“Hilburn . . . had the access and longevity to get to know musicians better than few in the media do today.”
– Associated Press

Is “better than few” the same as “less well than many”?

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Say what?

“Good sense is a thing all need, few have, and none think they want.” — Benjamin Franklin

“I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.” — Walter Savage Landor

Whether none should be singular or plural is the kind of question that makes the nonprescriptive linguists feel smug and superior. But people who work in publishing know that some standards are needed — even if not the same ones for every book.

So, which is correct?

1. None of the editors really understands language.
2. None of the editors really understand language.

The first sentence presumes that none takes a singular verb, the second sentence that it takes a plural verb. I think more people would be likely to use the second formulation in ordinary speech, but some editors insist that none should be considered equivalent to “not one,” and therefore should take the singular.

That sounds plausible — except that it’s nonsense. None derives from an Old English word that is related to the German nein. Its constellation of meanings centered on the concept of “not any,” but there is no reason to consider it a strict equivalent to “not one.” In fact, back in the early twentieth century even old tight-assed Henry Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, urged writers to avoid the singular.

The reality is that sometimes none takes the singular and other times the plural. Rather than think of it as equivalent to “not one,” think of it as sometimes used that way and other times used as equivalent to “not any.” Thus:

1. None of the linguists are good writers [not any of them can write]
2. None of us is the chosen one [not one of us is Harry Potter]

In other words, you have to use your judgment. Sometimes you could go either way. Trust your ear — after all, there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.

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Is none singular? Are none plural?

According to Language Log

Lakoff wrote a 23-page single-spaced blast against this man’s recommendations, showing in detail and with clear arguments the nature of the hole up which the editor’s head was. And then unusually it turned out to be all happy endings: the linguists won, the editor resigned from the project, the editing changes were not made, the title was kept, and the book was a huge hit.

Is a happy ending from editing so unusual? Is there then no useful role for the copy editor? Of course there is. These folks can and often are quite helpful — even to nonprescriptive linguists — but they need to bring the proper attitude to the job. (It shouldn’t be necessary to say this.) Rather than seeing their role as grammar dominatrices they need to recognize that their assignment is to help authors realize their goals according to the strategies implicit in their works.

Years ago one of my favorite free-lance editors was an aspiring actress. Working with her I realized that copy editors are not unlike actors. Both are trying to immerse themselves in and in effect embody an author’s words. Copy editors need to be flexible, let go of their own voice, and adapt to the author’s individual style. Each edit should be a collaboration between the author and the editor, a unique work of art.

Some editors, though, can’t let go in that way — they stick to their guns come hell or high water. But don’t damn the whole profession because of them.

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image via freefromeditors.com

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A role for the copy editor

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It’s urgent!

According to BusinessWriting.com, these are the 25 most  commonly misspelled words in English.

I don’t consider myself a very good speller, for an editor (I just look everything up). But this test seemed easy to me. The only question that I thought was a little tricky was the one that asked about a British spelling, since I’m only familiar with U.S. style.  I figured it was a trick question and answered with the U.S. spelling, which luckily was right.

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Spelling test

For example, I e-mailed a print rep earlier today to ask, “Would the 60# Natural Smooth paper be cheaper than the one I had speced?”

Should it be specked? speced? specced? spec’d? or something else?

And no, no one would say “the one I specified.”

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What the heck is the past tense of spec?

Pick the spelling preferred by Webster’s New Collegiate:

6.
___ supercede
___ superceed
___ supersede
___ superseed

15.
___ miniscule
___ minniscule
___ minnuscule
___ minuscule

Answers after the break . . .

15.
___ miniscule
___ minniscule
___ minnuscule
X__ minuscule

Some might allow supercede with a cee, but it is a variant spelling; supersede is preferred (needless to say, this only applies to U.S. usage; also, the test referenced Webster’s New Collegiate as the spelling authority). As I mentioned, I’m surprised so many of the editors missed minuscule.

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Two more tough words to spell

It means “to dry; to preserve by drying.”

I’m hiring a temporary replacement editor for a colleague who will be out several months on a medical leave. I got a lot of very qualified applicants. To whittle them down I produced a test of 85 objective questions. I tested the top 14 candidates, all with sterling credentials. Apparently the test was harder than I thought — the average score was 66 percent.

