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A Copy Editor's Lament By Teri Zucker
Dictionary.com states the definition of "copy editor" as "an editor who prepares text for publication." Such a brief description, yet it somehow sounds so important-- at least it does to me. Ah, the many facets of my job. For as long as I can remember, I have been a copy editor, or copy editorish, at one place or another.
Today more than ever, I try my best to live a life of grammatical perfection, or at least to make sure that everyone else does. With every article I read, I feel like I am performing some kind of surgery. Helping a struggling child to grow and blossom. A few scars might be left, but you hope that they are hardly noticeable. In another sense, I am like one of your basic blue-collar professionals, called on to fix a leaky grammatical faucet.
How to sum up my job description? The word that comes to mind is "thankless." I remember an oft-forgotten fact: Behind every glitzy and glamorous job, there is someone in the background who is the technical genius (to use the term loosely). People who perform technical aspects of a theater, film or television production are invisible, but at least they get big bucks. They often attend lavish awards shows-- and sometimes win lavish awards. Why, even at my community theater group, where no one earns a penny, the cast acknowledges the silently powerful backstage workers by bestowing gifts upon them. Consider how many people in this world spend their leisure hours reading a serious publication. No doubt they sometimes have to stop short or do a double take because of some small but klutzy error. Among my personal favorites are "you" for "your," "chose" for "choose," and "thought" for "though." Then there are hominomial errors (yes, I just made up a word, but at least it was intentional). But what if their eyes glide across perfectly clean text? Do these readers ever sit back and think, "Wow, what an amazing copyediting job!"? Well, I have no illusions; I realize that this is highly unlikely. And yet, readers are very quick to pounce when they see a mistake. A few months ago I received, via snail mail, a cut-out (yes, literally cut out from the publication, not photocopied) article that identified someone as the "principle author." The error was circled and labeled with an interjection. Ah well, there goes my certificate of perfection.
Not to say that I get no appreciation. Writers are often quite pleased with many of the catches I make that could have turned out as embarrassments for them. But for every appreciative writer there is a prima donna who thinks that doing anything more than adding or deleting a comma is rewriting his or her piece. And I am at the point in my life where I am not very tolerant of people who treat me as though their byline makes them my holy master. On more than one occasion, I have been accused of rewriting an essay when in fact another editor had done so prior to passing on the piece to me, and I got great satisfaction from receiving apologies after setting the writers straight (heck, once I even got some chocolates shipped to me from a writer after I made it known that he had upset me on my birthday).
Believe it or not, there are also off-the-job troubles. I find myself in a permanent copy edit mode. Most of the things I see or hear are off in punctuation or in syntax. And I realized that this thinking technically started when I was very young. At the age of six, I made a card wishing a happy Hanukkah to all Jewishes. After all, if Catholic, Christian, and Protestant serve as both nouns and adjectives, why should Jewish be any different? I also had a big problem with asking "Aren't I?" Not that I couldn't pronounce it; it's just that it made no sense to me that one would say "I am," but then not ask "Amn't I?"
When a message is painted with that squiggly stuff onto a birthday cake, I don't think I have ever seen a comma placed after the word "birthday." I mean, you would be wishing a happy birthday to John, not a birthday John that is happy. Fortunately the fact that the name is usually written below the message manages to compensate for the forgotten comma.
And I will never forget the letter I once got in response to a personal ad I had placed. I could not imagine why a man from Texas would answer an ad from someone who resides in New York, but in his letter this man explained to me how in Texas there were "little Jewish women." I stared perplexed for a few minutes, wondering what he had against short women, and then imagining several women less than five feet tall coming out of corners-- sort of like the Munchkins of Oz when Glinda told them it was safe to "come out, come out, wherever you are." And then I said out loud, "Oh, few Jewish women!" Incidentally, the late Harry Chapin should have heeded this same rule, though his consequence is not nearly as ridiculous. In his wonderful song "Taxi," he remembers Sue "through the too many miles and the too little smiles." Somehow I don't think Harry had a complaint about the size of said smiles.
Alas, there are other songwriters who need grammar lessons. The most prominent is Paul McCartney, with his infamous line in "Live and Let Die": "... but if this ever changing world in which we live in...." When I catch a mistake like that, I say to the person involved, "You did a Paul McCartney." Well, I doubt Paul was an English major, but I am sure he makes a lot more money than the average person who was.
