Don't say this editor passed on; just say he died

Editor's note: John Addington, a Star Tribune editor who influenced the newspaper's style and usage standards over a career that lasted nearly 50 years, died last month at 83. His colleague Stephen Ronald spoke at Addington's memorial service last Friday. This commentary is adapted from Ronald's remarks.

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John Addington loved newspapers. He loved reading them; he loved working for them. And he was ideally constituted to be a newspaper editor because he knew at least a little bit about almost everything, and he knew a lot about some things. He was steady, precise and fast.

John loved newspaper people -- at least most of them. In the obit she wrote for the Star Tribune, Allie Shah quoted me as saying John was "avuncular." He was like a favorite uncle to most of his colleagues over decades of time.

Very few people in a newsroom inspire the sort of universal affection that John enjoyed. A list of the reasons sounds familiar -- he was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And sweet and gentle.

John loved the language. He knew how it worked and how it should work. His standards for usage and grammar were high, and his standards can be said to have been the newspaper's standards because he taught young editors (and old ones, too) every night. And he was the Stylatollah -- the compiler and interpreter and burnisher of the stylebook.

His peeves were widely known:

Needless words. He didn't even like needless parts of words. Why write "hallway" when "hall" will do?

Cliches. He thought they were lazy writing and would stamp them out when he could. For years the wire services from Washington always referred to "nearby Andrews Air Force Base," but John spared readers from the "nearby."

Dangling modifiers. He made up this one to inveigh against them: "Gleaming with ethereal beauty, I viewed the Taj Mahal in the moonlight."

Euphemisms. John seldom was visibly angry at work, but he complained bitterly about the people who made hospitals medical centers and jails correctional facilities.

Redundancies. He would eliminate them from copy, but he chuckled over them and saved them. I remember his favorite: "illustrated wall mural."

His delights in the language were widely known as well:

Puns. I refuse to give you an example, because this many people groaning together could damage the sanctuary.

Word games. He was so good at crossword puzzles that for decades he worked every one before publication to check its accuracy. And more often than you'd expect, he would find it necessary to fix an incorrect clue.

John and I liked the Ten Game. Start with a well-known person's name and then relate it, one by one, to 10 other names until you return to the original. I'd dash off a list in haste and always have some weak connections. John carried a tiny notebook and would polish a list in odd moments for days. He had no weak connections.

John loved to laugh and to share funny stuff with coworkers. In a profession that's frequently frantic, a sense of humor can help one cope for, oh, say 50 years.

September also saw the deaths of Mike Cooney, another Star Tribune copy editor and lover of the language, and usage guru William Safire of the New York Times. Some of you might say that is ironic. John would say NO, NO, NO. That is coincidental, not ironic.

I'll finish with a suggestion: That we all honor John's memory by making sure that our subjects and their verbs always agree, that our pronouns and their antecedents always agree, and that we always agree that we are privileged to have known him.

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Stephen Ronald, 68, was a Star Tribune editor for 36 years, many of them as the newsroom supervisor at night. He is a landscape painter and lives in Minneapolis.

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