Castle Walls Editing

Author: kim

  • A Sweet Dessert Is My Just Desert

    Desert and Dessert are words that should always trigger mental warnings.

    Dessert is the sugary treat you eat after dinner. As some say, the extra “s” is for “sweet.” Those with a sweet tooth might also be interested to know that while Merriam-Webster lists a dessert fork and a dessert knife as two words, it closes up dessertspoon. Go figure.

    The word desert is a bit more interesting. It is, of course, a hot, arid place. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Arrakis is a desert planet, while in Frank Norris’s McTeague, the desert (specifically Death Valley) is the place in which the titular character ends up handcuffed to a corpse. The great novel also introduced me to steam beer, which I’ll choose over pie for dessert any day of the week.

    As a verb, desert is used in the sense of “to abandon.” It might be understandable if you deserted your friends at the bar after one too many steam beers. (I’m joking. There’s no excuse for abandoning your friends at the bar.)

    The following meaning of desert causes more than a bit of confusion. As a noun, desert can also be used to indicate a deserved reward. The expression, then, is just deserts, not just desserts.

    The hell, you say!

    I know, I know. On the face of it, just desserts makes so much sense. Of course your reward should be something sweet. But in this expression dessert is incorrect. I’d love to have stats on how many young editors have seen this written correctly and, with the best of intentions and an unshakable conviction, added the extra “s.”

    It’s forgivable to miss an edit. It happens to the best of editors. But changing something that’s correct to something that isn’t simply can’t happen. It’s an editor’s greatest sin. Do no harm.

     

  • Your Own Private Library

    “Every one of us is losing something precious to us,” he says after the phone stops ringing. “Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”

    —from Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

     

    How do you treat your past? Do you tend to it regularly? Do you edit and reshape it? Would you even know if you were?

     

  • Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!

    This morning I grabbed House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and walked to my favorite breakfast shop. The place has a nice outdoor sitting area and a water view, so it’s a pleasant setting for reading and enjoying a cup of coffee.

    Little did I know I was on a collision course with an apostrophe issue.

    When it comes to punctuation errors, few cause as much trouble as the apostrophe. You can hardly blame people for getting irritated with it. Who do you think you are anyway, you preposterous, jumped-up comma? 

    Of course, it’s not the apostrophe’s fault that people confuse “its” and “it’s” or get flummoxed with its use when writing plural and possessive words. Misuse of the apostrophe is so prevalent, however, that it’s damn near epidemic.

    Today’s apostrophe in question showed up on a menu item. Menus, we all know, are a popular spawning ground for all manner of spelling and punctuation errors. We might wish they weren’t, but, hey, I’m awfully forgiving if the food and service are otherwise excellent.

    The shop uses playful names for their food items, and the sandwich that caught my eye (a poached egg, blue cheese, and grape jelly on an English muffin) is called “Finnegan’s Awake.”

    Ah, I thought, an allusion to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (confession: I’ve read Dubliners and Ullyses, but never Joyce’s most challenging work). The missing apostrophe in the book’s title changes the meaning from a wake for a man named Finnegan to the notion that many Finnegans should wake (or awake, as the sandwich would have it).

    Another misused apostrophe, I thought, all self-congratulatory smugness.

    But wait.

    Joyce was playing with the title of an Irish, 1850s ballad, “Finnegan’s Wake,” which has more recently been recorded by such bands as The Dubliners and Dropkick Murphys.  The song tells the story of Tim Finnegan, a hard-drinking man who falls from a ladder and bonks his noggin. Thought dead, Finnegan is prepared for burial, but at his wake rambunctious mourners spill whiskey (the “water of life”) on Finnegan, reviving him.

    Joyce’s title therefore suggests the rebirth of those fallen.

    The proprietors of the restaurant could very well have been referring to the song and not the book. Or they may not have given it that much thought. In any case, I should probably have just moved quickly past it and enjoyed my coffee, sandwich, and book.

    But it’s never that easy for editors, is it?

  • A Most Unfortunate Comma

    Few commas cause as much irritation as the one falling after the state in constructions such as this:

    Annapolis, MD, is a great place to visit.

    People are no less happy when it pops up here:

    Ed Begley, Jr., is a funny actor.

    And the irritation isn’t just from those who prefer Baltimore or the work of other comedians.

    Reactions generally fall along the lines of “It’s unnecessary,” “It’s stupid,” or even “I don’t care why it’s there, because I’m not using it!”

    Both Associated Press and Chicago styles call for this comma, so no matter the level of consternation, it’s a pill (bitter to many) that just has to be swallowed.

