10 additional stray copyeditorial thoughts

[a sequel of sorts]

1. I identify myself as a copy editor who copyedits in the service of the craft of copyediting, and thus I have copyeditorial thoughts. (For having typed “copyeditorial” I’ve been awarded—three times just now, in fact—the red dots of judgment.) Some copy editors identify themself as copyeditors, which displeases my eye, and refer to what they do as copy-editing, which displeases my eye and is a waste of a hyphen. YM, as they say, MV.

2. When I got started in the copyediting business, three decades and a skosh ago, I believed that the most important quality in a copy editor is correctness (by which I latterly came to understand that I meant, alas, strictness and inflexibility). It took me a while—happily not too long a while, though surely apologies are owed to the first writers whose manuscripts I worked on—to realize that the most important quality in a copy editor is the ability to listen. One’s job as a copy editor, I eventually learned, is not to rethink and rewrite a writer’s manuscript into one’s own notion of what is right or appropriate or good (whatever those may mean); one’s job as a copy editor is to attend to what a writer is doing and then, helpfully and respectfully, offer advice re valid improvements and refinements that will make the writer’s writing into the best possible version of itself that it can be. (Yes, of course there are such things as errors, and errors need to be found and fixed; that goes without saying, though apparently I feel the need to say it.) I make it a habit—and I urge other copy editors to make it a habit as well—to read the first thirty or so pages of a manuscript with one’s hands figuratively tied behind one’s back before even contemplating laying so much as a finger on it. Hopefully¹ by then you’ll have a sense of what the writer is up to (it might be a bit premature after thirty or so pages, to say nothing of grandiose, to suggest that you’ve internalized the writer’s voice, but ultimately that’s your goal) and can thoughtfully, meaningfully roll up one’s sleeves (once one’s untied one’s hands) and get to work.

3. Good writers, I believe, appreciate being well copyedited, accent on good and well. Less adept writers may view a copy editor’s suggestions and alterations as an affront to their talent and will balk at almost everything you say and do, often increasingly angrily.²

4. In my experience, writers do not wish to be told that everything they’re doing is correct simply because they’re doing it. They appreciate thoughtful advice, and they (well, at least the ones I’ve worked with; it’s not like I know everyone) especially appreciate being protected from the carping of readers-down-the-pike who are inclined to carp. Which leads me to:

5. The extent to which one, as a writer, is willing to bend or even break the so-called rules of English (I say so-called because there is far more gray³ than people sometimes suspect in these matters than black or white) should be, I think, determined by consciousness and deliberateness. Rules are meant to be broken, as they say, but it’s always a good thing to know what the rules are, so-called or otherwise, before you break them. And as I say, if you’re going to irritate your readers, do it on purpose, not by accident.⁴

6. For instance, if you describe someone on the verge of vomiting as “nauseous” rather than “nauseated,” you can be certain that a portion of your readership will wrinkle their noses at you, and not simply because they don’t relish descriptions of Technicolor yawns, but I suspect that it will be a relatively tiny portion of your readership. I don’t think I even knew that there was such a word as “nauseated” till I was well into adulthood, so I persist in “nauseous” because I’m used to it, comfortable with it, and it sounds like me.⁵ Sounding like oneself is, I think, key in writing. Be yourself, as Oscar Wilde never said. Everyone else is already taken.

7. Do you write “set foot in” or “step foot in”? The former tends to be described as the correct version (it’s inarguably more popular, vastly so), and the latter is often derided as a latter-day aberration.⁶ But both have been knocking around for a good bit, and I can’t say that I see much meaningful difference in their meanings.⁷ (Though I’ve just now encountered the assertion that “set” sounds more deliberate. OK, I like that.) When I see “step foot in” in a manuscript, I’m apt to change it to “set foot in,” mostly because I think that I ought and because writers tend not to care one way or the other. (Neither, apparently, do I.)

8. That said, you can be danged sure that if you ever follow the word “comprised” with the word “of,” alarm bells will go off all over the joint. As our eloquent friends at Merriam-Webster inform us: “Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 2 [that is, “comprise” used to mean “compose” or “constitute”] is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 2 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 2 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up.” What’s a copy editor to do? Well, if your writer has written “comprised of,” you might want to tactfully note in the margin that “composed of” might be taken as properer and leave it up to the writer to decide. (Shocking, I know, but letting writers decide what to do with their own writing is never an especially bad idea.) As for me, I’ll write “comprised of” with the same perhaps obnoxious brio with which I’ll write “I could care less,” specifically and particularly because I know that it’s going to piss (some) people off. And that is my God-given right as an occasional people-pisser-offer.