The first twenty questions were multiple choice spelling questions. Thirteen of the fourteen editors disagreed with Webster’s New Collegiate on how this word is spelled:

13.
___ desicate
___ desiccate
___ dessicate
___ dessiccate

Correct answer after the break . . .

. . .

13.
___ desicate
X__ desiccate
___ dessicate
___ dessiccate

The double c comes from the Latin word siccus, dry. I think it is related to words for sack or bag: Latin saccus, Greek sakkos, Hebrew saq.

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image from mbollino’s photostream

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A hard word to spell

Some pretty porous copy on this text panel about porous paving at the National Botanical Gardens near the capitol building in Washington, DC. (Official, nonpartisan, federal government-approved typos.)

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Poor, poorer, porous

Book editors are a peculiar mixture of optimism and cynicism. They begin as idealistic literature enthusiasts — they probably start with a ridiculously low-paying job, just because it’s “in publishing” — but those who survive are all too likely to get fried by the strains of book publishing (an extremely difficult business) and turn into cynics who will publish any crap if they think they can push it off the shelves.

But inside these crusty exteriors an optimist still lives. Each time a manuscript arrives on their desk they are hoping that it will be the book — the one that will sell like crazy, maybe be a critical success. The editor’s career, in fact, depends on that manuscript showing up.

So when editors find a promising memoir, they want it to be true. They are predisposed to believe. That’s the optimist in them. Meanwhile, the cynic in them says, Even if it isn’t true, who will know or care?

This might sound extreme, but I think it is fair to say that on some level many editors today despise their readers — they know they are putting out garbage, so if people are buying it, it must mean they have no discrimination. So the editor has come over time to believe that readers aren’t smart enough to question the authenticity of the book to be published. After all, they’ve swallowed plenty before now.

What can be done? If publishers care to change — and they will, if their bottom lines start to suffer — they need to take the process of vetting manuscripts out of the control of editors. A book editor is never going to be like a newspaper reporter who at least understands the concept of challenging sources (that’s another story).

The only safe way to handle this is for an independent person, a fact checker who is not reporting to the editor, to vet manuscripts whose authenticity can be questioned. Unless an approach like this is adopted the fake memoirs will continue to flare up periodically, as natural a phenomenon as sun spots.

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Why are book editors so gullible?

WORDSMITHING: The process of going through a document and making sure the best possible word is used in all circumstances. — ww.lewiswritingservices.com/glossary.htm

If there is one word I would like to ban permanently it’s wordsmithing. In my day job there is someone who likes to say “Give it to Tom for wordsmithing.” The implication, to my ear, is that editing is merely cosmetic. In fact, as we know, style is content and content is style, and a good editor’s work is substantive and not just superficial.

An analogy would be accusing a politician of not being substantive because he gives a good speech. But surely no one would ever make that charge, right?

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The screenshot above is from John Langdon’s Wordplay. Wordsmith is one of the ambigrams shown on the site. An ambigram is a graphic that spells a word in more than one direction. Wordmithing in this Lewis Carrollian sense is an acceptable usage.

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Wordsmithing

• Hooray for the ;
• I say! A subterranean semicolon!
• FANBOYS and the Semicolon
• Colbert on punctuation
• How to Use Punctuation Correctly
• Punctuation lives
• The Elements of Spam
• Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to differentiate itself from the hoi polloi?

Well, maybe that’s reading too much into what might just be a random flare-up of semi-colonitis. In any case, I like this exchange from the Colbert link above.

• Tulugaq: Kurt Vonnegut’s take on it was a little less warlike and more of a mandate: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Me, I like the poor semicolon and the colon alike, so I guess I just have to be a conscientious objector. Sorry, Steve Colbert.
• The Ridger, FCD: How can a hermaphrodite be a transvestite? Do they dress like asexuals?

For anyone with market aspirations in today’s publishing climate, Vonnegut’s advice remains sound. But what would Flaubert be like without the semicolon as the hinge on which his crafty sentences swing?

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Shown: Arabic semicolon from brill.nl.

