Being an editor is mostly a matter of simply imposing your taste on others. You say “yes” and you say “no,” to story ideas, photographs, themes, covers, words. This is why I was and remain — you’ll excuse my egotism — a good editor: Right or wrong, I am sure and confident in my own taste, to an absolute and probably abominable degree. That’s all it is.
I was a senior editor at Vogue (don’t leave off the “senior”!) for a long eon, about eight years in the office and another decade working on contract from afar, and the whole thing operated on the big boss, Anna, saying “yes” or “no” to a concept, an image, a color, a shoe. Yes to electric-blue, no to baby-blue pastel. Yes to short red nails, no to long red ones. Anna’s decision-o-meter was successful, business-wise, because her taste was fair enough but essentially upper-middle. It was bourgeois, the tasteful end of upper-middle-class aesthetic decency. (That’s in my own shockingly snobbish opinion.) Her aesthetic sense was aspirational for the average American reader, in other words, but not actually too elevated or esoterically interesting, and that put Anna in a perfect sweet spot for dictating fashion ideas to the masses.
Anna was exacting in her way, but exacting in the cause of commercial, popular good taste; she reined in the extravagances, whimsies, and extreme-chic strictures of the staff editors who had a more imaginative, creative, or particular/peculiar eye (Hamish Bowles, Camilla Nickerson). The queen of all media herself did not have exquisite aesthetic sensitivity. She wore Manolo slingbacks and a Prada skirt — full, either pleated or circle — and left it at that, decade in and decade out. She ate a lamb chop or steak with two vegetables every day at lunch, and left lunch at that. I only went to her townhouse twice, I think, but I cast a critical eye on her collection of Majolica vases.
I was just pompous enough to do well in that world. The revisionist history of pop culture has painted an inaccurate portrait of what the world of glossy magazines was like at the turn of the millennium, when Condé Nast ruled the media universe and we prowled the Manhattan night in black Lincoln Town Cars. Pop culture depictions would have you believe the bosses were hard externally but soft at heart, and kind, behind the armor of their Dior sunglasses, but they were not. That world was extraordinarily cold. It was mean. Don’t try to argue with me about this. (And, side note, if you want to know the real back story of the title that one of Anna’s former blond assistants used for her best-selling book and blockbuster movie, “The Devil Wears Prada,” you just let me know.)
As an editor in the Vogue features department, I was never in the position of making aesthetic decisions about clothing, accessories, makeup, or shoes, but — to indulge in a bit of retrospective self-congratulation — I would like you to know that I did slowly exert my opinions about language on the entire editorial staff, swinging my swashbuckling sword, claiming a throne as the undisputed despot and arbiter of word-choice decisions at Vogue between approximately the years 1998 and 2006. “Not every hat is a ‘fedora’!” I would thunder. I’d swoop with a scowl into the copy department, to insist that my hissing alliteration on “slithering, sinuous, slinky snakeskin” (or whatever) was entirely intentional and that the junior fashion-writing staff needed to cease and desist from overusing the verb “snag.”
It was my great delight to try to work certain words back into the Vogue vernacular: “purse,” “pocketbook,” “pantihose” — words that had gone out of fashion in the 1970s or so, before my time, but that I wanted to appreciate and reclaim. “Pocketbook” and “pantihose” gave me absolute fits of giggles, because these words, with their class connotations, scared the more timid and less self-assured writers and editors at Vogue, those who were less confident than I in their social position as well as the correctness of their ear. I tried and tried and tried to slip “pocketbook” and “pantihose” back into the captions or fashion-news stories, but I was always caught by Anna in this caper. That I will give her: She read every single word of that magazine with eagle-eyed — no, raptorlike — scrutiny. I see her now, picking apart each paragraph on the printed-out pages, thin and slightly hunched, like an elegant vulture, as we did our monthly ritual review, walking behind her, taking notes, as she circled a special room where “the book” had been spread out on elbow-high shelving.
The rest of the staff knew better than to argue with me about whether our esteemed periodical should use the word “rug” or the word “carpet” in print. (“Carpet” is always déclassé, unless you are modifying it with “wall to wall,” in which case it’s acceptable, although it’s better to avoid mentioning wall-to-wall carpeting, full stop.) The British staff, of which there numbered many, were very perturbed by my iron-fisted insistence that in the United States, the social implications of the words “couch” and “sofa” were flipped, and that we, being an American magazine, needed to use the word “couch,” lest we accidentally exude a whiff of the New Jersey’s marshy meadowlands.
I know, I know. I was a monster! A monster of judgementalness. Still am. I have words I love and abide (“caboose,” “jubilee”) and words that I won’t allow to be spoken in my presence (“tummy”).
As I type this, human language appears to be in a death match on the field of combat, wrestled to the ground by the overwhelming strength of machine language. ChatGPT is writing half the words you will read this year.
To switch metaphors midstream, ChatGPT sings a particular song, and if you have spent enough years reading the actual human word, as many of us who still read newspaper columns have done, you will find yourself able to recognize ChatGPT’s tune instantly. ChatGPT can create very convincing melodies. ChatGPT prose hits all the right notes and sounds like real music, but it’s a chant or jingle. It isn’t the chorus of the cosmos, as the cacophony of human voices has been all through human history.
Well, hum. What’s a word editor to do at the twilight of the book and of print?
Speaking personally, I consider it a big, fat shame that the world needs fewer editors these days because — to again let loose with a bit of Vogue-level narcissistic self-assessment — editing-wise and as a fixer of others’ poor prose, I remain a Maserati among Mazdas. My skill set has been made superfluous. Pity. Dommage, as we said, slipping into boarding school French — but not frequently enough — at Vogue. If anyone out there needs a freelance word-decider, you can find me behind my desk in the office at the First Presbyterian Church.