin', readin' (Mark Helprin's "A Soldier of the Great War," for the second time) and writin' (notes for a novel that's beginning to congeal in my soupy head) to discover the editing business still needs editors.
I Googled the phrase "passing fad" to find 345,000 citations. That means that 345,000 times some writer didn't care enough to think before putting fingers to keyboard. While not strictly redundant, the word "fad" means a "temporary fashion," so a fad is, by definition, passing. Would that we should think as much before writing as we do before stepping off a city curb. By the way, I was moved to this demi-diatribe by a Moira Herbst's BusinessWeek article: Energy Efficiency: A Passing Fad?
On a different note, I've enlisted the help of a longtime editorial colleague of mine, Jackie Damian, to contribute to this blog from time to time. (I'd love for it to be daily, but she does have a real life!) Jackie is one of the finest editors I've ever worked with. I've seen her transform the unintelligible into the articulate and the workable into the insightful. Her first contribution comes later this week.

Warning: Crocodiles ahead

My favorite author is Mark Helprin ("A Solider of the Great War" etc.). He tells soaring stories with pristine, precise prose that works its way into every pore of your soul. What got me hooked years ago was the fact that Helprin's prose -- his fiction -- is relentlessly optimistic, and not cheesily so. His writing made me realize I could slink through life as a cynic, or I could pilot along optimistically. Indeed, even in the darkest moments, there is life if you choose to see it.
He's a conservative columnist, and he writes (too infrequently) for The Wall Street Journal. Today he penned a winner: "McCain and the Talk-Show Hosts," a piece that finally took to task the jabbering jackasses of the jaw-jockey circuit.
His last words were priceless as he described: the "relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter." Most of us would labor for a day or more coming up with that description. For Helprin, no doubt, it flowed effortlessly. Man, if I could write like that..........

Onward:

"5 a.m. in the morning." That's what a.m. is: the morning. It's bad enough to be awake at that hour, let alone emphasize the point redundantly. A.M.=Ante Meridiem, or before noon in Latin. (Without the periods, of course, it means amplitude modulation, a form of radio wave, which, coincidentally, carries many of the jabbering jackasses of the jaw-jockey circuit.)