In most everything I read or hear, I seem to find a meaning different from the one intended. A few weeks ago, I signed on to AOL and saw a news headline that read "Alligator Attacks Puzzle Experts." I kid you not when I say that I envisioned several people sitting around a swamp, minding their own business, engaging in crossword and jigsaw puzzles, when suddenly an alligator emerges and attempts to devour them. It seems to me that it would have made much more sense for the headline to say, "Experts Puzzled by Alligator Attacks." And I also thought of looking into a position as a script copy editor, if there even is such a thing. There are certain television shows on which allegedly educated characters constantly make common grammatical faux pas or say something that totally distorts what they mean. But a flat-out example, which I wonder whether anyone besides me noticed, occurred during a production of "The Music Man" at my community theater. As the leading lady thanked the leading man for showing kindness to her brother, he replied, "It was nothing." In turn, she replied, "Yes, it was." It actually was nothing???? Was the script messed up, or did she goof on her line? Or was it a matter of him goofing on the preceding line and her not compensating? Who knows? But I had to fight the urge to jump up and scream, "That can't be the line!"
So, is there some infinite wisdom to be gained from my personal and professional tale of woe? I don't know whether I have inspired readers to become copy editors, or if they will avoid an ad for this position as if they were escaping the gates of hell. Just to let you know, my job is seldom boring. One day, I might sit down and write a book titled Top 20 Mistakes Made When One Is Under Pressure. Believe it or not, what your mind thinks is not necessarily what your fingers will type. As hackneyed as it sounds, the job is often not for the faint of heart. In fact, I don't know whether this is good or bad, but if I err because of ignorance of a grammatical rule, historical fact, etc., I almost hope the mistake happens again so that I will have the chance to correct it. Okay, now that I wrote it and read it back to myself, it sounds cruel. But the point is, I try to learn from my mistakes.
Just the other day, while reading a weekly television guide, I zeroed in on a paragraph introducing a new show about a teen destined to fight evil (how unique). When I took note of the actress identified in the lead role, I spotted a misspelling of her last name. But it was not just any misspelling; the two added letters actually changed the star from a Chinese American teenager (who had been pictured next to the text) to a middle-aged Caucasian woman. Well, I won't lie; the first thing I did was give myself a mental pat on the back for being TV savvy enough to catch this mistake. Then I thought about how careless it was to let such a mistake get printed. Suddenly, a strange feeling came over me. I stared frozen at the page, tapping my index finger against my cheek. My eyes opened wide, as though I were Dorothy opening the black-and-white door of her shabby Kansas home to the breathtakingly colorful Land of Oz ("The Wizard of Oz" makes for some good metaphors), and then got squinty-- not a huge stretch, considering the shape of my eyes-- as I sat with my head cocked to the side and my hands folded in my lap. A wonderful thing had happened: I was trying to understand. Who knows the true reason behind the mistake? Maybe some poor copy editor sat there at an ungodly hour, wringing sweaty hands while gazing at the growing pile of papers, juggling three or more documents as phones ring, co-workers chatter, and eager writers frequently e-mail to give notification of their next moves. There is also the possibility that, in addition to doing the grammar, etc., cleanup, this poor soul was stuck relying on instincts that called forth and warned of a multitude of facts that could have been inaccurate. Yes, some of us copy editors are lucky enough to be saddled with the extra task of fact checking. Why, there could have been errors of any and every conceivable kind on the page (I'm betting that several other pages had to be looked at, practically simultaneously), and that misspelled name managed to evade those skillful eyes and maybe several other pairs, as well. This name might have been one of the aforementioned scars left behind after the copy editor's tender loving care.
I beseech all readers: understand. Understand that copy editors are people, too. That no one sees the many things these editors catch, only the minority that they miss. Put yourselves in the copy editor's shoes-- and eyes. And as for you writers, remember: Spell check is your friend; use it.
Teri Zucker resides in Brooklyn, N.Y., and serves as the copy editor of a weekly newspaper. One of the things she enjoyed about writing this essay was having people copy edit her work for a change. As she strives to find a cure for writer's block, she hopes to realize her dream of performing a cabaret act composed entirely of TV show themes.
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