Debating language rules is copy editor's professional hazard

When it comes to the English language, you must never take anything for granted.

It ought to be a simple enough proposition.

If the singular referring to the famous sled dogs known as Huskies is Husky, then it follows, doesn't it?, that the singular of the famous fish known as muskies is musky.

But if you're a good copy editor, something smells fishy about that logic. When it comes to the English language, you must never take anything for granted, nor should you expect that any of the language's hundreds of grammatical and spelling rules are rules in the sense we usually think of them. That is as rules -- consistent, reliable, resolute, specific …

One of our copy editors applied the "ies/y" rule when writing a headline for a story about muskies being stocked in local forest preserves. "Elusive musky is back," our headline announced. Knowing the allure of muskies for sport fishermen, we played the story on the front page in many of our editions -- but some of those same sport fishermen, and at least one editor, took issue, contending that the singular form of the muskellunge's nickname is "muskie" and setting off one of those electronic mini-debates that leads you to wonder whether e-mail is really such a valuable tool after all.

Some writers avowed they'd seen the term both ways. Some suggested the brilliant strategy of turning to the dictionary, to which one editor pointed out that her dictionary offered both spellings. Yet another editor pointed out that our outdoor writer, Mike Jackson, has been referring to "muskie" in the singular for years.

In the end, style monitor Colleen Thomas added the word to our stylebook, so that ever hereafter the Daily Herald will have a consistent standard, hopefully heading off the kind of debate that perhaps only copy editors and English teachers truly appreciate -- until the term in question involves someone else's specialty.

For example, during the Turin Olympics, we carried a headline invoking the Italian term Benvenuto for "welcome" and several people called us to claim the term should have been Bienvenuto, a spelling we found to be used by some but not all Italians. Similarly, whenever we write about "bocci ball" in our Neighbor editions, we hear from aficionados of the game who spell it differently.

Dealing with tens of thousands of words, phrases and images every day under the pressure of constant deadlines, our copy editors fight an uphill battle just to catch obvious and serious spelling and grammar mistakes. The challenge is exacerbated by the need to be authoritative when writing about specialty topics. A lengthy discussion about the finer points of referring to a fish may sound less than scintillating, but it's sure good to work with people who are willing to debate -- and I think secretly enjoy debating -- such arcane issues.

All the same, I couldn't help envying that Australian identified in an AP story this week as the last person on the planet who speaks Amurdag, one of apparently thousands of languages considered on the verge of extinction. When you're the only person who speaks a language, it's a snap to make the rules -- or bend them to the need of the moment.

Of course, if you want to communicate with others, you'll have to pick a more common tongue. So, we'll just have to accept the occasional e-mail brawl as a professional hazard. Hopefully, the result will be more authoritative writing on topics aimed at readers who are themselves the real authorities.