Merrill Perlman of the New York Times talks about the basics of the language in a session that has become an ACES staple.

Language is fluid, and sometimes we drown in it. Here’s a life raft for some of the basics that may be washed away in the flood of deadline — who and whom, which and that, danglers and such — as well as a discussion of words that you may THINK you use correctly, and that maybe you do. Or don’t.

Merrill Perlman is director of copy desks of the New York Times. She’s in charge of the paper’s 150-plus copy editors as well as the recruiting and hiring of copy editors. She’s a familiar figure at ACES, having presented seminars at all conferences but the first. She has been an editor at the Times in some capacity since 1983.

From the archives, here’s a review of Perlman’s session from Sé J. Reed in 2001:

Only if I knew. If only I knew. If I only knew “only!”

The English language is a tricky son-of-a-gun and no one knows that better than copy editors. Even those of us who make a living wielding our command of grammar and syntax sometimes have a hard time with even the basic “who” and whoms.”

That’s where Merrill Perlman comes in.

Perlman led an interactive workshop on the grammar demons that plague us all.

Perlman presented examples of the most common mistakes in usage from newspaper across the country. Attendees worked through handouts and drills, tackling the traditional “who” vs. “whom” and “which” vs. “that.”

“The thing about language is that eventually the bad usage will become acceptable,” Perlman said. Words such as “alright” vs. the proper “all right” are constantly being muddled. “‘Alright’ is already accepted in a lot of dictionaries, because it’s been used incorrectly for so long.”

The trick is, Perlman said, is to look at grammar rules as guidelines instead of rules.

“ ‘Does this break a rule?’ is the first question and ‘Does it work?’ is the second question,” she said. “If ‘Does it work’ outweighs ‘Does it break a rule,’ then it’s OK to break the rule.”

The perils of punctuation were also discussed – not the basics of use and misuse, but the philosophy and theory behind them.