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Semi-buzz

But one thing that has been annoying me lately is what I regard as the misuse of the word refute. Newspaper journalists and others consistently use refute when they mean rebut. They will write, “Senator Obama refuted Senator Clinton’s argument that she is the most electable candidate.” What I understand from that sentence is that Obama proved that Clinton’s statement was wrong. Whereas what the author means to say is that Obama responded to Clinton’s assertion and argued for a different point of view — in other words, he rebutted her argument.

• refute: to prove to be false or erroneous
• rebut: to oppose by contrary argument

I know that some would say that these words are or can be synonymous, or that words are defined by their usage, which should just be described and not prescribed. But that sacrifices a distinction that we are otherwise able to make, one that seems to me worth preserving.

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Refute vs. rebut

Once upon a time tech types used to track stories on Digg.com. When a post got promoted to Digg’s front page it would bring your site a huge amount of traffic. The web economy is a numbers game — the more views you get the more likelihood of getting links, clicks on ads, subscriptions, and so on. Therefore, getting on the Digg front page was valuable. And when something is valuable, people will figure out ways to improve their chances of getting it.

What happened at Digg was that a clique of “power users” gained control of the system for their mutual benefit. The voted up each other’s stories, and voted down those of others. As a result, Digg became less useful to regular users. It no longer has the influence it once had. It is said that Digg blacklisted stories from some sites and manually killed others. Finally, last week, Digg announced fundamental changes to its algorithm.

Occasionally you will see stories in the upcoming section with 100+ Diggs – this is evidence of our promotion algorithm hard at work. One of the keys to getting a story promoted is diversity in Digging activity. When the algorithm gets the diversity it needs, it will promote a story from the Upcoming section to the home page. This way, the system knows a large variety of people will be into the story.

In other words, Digg is counting some votes as worth more than others (shades of Animal Farm). Similarly, Google once counted a link as a link in figuring page rank. Now they use a complicated formula for determining the value of links, and they further moderate page rank with several other factors. Finally, with Wikipedia we have seen problems caused by ineffectual refereeing of stories, which has led to the creation of Citizendium, a sort of refereed version of Wikipedia, which frequently has more reliable content.

And that’s why we need editors. Without some directing vision a publishing company is nothing but a random house.

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RELATED: Digg Demonstrates The Failure Of Completely Open Collaborative Networks

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The need for editorial direction

The first thing to realize is that the furor is the result of a promotional campaign for a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary; the sixth edition has omitted 16,000 hyphens that were included in the previous edition. The popular press has blamed e-mail for this, but the trend toward reduced hyphenation has actually been going on since at least the middle of the twentieth century.

What makes this a nonstory for me — besides the “who cares” aspect — is the source. If you are using the Oxford English Dictionary as a guide to spelling, all I can say is, stop now. The OED has no equal as an etymological and historical dictionary of English usage. But as a guide to spelling it has always been decades behind the times, and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here. The sixth edition of the Shorter is playing catch-up with other dictionaries, and now is hardly the time to make a fuss about hyphens that perished half a century ago.

Check out these examples — not chosen by me but just picked up from the press reports — of words that according to SOED6 have changed from being hypenated to being spelled open or closed:

• Words that the SOED now spells open:
  • fig leaf
  • hobby horse
  • ice cream
  • pin money
  • pot belly
  • test tube

• Words that the SOED now spells closed:
  • bumblebee
  • chickpea
  • crybaby
  • leapfrog
  • logjam

Okay, now compare those to versions from a dictionary that people actually use as a guide to spelling, Websters New Collegiate. Just to make things clearer, I’ll use the ninth edition, published in 1983.

• fig leaf
• hobbyhorse
• ice cream
• pin money
• potbelly
• test tube
• bumblebee
• chick-pea
• crybaby
• leapfrog
• logjam

You see? This has nothing at all to do with e-mail. Already a quarter century ago — in the real world if not in the OED — there was only one hyphen remaining in the entire lot that is now being used to support this story. Congratulations to the Oxford folks for successfully framing this story as one about disappearing hyphens. But the real story is that the OED is beginning to take its head out of the sand and move closer to the practice of real contemporary dictionaries.

RELATED: Typophile: What’s your favorite hyphen?

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Disappearing hyphens?

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Advice from an editor

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Do we really need copy editors?

via India Ink

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The impotence of proofreading

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Seen on eBay

Via Swiss Miss via Random Culture

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Editing Reality