9. As to the notorious “begs the question,” let me simply say this: If you use the phrase to mean “inspires or demands that a question be asked” rather than in the venerable sense of, more or less, asserting as a fact a premise or conclusion that you haven’t in fact proved, or asserting the correctness of a premise or conclusion by blithely declaring the premise or conclusion correct in and of itself, you are going to be called out by a significant portion of the populace as a subliterate boob, and it’s simply not, I think, worth the bother. That the newerfangled use is increasingly popular is inarguable but doesn’t make it any less irksome to, again, that significant portion of the populace, no matter that that significant portion of the populace may well be aging out of significance and rapidly dying off, possibly of apoplexy.⁸

10. If you can’t wait to see what I have to say about “enormity,” “fulsome,” and “[the] hoi polloi,” I invite you to open your copy of that fine handbook Dreyer’s English, available wherever better (and presumably worse) books are sold, and of course very much takeoutable from your local library, and look ’em up.⁹

Ten thoughts (the last, yes, a cheat) seem sufficient for a Sunday, don’t you think? I’ve made a note to myself to pick up this thread with yet further thoughts on dashes vs. parentheses, inadvertent rhymes and puns, “between” and “among,” “each other” and “one another,” chaise longues, my overfondness for the phrase “garden variety,” and the copyeditorial significance of my prize and most peculiar hobbyhorse the 1899 musical Florodora, but more on that presently.¹⁰

Florodora, the musical that dares ask the question “Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?”

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The Fine Print

Thank you for being here. This ’stackery work of mine is free to all readers and will remain that way; if you’ve chosen to contribute financially to its and my upkeep, you’re doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful.

Benjamin

[Cover painting: Leonid Pasternak, The Throes of Creation, c. 1892]

1. Oh boy here we go again. I draw your attention to earlier copyeditorial thought no. 23.

2. Absolutely true story: I was once shown a manuscript (an actual collection of pages, that is; this was back in the paper days) in which a writer had responded to a repeated suggested change—as I recall the suggestion was valid and should have been heeded, but that’s not really the point—with, the first time, “Stet,” then, the second time, “Stet!,” then, the third time, “I SAID STET!!!”

3. It is generally understood that Americans spell gray “gray” and that Brits (and their friends, associates, and allies) spell gray “grey.” That said, any number of American writers will go quite red, carmine, and scarlet in the face when, in copyediting, their e’s are a’d. I’ve always suspected that these writers spent an inordinate amount of time in their childhoods reading books like At the Back of the North Wind and The Wind in the Willows and that the e spelling burrowed deep into their souls, never to be dislodged. (I’ve also developed the somewhat crackpot idea that, push comes to shove, gray and grey are two different colors, gray being brighter and more silvery, and grey being leaden and sodden.)

4. When I die, someone else will have to attempt to stop the younger folk from writing “on accident,” to say nothing of the odious “based off of.” In the meantime, I remain vigilant.

5. Also because those good folk at Merriam-Webster, my go-to dictionary, grant me permission to do so.

6. A journalist friend once told me that the distinguished newspaper he works for discourages writers from using “former” and “latter” because they confuse readers. That makes me all kinds of sad. (Real-time self-editorial note: I’d written “A journalist friend of mine,” then deleted the “of mine.” It felt unnecessary, no?)

7. See also “champing at the bit” vs. “chomping at the bit,” and you can explain to me the alleged difference between them from now till the horses come home, and I still won’t get it. (The difference between them, I think, is largely that people who prefer “champing” get to look down their muzzles at people who say “chomping.”)

8. “If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building,” as my late mother was wont to suggest, “would you?” is not a traditional rationale in copyediting, but perhaps it should be.

A further thought: I’ve occasionally encountered the suggestion that one of the problems of “begs the question” (in its traditional use, that is) is that it’s an inelegant and uneloquent translation of what the original Greek phrase is meant to mean. (I don’t speak Greek, so I’m not qualified to judge.) And that problem is compounded by the fact that the phrase very much sounds like what it’s increasingly coming to mean. So really, one can’t win.

9. And my gosh, let’s not forget Stet!, the game that’s fun for the whole family! To say nothing of the dog.

Sallie!

10. I only ever use “presently” to mean “soonish,” never to mean “now.” (The “now” meaning cannot be called incorrect, though I know that some of you want it to be called incorrect.) That said, as long as we’re down here, if you ever want to severely irritate a Brit—and, really, sometimes you just need to—wield the word “momentarily” in the sense of “presently” rather than in the sense of “for a moment or two or three.” It gets them every time.