Editorial Peeve: Trend, Real Data

At first I intended to post a simple rant, possibly an admonition, against a phrase I hear misused all the time. I deflated after a Google news search pulled the phrase up as early as 1894 and included about five million hits. About four million hits appear in this new millennium alone. The peak for the phrase comes in July 2009, about 3.5 million hits!

Why such a distinctive spike in data? I don't know, ask Malcolm Gladwell. Just a Google search can't be definitive. But hey, pull that data together with all the anecdotal tales of the phrasal offense, and we've got a case for petitioning the public speakers of the world to put a stop to this.

NPR copywriters, Obama speech writers, news reporters, just quit it. You've offended an otherwise cool-headed copyeditor. The next time you're writing or speaking about a wide range, it better be the Himalaya or some such, not just choices for fresh-baked pies. Sheesh.

Observe:
"Hey Jackson, what'dya want to do today?"
"Oh, I don't know, Skip. Boy, there sure is a wide range of great stuff to do."

Ludicrous, right? Leave your own, in comments.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, a variety will suffice. I don't think I want to make the effort to consider a wide variety all the time.

Business Card

I’m looking for ways to re-market my resume here in Seattle. It’s a little static in MS Word. I’ve used up my Acrobat trial, and I’m not ready to shell out the $450 to regain access, so the hip pdf resume will have to wait. Even if software’s a business expense, I’m looking for ways to earn and save, not spend.
Check it out, Google Docs to the rescue.



What do you think? Readers, in comments.

Chesapeake to Puget Sound

I left Boston fourteen days ago, and after an Independence Day weekend in Washington DC and on the bay's Middle River, I left Landenberg, PA. About thirty-five hundred miles later I'm in a SeaTac hotel with my travel partner, my dad, a budding journalist (thanks to satellite technology) .

We camped in state parks, national parks, and national forests; we ate at roadway diners and cooked up camp feasts with chance local ingredients; we left the van for some exercise (the van got a lot too) and brief encounters with the people and landscapes where we travelled. Anyone that has been on the road in America knows that praise amounts to understatement and awe can't capture enough.

This trip served as a bit of a vacation for me; mostly it's a move of my freelance biz (editorial and otherwise) and my life back to Seattle. Many thanks to my friends and coworkers in Boston and elsewhere.

I've adapted my dad's wireless updates from the last ten days on the road below:

Day 1


Schraepfer and I left PA at 10:30 Sun morn and made it just 25 miles south of Michigan, east of Toledo, OH, on Maumee Bay, which opens onto Lake Erie.

Day 2


Today we drove about 225 miles and stopped in Muskegon, MI, and had lunch with my 90 year young Uncle and his wife. He was in the process of digitally editing music on his PC (running XP and using Sound Forge to clean up the files, for you techies) and entertaining his wife's son and grandson. She prepared a great lunch, and we are on our way north to the Upper Peninsula to camp tonight.

Day 3


Traverse City -- cherry capital of the world -- happened to hit upon the National Cherry Fest today. Saw the Native American cultural heritage portion. Off to the Upper Peninsula.

Day 4


So, after the Day 3 pic of the festival in Traverse City, MI, we drove about 160 miles across to the Upper Peninsula and stayed on Lake Superior at Bay Furnace State Park in Christmas, MI.

Today we drove 450 miles across Wisconsin into central Minnesota to the headwaters of the Mississippi (you can step across it!). The real treat was meeting up with C and his girlfriend Erika who have been in Alaska and Canada. Basically the old story about two trains leaving stations, where do they meet? Bemidji, MN.

Day 5


Schraepfer and I traversed North Dakota after leaving central Minnesota today. We are in Theodore Roosevelt park on the Little Missouri not far from where Teddy came to hunt and cattle in 1880s. Simply beautiful hanging under the cottonwoods!

Day 6


Stellar day. Went mountain biking in the North Dakota badlands and grasslands. Schraepfer's maiden voyage (it was his idea) and amazing sites, animals (feral horses, bull who made us get off the road), weather, exercise.
Followed up by some brewskis and our first shower of the trip -- what could be better? Oh yeah, doing some laundry.

