(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
Public sticklers have annoyed me forever, and I’ve been meaning to write about that, but recently, in a post titled “Editors, Would You Do Me This Tiny Favour?” Katy McDevitt at PublishEd Adelaide did a great job of it herself. McDevitt gets to the meat of it in point 3:
This video from Stephen Fry isn’t new, but I somehow missed seeing it, and I’m guessing many of you might have as well. It expresses everything I believe about how editors might best respond to grammar and usage “out in the world” when it departs from the norms we follow in formal contexts. I could never say it as well as Fry does, so I’ll let him guest-post here today.
Dear Copy Editor, Having looked over your editing, the amount of it strikes me as excessive. Being what I consider a fairly accomplished writer, your intervention at that level seems unwarranted. Frankly, looking at all the redlining, your competence comes…
I’ve noticed something in my reading lately: children and young adults in print are disgusting eaters.
Not a Mountweasel Hanging around the Internet, you pick up some interesting lingo. Not the kind you’re probably thinking—I’m talking about the jargon you learn from linguists at sites like Language Log and Johnson. The terms below are old news to language observers, but some I learned only recently. You will certainly recognize the phenomena they describe, but did you know what they are called? Crash Blossom: When headlines go awry. Crash blossoms aren’t simply stupid (“Statistics Show Teen Pregnancy Drops Off Significantly after 25”) or funny (“Man Accused of Killing Lawyer Receives New Attorney”); they feature awkward phrasing that results in ambiguity: “Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case” or “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Cupertino Effect: When you doze off and let a computer or cell phone correct your spelling. (I’m sure I don’t need to give examples—in fact, I invite you to share your own in a comment.) Mondegreen: Misheard lyrics to a song—such as that cheerful Christian hymn “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.” Snowclone: A variation on a popular phrase, such as “What happens in X stays in X,” or “X is the new Y.” Spoonerism: A transposing of the initial consonants of words: I’m going to shake a tower. Mountweasel: Nothing to do with taxidermied weasels. A fake entry in a dictionary or lexicon, or a fictitious town on a map, placed as a trap for copyright violators. I knew of this practice from a brief stint as a cartographer, but the term for it came to my attention only recently at Johnson. And my favorite: the Shatner comma: Urban Dictionary describes these as “oddly placed commas that don’t seem to serve any actual purpose in punctuation, but make it look like you should take odd pauses, as William Shatner does when delivering lines.”You know, exactly, […]
For the last month I’ve been copyediting a second edition of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. War and battles and great hulking, stalking gods and heroes . . .
In a lather recently over copyeditors who waste time searching for rules that don’t exist, I failed to acknowledge something important in defense of the offenders . . .
Yesterday I posted these sentences for your scrutiny, challenging you to find errors in style and usage. Today I’ll tell you why some popular answers are wrong.* 1. If you want to lager beer, you’ll need a reliable refrigerator. Lager…
I’ve been reviewing copyediting tests lately, and I’m feeling mentorly. So just for fun, I have a little quiz for you. The sentences below are snippets from texts. How many errors in style or usage can you find in them?…
In his On Language column for the New York Times, Ben Zimmer discusses the use of the first-person plural in writing, specifically the perceived motives of writers who use it. Zimmer acknowledges the use of the editorial “we” to create…