    Think of it this way: when you use this comma, you’re essentially saying, “Annapolis, which is in Maryland, is a great place to visit.” You’d never leave out the second comma in this instance, so if you put it in these terms, the troublesome punctuation mark should be much more palatable.

    While you can’t leave out the commas in city-state constructions, both commas can be left out with juniors and seniors. Unless the particular style you’re following specifies otherwise, it’s perfectly fine to say, “Ed Begley Jr. is a funny actor.” (Fine, of course, if you agree with the sentiment.)

    So if the comma in question makes you want to gnash your teeth and pull out your hair, then dropping it entirely with juniors and seniors should give you a little thrill. And who knows? If that second comma falls further and further from general usage, the style may eventually change.

    Stranger things have happened.

  • Bring Out Your Dead!

    While reading Mary Roach’s fascinating and surprisingly humorous Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I came across this sentence:

    “A series of modern-day Burke-and-Hare–type killings took place barely ten years ago, in Barranquilla, Colombia.”

    In the 1820s, William Burke and William Hare became notorious for selling corpses to Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, who eagerly bought the cadavers for the purposes of dissection. While grave-robbing was common enough, the problem here is that the two Williams, shall we say, hastened along the deaths of the cadavers they then sold to Knox.

    * Notice the proper way to make a plural of the name “William”—the plural of the last name “Williams” would be “Williamses.”

    Of interest to us, though, is the use of hyphens and en dashes in the sentence. Grouping adjectival expressions before a noun is simple enough. We hyphenate “modern-day” to hold it together so the reader can more easily see that it’s modifying “killings.” But what of “Burke-and-Hare–type”?

    We hold “Burke-and-Hare” together with hyphens: no problem there. But then we tack “type” onto the end with the en dash, which might look a bit odd to some. Why do we do this? “Type” has to apply to the full expression “Burke-and-Hare,” so we need something stronger than a hyphen: the en dash. Were we to use the humble hyphen there, “type” could be read as applying to “Hare” only. And we wouldn’t want to let Burke off the hook.

    So . . . you dissect a line of text. A dangling participle might make one think of a criminal hanging from the end of a rope. What is a full stop but the death of a sentence? An ellipsis might suggest a gradual slipping away from this world.

    Are there any other deathly (and grammar related) allusions you’d like to contribute?

  • Now That’s a Fire

    People love to point out other people’s mistakes. Sometimes this is done with an encouraging word and a gentle smile. More often, it’s done less kindly, and is perhaps accompanied by a pointed finger and raucous laughter (try tripping over a rug at a cocktail party sometime). Whatever the case, people generally feel a smug mixture of superiority and relief (Thank God that wasn’t me!) when someone else screws up.

    As a copy editor, I get paid to find other people’s mistakes. Diving into a manuscript and locating errors, seeing one red mark become two, five, ten, beyond count as the pages flip by, brings undeniable satisfaction. With every new mark, I experience a little charge.

    There are worse ways to make a living.

    Earlier today I came across a piece of publisher copy for a book I will not name. In the copy, a fire was described as raging through a residence, rendering the house “inhabitable.” That’s one hell of a helpful fire!

    I laughed, mentally pointing—and it was damned funny—but a part of me wanted to give that anonymous copy writer a friendly pat on the back and say, “Hey, we’ve all been there.”

    I suppose most people are protective of others in their professions, and the stark truth is that mistakes happen, even to the best of us.

    Once a mistake has been identified, it’s easy to circle it and isolate it and say, “How could you miss this? How could this happen?” The person saying this is usually not an editor but someone who, having found a goof, immediately believes himself or herself capable of having caught all the other thousands of mistakes in a document. (A point to be discussed at another time is that somehow the ability to read confers on nearly everyone the belief that that person is a writer or editor.)

    Unfortunately, even the best editors miss something from time to time, especially when someone is overworked, or not 100 percent healthy, or subject to all manner of distractions that can occur in an office.

    So, yes, mistakes happen. But as copy editors, we have to move forward and learn from these mistakes, adjust our processes if doing so can prevent similar mistakes in the future, and rededicate ourselves to achieving a perfection we can at least aim for, if not attain.

  • Lie Down Already

    Today I finished a book I had been looking forward to reading, and in fact the book had been a Christmas gift from my daughter, making me savor its reading all the more. I won’t name the book, though, because however much I enjoyed it—and I enjoyed it immensely—there was an incorrect usage throughout.

    And it rankled.

    The book repeatedly used “laying” when it should have used “lying,” and each time I came across one of these instances I was taken out of the book, the narrative spell broken by an inattentive copy editor. To be fair, the rest of the book was remarkably clean, and “lay vs. lie” issues are understandably difficult.

    But with the price of hardcover editions, you have the right to expect better.