Day 7


Well, we left Medora, ND, (will definitely be going back) and crossed Montana to Glacier Nat. Park. Today was green grasslands, huge big sky, Native Am. res', and cool little towns and a big wind turbine farm (couple hundred).

But we stopped in Lewistown, MT, at a farmers market and chatted it up with two Hutterites (think Amish with a flair) and bought some great bread and chokecherry jam (Lewistown is capital of chokecherry).

Beautiful weather but it will probably get to freezing tonight.

Day 8


Hard to describe the majesty of the peaks and valleys in Glacier Park. Another beautiful day, with a nice hike up to (no) Fish Pond to try out Schraepfer's new fishin pole but the only things biting were skeeters and black flies. Otherwise every view is awesome here.

Day 9


Well, the pic sums up our drive, lots o' rain from western MT, thru Idaho and then beautiful skies in eastern WA. Vineyards and farms. Last full day tomorrow, no more country stations singing 'bout "gave up smokin, women and drinkin, worse 15 minutes of my life" or "honky tonk badongadonk" or "drinkin on sat., prayin on sun." etc.

Day 10


Another stellar day from eastern WA (big country, big vineyards and fields of fruit, etc.) into big mts (Cascades) thru tall Douglas fir and Pacific silver fir back on the grid.

Thanks for travelling with us.

Sports guide copyedited

The Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston: A Spectator’s Handbook by Christopher Klein, from Union Park Press, offers sports fans the first and only comprehensive guide to the range of sporting events on offer in and around the Greater Boston area. From minor- and major-league baseball, football, basketball, and hockey to soccer, golf, tennis, and college teams, Klein sets the city’s sports history against practical information for devoted Boston sports fans.

Get a copy at Amazon.com or at local bookstores. Turn to the guide to be in the know about New England sporting events all year. To learn more about the book, visit Union Park Press.

Also keep an eye on the Union Park Press website for upcoming events all summer long. Klein will be speaking about The Die-Hard Sports Fan’s Guide to Boston as well as Union Park Press’s inaugural book, Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands: A Guide to the City’s Hidden Shores, at a variety of venues in and around the Hub.

Know-it-alls, feel free to abuse my inbox with punctuation errata after you’ve bought the book and pored over every mark. Really though, an astounding comprehensive guide. Congrats to author Chris Klein.

Grammar: Not always high brow

Sergeant Anous, formally with the normal police, now with the Grammar Police, has a word with Timmy Blumpkin, contraction violator and reigning douchenozzle, then busts cheat sheet dealer.

Sergeant Faraday responds to a domestic grammar dispute.



I'd like to think I'm more judicious about the use of force. But I do keep fresh Duracells in my grammar tazer and holster full of pens. Lol Grammar Police. Gotta love your copy editor.

Autocorrect: Not so common typos

You already know to look out for the common typos and homophones. Train your eye for the errors on you’re own time. Their everywhere. Often the errors involve the apostrophe; sometimes its a simple typo. Spelling and grammar checkers might alert you, but you should perform the check to. If deadline’s got you on editorial triage, than at least please your client by not missing those common mistakes.

Depending on your project, at-risk words likely have an impostor standing by. You can sharpen your project-specific proofreading by customizing Word. For instance, if you’re working on reports for public entities, save yourself unnecessary embarrassment: Tools/AutoCorrect Options/Replace: pubic/With: public (unless you’re working on docs for a pediatrician).

Be careful with AutoCorrect. The printed world is still in need of a proofreader. You’d do well to keep an eye out for less common typos too. Corrections of the following mishaps mark a triumph for the profession:

calendar | calender
compiled | complied
compliant | complaint
filed | field
form | from
of | if

How ’bout it proofreaders of the world? Expand on that list in comments.

Hot for Typo

Many folks are fond of critiquing public signage; some even take vigilante action (as reported by blog Laughing Squid). Here's one from the Boston Public Library's special reserves desk near the sixty-minute Web room:

Check back in 30 minutes if your pager doesn't flashes.

