A Copyeditor’s Perspective
(on what makes good writing tick, delicious mistake truffles, and why the amazing anthill of language is more important than ever right now)
I’ve worked as a copyeditor for more than 20 years. I have a lot of opinions about the process of transferring a thought from one messy human brain to another by means of little marks and squiggles on a page or screen.
I also have a lot of questions.
A copyeditor on the clock encounters a lot of intriguing and sometimes confounding examples of language use. But because she has to keep up a pace, she can’t stop to ponder and research every little conundrum, much as she might like to.
Here at Foul Copy, I’m off the clock and free to digress.
What will Foul Copy be about?
Here are a few of the themes I have in mind.
Mistakes
An author could be forgiven for assuming that copyeditors hate mistakes, that the copyeditor is like a drug dog, brought on board to sniff out every tiny textual crime and expunge it before the book steps into the public eye.
Some errors in prose do rise to the level of crimes (we’ll get to those when we discuss forensic copyediting), but copyeditors are actually less like drug dogs and more like truffle pigs. They snuffle their way happily through each sentence, alert to the whiff of a delicious usage mistake or a tasty grammar gaffe or a subtle but satisfying “infelicity.”
Copyeditors love mistakes. And not just because we’re paid to find them. Mistakes can be fascinating and hilarious and revealing.
Words
Writers have a responsibility “to keep our language capable of telling the truth,” the poet Wendell Berry wrote back in 2005. And in order to do that, he said, we must make sure “words mean what they say.” That responsibility feels more important than ever right now.
Whenever I see good, useful words being twisted or co-opted or drained of their meaning, I feel like shouting, “Stop messing up my language!” We need those words!
Communication
Words are the alternative to violence. We tell children to use their words instead of their fists and teeth. If we’re lucky, maybe the ability to communicate can save us from ourselves.
The physician and essayist Lewis Thomas said the human race as a whole, like a giant ant colony, is building something, and that thing is language. It’s our crowning achievement and our most important tool. Thomas wrote:
Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings. We engage in it communally, compulsively, and automatically. We cannot be human without it; if we were to be separated from it our minds would die, as surely as bees lost from the hive.
Language connects us. It makes empathy possible. We cannot survive without it.
Reading
We learn to read well by reading clear, truthful writing. Reading is how we expand our vocabulary, encounter new ideas, and develop our knowledge and instincts about how our language works.
Reading helps us learn to think. And how we think determines how we see reality.
I agree with this explanation, spoken by a character in a Tom Robbins novel:
The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.
Evolution
I often bristle at the use of the term “evolution” to describe changes in language use. Of course, complex human systems, like languages and governments, do and must evolve over time.
But changes in how people use particular words or grammatical structures don’t automatically constitute evolution, a precise term that implies progress toward improved function. Sometimes changes in language use are more like dog breeding, which is mostly about fashion. Evolution gave us the opposable thumb; breeding gave us those dogs with so much extra skin they look like they’re melting.
Until next week …