    Lay means “to put” or “to place,” and its forms are lay, laid, laid, laying. Lay also requires an object to complete its meaning (a chicken lays an egg; I laid the envelope on the table).

    Lie means “to recline” or “to take a position of rest,” and its forms are lie, lay, lain, lying (I need to lie down; he was lying on the ground).

    A good trick is to substitute the appropriate form of the word place for the corresponding form of lay or lie, and if it makes sense, then you know to use lay (for example, being able to say “I placed the envelope on the table” lets you know that you should use a form of lay).

    It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to keep straight, especially for those who couldn’t give a rat’s arse, and especially considering that the matter is further confused by lay being the past tense of lie.

    Still, mastering the correct usage of lay and lie is well worth the trouble and may even win you a nod of approval from those who notice such things.

    At the very least, keeping these troublesome words straight will prevent you from irritating your audience, and whoever your audience is, you don’t ever want to inadvertently provide an excuse to quit reading.

    To wrap up, I’ll mention that the title of this blog entry is a reference to a novella from the fantastically talented horror and crime writer Tom Piccirilli. I only used the title because it’s one I like (especially the full title; go look it up!)—to be clear, it wasn’t his book that had the incorrect usage.

    I’ll also mention that last week I returned the book-giving favor to my daughter by attending a Karen Russell book signing and landing my daughter a signed edition of the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Lest anyone think I’m more selfless than is really the case, I also had Russell’s new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, signed for myself.)

  • Excuse the Intrusion

    Damned if sometimes things don’t just look funny.

    The other day I ran across an “a vs. an” issue that I can’t recall having even thought about before. As we know, when choosing whether to use a or an, we decide based on whether the word the article precedes begins with a vowel or a consonant sound. Thus, while we would say “a union,” we would alternatively say “an unfair practice.”

    What momentarily threw me was a sentence that used the word great and then, to let the reader know that the author was self-consciously repeating the word, used a construction similar to what follows.

    “The Great Gatsby spends a, uh, great deal of time . . .”

    The actual word choice wasn’t that poor, but you get the idea. The point of interest here is that, as a copy editor, I’m so attuned to matching a or an with the correct sound that seeing a before uh set off the ol’ alarm bells. As if acting on reflex, a part of me wanted very badly to change that a to an.

    Then I came to my senses.

    In the sentence, uh is an interrupting element. The author intended to say “a great”—no problem there—and uh, as an interrupting element, can simply be ignored as though it were surrounded by em dashes or parentheses.

    Interrupting elements are also famous for wreaking havoc with subject-verb agreement, but that is a discussion for another day.

  • Going to the Well Once Too Often

    One guy sits at the bar in his favorite watering hole. Another guy sits down next to him. After a brief exchange, it’s established that the second guy is from out of town. The first guy asks after the football team in the second guy’s home city.

    The second guy says, “They’re looking really well this year,” and he lingers just enough on the word well to reveal a hint of pride at his word choice.

    “That’s good,” says the first guy. “I’m glad they’re not ill.”

    And then a Boy Scout, a bear, and the president enter the bar, prompting the bartender to ask, “What is this, some kind of joke?”

    * * *

    In the same way that people are deathly afraid of saying “you and me” in any context, whether it’s grammatically correct or not (“You and I!” your first-grade teacher scolds), people are also afraid of using good incorrectly. Unfortunately, this leads to them always replacing it with well, which of course renders them susceptible to looking foolish.

    Good is an adjective. Well is an adverb. Simple enough.

    Adjectives come before nouns. Adverbs hover around verbs. Got it.

    Unfortunately, there is the sad case of the predicate adjective, often following “to be” verbs. Saying “He is good” indicates that someone is in high spirits or is generally in a satisfactory place in life. Saying “He is well” would indicate that the person is not sick. The confusion arises from a fear of using the adjective when the adverb is called for. Someone saying “He hits the ball good” would have made this mistake.

    In addition to “to be” verbs, there are reflexive verbs such as “looking” that can also take predicate adjectives, because the action of the verb refers back to the subject: “The Bashers look good this year.”

    Just between you and me, I’ve had my fill of wells this week.

  • Now I’m Lookin’ at a Flashback Sunday

    Quite some time ago, I was critiquing catalog write-ups, some of which I’d written, in a roomful of writers and marketers. A particular piece contained a phrase that read something like this: “A tale where such and such . . .” I made the suggestion that we change “where” to “in which.”

    One of the people in the room smirked and said, “So you’re an ‘in which’ guy.”

    Freeze-frame.