Pretty advanced verb agreement stuff going on here. The present tense, third person auxiliary verb, with negation, doesn't, is correctly paired with the subject, your pager [it]. But flashes is conjugated to match the third person too: it flashes. Huh?

Here's what Latent Print pulls from trusty ol' MW's Collegiate (spend more time with your dictionary, k?): In the auxiliary form, do is "used with the infinitive without to to form present and past tenses ... in negative sentences." If all that grammar gibber sounds as ridiculous to you as the above sentence, you're probably fine just trusting what sounds right to you: Check back in 30 minutes if your pager doesn't [to] flash.

Beware, however, that a simple fix could throw the author's meaning even further from the mark. What if the author meant to direct you to check back if the pager flashes? What if it's a rogue doesn't? Oh my.

How do these flubs get printed? Latent Print readers, I leave the imaginary journey of that sentence to you, in comments.

Elements and the Mod Copy Editor

Plenty of comments and much debate to keep grammar-teurs busy here in a New York Times piece last week announcing a fiftieth anniversary edition of Elements of Style. The ol' manual does offer sound advice on an approach to writing. Further, it prepares a copy editor for inevitable encounters with self-proclaimed sticklers and grammar junkies.

Without that book, a flabbergasted copy editor might have no explanation for why an author would insist on particular usages. Strunk and White's work, or nuns, have entrenched prescriptionists and some authors. Whereas in the modern copy editor's library, that ubiquitous go-to manual has become a field guide for the copy editor to the prescriptionist camp and to some authors' origins. Strunk and White's work reminds us that conventions, not rules, shape American grammar, and the relevancy of those conventions will vary from author to author, project to project.

Copyeditor’s Folly

Freelancers’ marketing commonly resorts to a rhetorical question. They’ll open their website, say, with, "Why do you need the services of a copyeditor?" Then follow with some aggressive prose about making communication sparkle and shine.

That the question doesn’t posit the profession’s demand as self-evident disturbs me. One rarely can claim a faulty valve repaired that is obviously broken, but everyone knows what is right about our language and gets away with knowing it? As the need for a plumber in certain instances goes without question, so too should the need for a copyeditor.

The urge to declare worth rhetorically comes from the nature of copyeditors’ work as both descriptive and prescriptive. (Not, we hope, from issues of esteem.) The copyeditor needs context to discover the solution to punctuation problems. Sometimes the copyeditor even needs to learn the author’s intent. Then with each prescription, the copyeditor disclaims thus: based on the information and prior treatments, plus the desired outcome and your given creative direction, I think A is a solution to the problem, though B might work equally well.

But the client hires for the prescription. They want solutions that can be applied consistently, standardized. Perplexed about how to market for the fixed and the fluid, the copyeditor markets by rhetorical claim, as if the Why? is commonly understood veil. The device seems weak. Maybe it works. I don’t know.

Even dictionaries claim little more than their descriptive value, as in Houghton Mifflin’s American Heritage College Dictionary, "A dictionary documents a language at a particular point in time." In a copy department or creative atmosphere, one would expect conversation to come of situations with no fixed solution. Alas conversation is rare; people still believe in a right and a wrong and turn to the published works, or the copyeditor, for either.

Copyeditors, we’re not selling perfect grammar and spelling, though it comes with the package, we’re selling modern usage; naturally, I within the realm of my expertise.

Thanks to commenters on Jan Freeman’s recent "The Word" column in the Boston Globe for inspiring this post. Also thanks to a family friend; talking about my job at a holiday party reminded me that there is inspiration in my work.

Jazz Cat Glossary

I take the cross-country night flight home to Somerville, Mass., today. The Earshot Jazz fest was great. Much of the written word that surrounds music comes as previews, reviews, and press material, but there's no shortage of colloquial spoken word, appropriately enough for an ephemeral medium. Choice verbiage in the jazz cat glossary: cat, mother fucker, horn, dig, killin, vibin.

Your turn, in comments.