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My name is Chingachgook. I am an editor. I am the last of my people.
Once we were as numerous as the buffalo. We roamed the corridors of every communications company, preventing people who could not spell, or punctuate, or speak the language, or who simply did not know anything, from bothering you.
We editors became endangered when the people who paid us discovered that you didn’t care, you were happy to pay for sloppy writing, speaking and thinking as long as it did not challenge your opinions or trouble your mind. We were further endangered when the social platforms opened up and people realized they could transmit their rantings to the world — for free, where it used to cost thousands if not millions of dollars to build a radio or TV station, or establish a newspaper or magazine.
The floodgates opened, and the editors were made to walk the plank. Soon no one knew where to put an apostrophe (it’s or its?), the difference between there and they’re, loose and lose — but everyone was absolutely confident of their credentials in political science, medicine, international relations, religion and philosophy.
And it’s not just Facebook and the Internet. In the past few months, in books published by the top houses in the country, listed on the New York Times best-sellers list, I have read about people “slamming on the breaks,” of their car, seeing how a light “shown in the window” and enduring the “pane of childbirth.” (Spell-check apps are not editors. Mine caught only one of the above malaprops.)
Editors existed to keep the language that is our only connection to other people and the only source of our information and education, from melting into a useless sludge, which it is now in the process of doing. I have not seen an editor now, in the wild or in the office, for years. We are almost all gone. You are going to miss us, when it’s too late.
English isn’t my mother tongue, so I suppose I’m allowed to commit the odd lingual blunder. I am meticulous (had to look in the dictionary for this one) when it comes to language, though, and reading the above misspellings makes even me cringe. Which one of them did your spell-checker catch?
(I hope I didn’t make any mistakes…)
greetings
Frank
he spell-checker flagged “pane” of childbirth. In my experience most people who speak English as a second language have better diction that us natives who take it for granted. Because, I think, they pay attention.
Of all the symptoms of the unraveling of our civilization, the degradation of the language is the most obvious (at least to me) and the direst.
“In the beginning was the Word…”* And its loss shall mark the end.
*John 1:1 kjv
I am an editor myself, after years of teaching English as a foreign language. I have noticed that in documents such as polygraph examination reports, police reports, probation officer’s reports, and court documents, the language standards are in steep and rapid decline. I do have to wonder where so many police personnel and polygraph examiners learned their own language, if they ever learned it at all.
Back in the mid and late 1980s, I worked in a law office run by a Cuban immigrant. The language standards were definitely higher.
It’s not just in English either. I also read and communicate in Spanish, French, and Catalan, and I see the same sorry state of affairs in those languages as well. As modern civilization continues to disintegrate, I expect to see more of it. It is truly a horror.
Wow. 😞
The correct position of the apostrophe in your second sentence is “probation officers’ reports. (I’m just doing an editor’s job.)
” … the difference between there and they’re … ”
And their, don’t forget that possessive something or other.
I type and my finders, those treacherous digits, have a tendency to pick whichever one of the three is most convenient for them in the moment. I know my pinky wants nothing to do with finding the apostrophe key, for instance, and has never made an attempt to find the question mark, and possibly never will?
For this I blame qwerty. As for my spelling errors, I blame all those who do not have an edit function, hint, hint, as I believe we all deserve second chances, murderers and the grammatically challenged alike.
As for editors, they should’ve been unleashing their hounds while they still had the chance. But they chose not to, choosing instead to keep their dogs always on the tightest of leashes, and this, more than anything else in my opinion, is what lead to their extinction.
Editors that is, not the dogs. A few of those chained dogs survived, and from time to time I can still here* them faintly barking at all that is left to them.
Da (M)oon of course.
*:) I’m agnostic on the emoji controversy, btw, but have strong views on the rise to prominence of the acronym.
Seen frequently:
“One thing lead to another…” [a heavy metal expression?]
“Free reign” [what despots do] and even “free rain” [do they meter precipitation?]
Also, a recent pearl: “For all intense and preposes”
Perhaps proper language has become too inefficient for transmitting the social organism’s nervous impulses. Not that there’s anything eufunctional about that.
As an editor myself, this really “peaks” my interest! :-D
I second that emotion.
Spelling? Vocabulary? Style?
If you want real pain, try being numerate at any time in the last thousand years.
If I were editing your comment I would suggest “literate” in place of “numerate.” But I’m not.
Clearly, the monkeys are in charge of the zoo. Years ago in an article on Kaiser Wilhelm II, I had to quote a sentence in French. The paper’s editor left everything to Spellcheck. That sentence came out in some version of Turkish mush. When I phoned the editor and asked what in the devil his copy editor was doing, he apologized and said, “We don’t have a copy editor.” Then there’s the author whose book described a submarine’s sinking “in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Peru…”
My hat is off to Tom Lewis!
Your fiteing a loosing battel, Tom
I no.
Editorial typos are the least of our problems – what about our steadily advancing authoritarian state:
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/01/theres-a-news-blackout-on-the-feds-naming-of-the-banks-that-got-its-emergency-repo-loans-some-journalists-appear-to-be-under-gag-orders/