    I don’t recall my response, but I remember being taken aback. Like most people, I don’t cotton* to those who assume things about me and smugly cast me as a certain type. The implication was worse than that I didn’t know a specific grammar point. The implication was that there was a rule governing a usage and that I was blindly following that rule, even if a less formal usage would have been perfectly suitable, and maybe even preferred, in the context.

    To set your mind at ease, this film does not resume with me turning that room into The Wild Bunch. The comment did stick with me, though, most likely because I’m sensitive to how I’m perceived. It’s bad to be thought incompetent, but it’s far worse to be thought ridiculous, and I like to think of myself as the opposite of someone who mindlessly enforces rules across all situations, no matter the appropriateness.

    Intermission.

    I’d meant this blog post to be about the attitude one takes toward grammar, and I had thought to compare that attitude to one that a person might take toward politics. I was going to levy charges against marrying oneself to a viewpoint, whether it be right, left, prescriptivist, or descriptivist. I meant to talk about my self-loathing in regard to the scornful “reasonable” view. I was even going to talk about free will, but all that will have to wait for another post. I’ve realized that this post (admittedly a self-serving one in many ways) is about something more basic: why one edits.

    Return to the Theatre.

    Many years ago, my office mates and I were charged with assembling going-away gifts for a colleague named Lars, who was leaving our group to strike out on his own. Someone in the office (an accountant, not an editor, mind you) had decorated and labeled a container as “Lars’ Jar.” I don’t remember what was to go in the jar, but it was likely to be filled with well-wishing notes or something of the like.

    One of my other coworkers, fancying herself a grammar guru, made a showy display of hand-wringing over her contention that it should be written “Lars’s Jar.” She was sorely aggrieved that anyone who saw the jar would assume that Lars, in essence, had worked with a group of slack-jawed yokels, presumably because it was such an eye-poppingly huge punctuation gaffe.

    First things [deleted] last: The manner of forming the possessive of a singular noun ending in s is a style decision. Chicago recommends apostrophe-s, while Associated Press style, for instance, recommends the apostrophe alone (saving even a single space in a newspaper column can be a big deal). But even if it were something as uncontestable as misusing “its” for “it’s,” longtime fans of Steven Goff’s informative soccer blog would recognize the woman’s outrage as nothing short of “overegging the pudding.”

    The point isn’t the right or wrong of the matter but why the comment was made in the first place. It seems clear that it was meant to mark the commenter as in some way superior while at the same time disparaging the person who’d taken the trouble to craft the jar. In the workplace or out, correcting other people’s grammar is often done for similar reasons, and many have undoubtedly witnessed someone wielding the “Never end a sentence with a preposition!” stick to carry out just this form of tyranny.

    It’s not why I edit.

    In the Robert Rodriguez vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn, murdering thief Seth Gecko (George Clooney) discovers that his brother Richie (Quentin Tarantino) has brutally assaulted an innocent cleaning woman. Horrified, Seth tells Richie, “Do you think this is who I am? I am a professional thief. I don’t kill people I don’t have to.”

    When I see an editor lording his or her knowledge (or supposed knowledge) over someone else for the purpose of belittling that person, I think, This is not who I am.

    I like to imagine that copy editors are much like trash men, who during their largely unseen, early-morning rounds clean up our towns and cities. Copy editors, also largely unseen, clean up our text. I’m comfortable with the blue-collar nature of both jobs, and the world is a better place without garbage overflowing bins or dangling modifiers confusing our text.

    I recently interviewed someone for an editing position, and during the interview I allowed as to how I enjoy editing, how I enjoy being alone with a stack of pages and keeping at my desk. In an attempt to be ingratiating, the person said something along the lines of, “It’s good to correct other people, isn’t it?”

    No, that isn’t me. I’d rather think that what I’m doing is helpful to other people. I like to do a good job and be acknowledged for it, sure. I can’t deny a certain self-congratulatory impulse to pat myself on the back every time I mark an edit. I’m not proud of it, but it’s there. At the same time, I’d like to think the majority of that impulse stems not from a feeling of superiority but from a sense of satisfaction at doing my job well. I can also remind myself that as editors, it’s easy to feel superior when we’re registering all the good catches we’ve made, but none of us are immune from that embarrassing gut-punch when someone finds something we’ve missed (and all editors miss from time to time).

    I’m not an “in which” guy, although there are any number of times I’ll recommend using those two words over “where.” I have to imagine that “in which” guys, if they exist, don’t quote Robert Rodriguez movies. I do try to keep an editing mindset that’s consistent with being a decent person. As Seth said, “I may be a bastard, but I’m not a [deleted] bastard.”

    PS: A hearty congratulations to anyone who gets the reference in the title. My only justification is that it made me laugh.

    * As for the use of the word cotton: some of the write-ups were for Western novels, you lousy coffee boiler.