I am not a big fan of copy-editors.
On one occasion, relatively early in my career in the Ed Biz, I sent a letter to the "Commentary" section of The Chronicle of Higher Education,
a letter coming in just over their 300-word limit. But there was an
easy fix: I had the phrase in it "hold in contempt," and I just changed
that to "contemn" and saved two words. "Contemn" isn't exactly a common
word, but it's only two syllables, and it's not difficult to figure out
in a context where it replaces "hold in contempt." Besides, "to dis(s)"
hadn't been invented yet, and "to disrespect" hadn't returned to White
English (according to The Oxford English Dictionary, "to disrespect" has been in and out of fashion since the 17th century); given those limitations, "contemn" was as accurate as I could get.
The copy-editor (of course) changed "contemn" to "condemn."
I
was not pleased. "Condemn" would work in the sentence, but that wasn't
what I meant to say; "contemn" was what I meant, and s/he could've just
looked it up and see (1) it's a word, and (2) it was the right word.
A
bigger deal was when my co-editor and I were driven up the wall by
apparently random changes by the copy-editor of "that" to "which" and
"which" to "that" in an anthology of essays we were editing. We called
the publishers and asked to talk to the copy-editor and were told they
wouldn't put through that call. So we asked for her, or less likely his,
name and were told they didn’t release that information.
As
the received wisdom of the time advised, we "got in touch" with our
feelings about the copy-editor and guessed quickly why the publisher
kept copy-editor names anonymous.
I
was in a department of English and asked around, and one colleague
looked at the corrections (?) and said, "Oh — it's an East-Coast
affectation."
I replied with my usual, sophisticated "Huh?"
And my colleague explained, "Remember the comment in Strunk and White" — Elements of Style
(1918 f.) a classic writing guide — "that it wasn't a rule of grammar
or anything like that, but it'd be nice if writers used 'that' with
necessary, 'restrictive" modifying clauses and '[comma], which' with
nonrestrictive clauses ….' As in, "The car hit the bump that jutted up
in the street" as opposed to, "The car missed the dangerous bump, which
jutted up in the street."
Ah,
yes, I remembered it well, that rule of thumb, since the one question I
missed on some State-mandated high school grammar and punctuation test
involved "that" and "which" and the misunderstanding by the test-makers
that "useful advice" isn't the same as "a rule of grammar."
Brits
especially use "that" and "which" pretty much interchangeably, and the
copy-editor had corrected the English of, among others, Brian Aldiss,
who may not have had a college degree (perhaps not even a high school
diploma) but did live in Oxford, England, and occasionally taught at the
university they keep there: a guy who had already or was soon to write
some notable fiction and scholarship, work with Stanley Kubrick and then
Steven Spielberg on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence,
and get letters after his name like "OBE" and "FRSL" ("Officer of the
Most Excellent Order of the British Empire" — no shit on the full title — and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature), et bloody cetera.
So I've had my complaints about copy-editors and had a fantasy or two about throttling them.
Still, I mourn the passing of copy-editors and proofreaders; we, all of us, need them.
For example …
.
For
example, I once wrote a letter that I signed with the relevant notice
of my editing something or other, and very impressively, I'm sure, typed
the job title as "Ediotor." I also once addressed one of my editors as
"ediotor." It was a standard Freudian typo with me, for reasons that
should be fairly clear from what I wrote above: "editor" + "idiot" —>
"ediotor," including when I was doing the editing.
And my father before me could have used an editor/proof-reader on at least one occasion.
He
learned of it reading an amused note that came with shirts he'd ordered
for his credit-clothing store. The note went something like, "Thank you
for your order, although we were somewhat surprised you still wanted
our product, given the opinion you expressed." Accompanying the goodly
number of shirts he'd ordered was his order letter, where he'd omitted
the "r" in "shirts."
Nowadays,
of course, we have few proofreaders and copy-editors but depend upon
SpellCheck and AutoCorrect. So now our errors can still include "this"
instead of "his" or writing "shits" when we mean "shirts" — "shit" is
certainly a word I've taught SpellCheck — but also utterly random and/or
grotesque mistakes.
Here
I'll leave the reader to fill in examples, since I've repressed the
memories of most of them. What I find is that apparently The System
decided that my "wrung out" — or the typo I made for that — wasn't
acceptable, but "rung out" was fine; or is perfectly willing to refer
someone to "seen 122" rather than movie "scene 122."
More
serious, of course, is if you don't check autoCompletion or autoFill
of, say, an e-mail address and an important e-post that is supposed to
go to one address goes to an address the intended recipient hasn't used
for years, or a confidential note for "Mike K." ends up going to "Mike
L."
Well, and so forth.
I've argued before that "Spelling Counts";
that's still true, but nowadays one pretty much needs to know only how
to spell approximately. If you use a computer, tools are available to
check your spelling, to suggest spelling, and to define words for you to
ensure that what you're correctly spelling is the word you want (e.g., I
once wrote that I'd be discrete [ = "individually separate and distinct"] when I meant discreet [= "careful and circumspect"; there's a difference). What we need now is greater care and a good eye.
And
we can't always exercise that care for our own writing, and all of us
have our areas of ignorance. If the writing is important, we need to get
it checked.
Now and then, anyway, everybody who writes needs an editor.
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