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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Is there something in the soil in Iowa? Generally, field corn, soybeans, and manure from hogs and cattle.
Ah, no doubt that would explain it!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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stranger
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stranger
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I'm new and wanted to say how dregulars struck me - by the way it's wonderful. But I see dregulars in their cups staring down and reading the dregs (and telling fortunes?).
Stuck in DC traffic one day, I came up with Driverticulitis. Whaddyathink?
To Herr is German made me laugh out loud, here all by myself.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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 Welcome Aboard, Pamela - be prepared to read six amazing things before breakfast for the rest of your days! In case you're wondering, the rather harsh apellation of "stranger" is ditched after 25 posts, so "don't be a stranger" - post often. 
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stranger
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Thanks, Max, very kind of you to welcome me. This is such a great forum! I'm so in awe of you all - awful! (sorry - just slipped out) So much to do on this list - for a free-ranger like me, it's fascinating. But six things before 6 am? If I stayed here and got involved in the site, I'd never get to work. I don't get the new word for the day until after I come home in the evenings, though. Is that the way it is usually? I'd rather get it at 5 a.m.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
But six things before 6 am?
Sorry, the "six things before breakfast" was a reference to the work of my favourite mathematician - Charles Lutwedge Dodgson. The Queen of Hearts told Alice that sometimes she had believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Since this board is often delightfully surreal, the Wonderland reference seemed apt.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Misspellings and misuses of words in books drive me crazy and always have. The absolute worst I've ever seen, though,
goes way beyond these. There is a doctor who used to write a column for Discover magazine. She wrote a book called
"Other Peoples' Children". (I think. She's a pediatrician.) She surely must have written parts of it at different times, because one chapter--only--in the middle of the book was written in the first person, with no explanation. All of the others were in the third person! Where on earth was her editor??
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Jackie asked (probably plaintively, and with a Southern accent): Where on earth was her editor??
The answer, Jackie, is complex and involves a deep and wide knowledge of the publishing industry.
For technical books, editors are chosen for their grasp of the subject, the industry and the audience, and their excellent grasp of the linguistic implications of the author's work.
They work long hours on high stools and sloping desks, under guttering candles or gas lamps, wearing eyeshades and with clips keeping their sleeves from accidentally dipping themselves in the inkwells, and to protect their cuffs from the splatter of hand-ground ink. They are carefully trained to make the most of each goose quill, and little boys are employed for pennies to run around sharpening their pen knives. Your average editor works sixteen hours a day, and is grateful for the few coins thrown to him or her by the grudging employer, who will almost inevitably be called Scrooge, especially at this time of the year. They lie awake at nights worrying about whether the word should be "deoxyribonucleic" or just "oxyribonucleic". They sweat buckets over each misplaced comma or mislaid full stop ("period" to US readers). They use galley slips for toilet paper and to wipe their perspiring brows with shaking hands. They fear nothing but their failure to make each tome produced by their house literally word-perfect.
How am I doing, Wow?
Actually most of the book/journal editors I know have trouble spelling their own names, and have so many publications on the go at once that if they can recognise what the author wrote as being English (or [choose your language]), that's good enough. I'm the associate editor for an information technology publication, and it's hard to get everything right within tight timeframes!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I have somewhere a wonderful cartoon: Dickens is sitting across the desk from his editor, who is saying, "Now, Mr. Dickens, was it the best of times or the worst of times? You can scarcely have it both ways."
TEd
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OP
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Carpal Tunnel
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DEAR Capital Kiwi, re proofing and editing : You are doing just great! Once upon a time there were proofreaders by the dozens, perched in a mezzanine above the Linotype room, and they read the copy after it had been set in type, correcting spelling and grammar and thereby teaching the readers and the reporters who read their own stories in the paper. They were good teachers those proofreaders. Then came computers. Goodbye proofreading as a full time job and accepted part of the publishing process. In came "spellcheck" which is not grammarcheck. For example : It would read "of" as acceptable when the context called for "off!" Or cellar for seller etc. etc. Things that never, ever, would have gotten by a proofreader. Proofreaders had dozens and dozens of reference books and they actually used them! As opposed to a this : a news editor who came across the word perquisites in a quote of a town official, in a news story said to me "You must learn to spell 'prerequisites'." When I exploded she wanted to change the word... IN A DIRECT QUOTE  ... because she'd "never heard of it." Arrggghhh ! The Editor overruled her, thank Gawd. Another time, in a story about intricate quilt patterns a typographer changed "busyness" to "business without checking with me ... and I was three feet away. How could it not be obvious by the story itself! Double Arrgggh. And while I am blowing off steam, it is Linotype, not linotype. Linotype is a proprietary word, please! RANT! RANT! RANT ! Well, calming down a bit I have to back off blaming computers....totally .... it was, in large part, that blasted Corporate-think that ended up firing proofreaders and turning writer/authors into their own proofers.... Corporate spent all that money on computers and, by Gawd, computers can do the job! Lean and mean. And there are several meanings in mean. I am going to go into a corner, curl up in a foetal position, chew on paper and mutter to myself, thereby saving you all from any more. (We need a cross-eyed, drooling emoticon) Thank you for allowing me to vent my frustrations. wow
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