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Investigative Grammar
0022-534 7/89/1414-1028$02.00/0
Vol. 141, April
THE JOURNAL OF UROLOGY
Printed in U.S.A.
Copyright © 1989 by Williams & Wilkins
INVESTIGATIVE GRAMMAR Virtually all printed matter goes through the hands of one or more copyeditors on the way to press. There's a lot of printed matter in the world, so one would expect there to be quite a few copyeditors. But in consorting with various kinds of publishing enterprises, I've met easily twice as many editors as copyeditors. Editors, like writers, are almost common fauna in comparison to copyeditors. So where are they? Even more puzzling is the question where they come from. There are no schools for copyeditors, no copyeditorial training programs, no boards, no certification. In the publishing hierarchy, they rate one level above proofreaders, so we might suppose that they evolve from proofreaders, the way amphibians once evolved from fish. But proofreaders are, if anything, even rarer than copyeditors. This cannot be the answer. The ultimate mystery, of course, is where copyeditors go in the end. They do not generally become editors. It is as if the theory of evolution does not apply to publishing personnel. There are fossils enough, but they show no progression. These are whimsical suggestions. The unromantic reality about copyediting and proofreading is that most people doing those jobs hold them only for a short time. Few people are prepared to regard juggling manuscript and page proof as a profession. And there is no mystery in that at all. Far from being jobs of prominent note, an important part of that kind of work is to make the result invisible. A properly edited piece of writing will not look as if it had been edited. A well-proofread page or proof will have no typographical flaws. Yet this success results in invisibility. Distorted text and typographical errors are visible irritants to readers, and stand on the horizon like Mount Everest to the suffering authors, but just let the job be done right once in a while and see who notices. And yet for authors, especially for authors in technical fields, overlooking the existence of these self-effacing ink handlers and their potential for mischief is a great hazard. I recall a case in a law publishing house where a proofreader took exception to the licensing fee for fortunetellers in New Orleans and inserted a new zero before the decimal point. I recall another case in medical publishing where a copyeditor felt the work 'microorganisms' was too vague and went through an entire manuscript changing 'microorganisms' to 'bacteria.' These examples are extremes, one diabolically subtle and the other infernally wholesale. Both were corrected in time; but they could have easily slipped through. One assumes that all editors occasionally feel something clutch at their guts when they wonder what might not have been caught. Authors should always read all their proofs as carefully as possible. I wish it was unnecessary to say that.
People who do copy work for a long time tend to fall into one of two camps, psychologically speaking. The largest camp is the camp of the progressively more indifferent. To these, often the fastest workers, it makes no difference what the words actually say. It's not that they notice but don't care; it's that they don't notice. Their approach is hieroglyphical. They have eyeballed so many sheets of symbol-covered paper at pointblank range that printed language no longer has intellectual content for them. If it ever did. Perhaps this condition is comparable to snow-blindness. The other camp, much smaller, is composed of copy workers who have come, rightly or wrongly, to revere print. A printing press is like an altar to them. Ink is their communion wine. Perhaps the camp of the indifferent is peopled with those who shrank to fit their jobs, and the smaller camp of people who reverence print have made the job grow to fit themselves. It's the old difference between factories and crafts. These are often secret, or at least unobvious, attitudes. An unfailing test to distinguish between them is to raise the subject of computerized printing. The real print worshippers will then either tell you that there is no substitute for hand-set type, or launch into maudlin reminiscence about that awful day when the scrap-metal man came and hauled perfectly usable linotype machines to the junkyard. Since this page is already cluttered with anecdote, no further harm will be done by telling a true story which must mean something, though I myself have no idea what. Some years ago I was wandering in the crypt of the National Shrine, which is a large Romanesque cathedral on the grounds of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. At first I thought I had the crypt all to myself, but slowly, after the manner of ghost stories, I became aware of a distant soft babble of voices, a sound at once as familiar and as strange and unidentifiable as words heard in a dream. I resolved to follow this sound to its source-in part to make sure it wasn't an hallucination. As it became distinct, I began to recognize it as the sound of a proofroom, the old-fashioned kind of proofroom where readers read aloud to one another in pairs. The only mystery was whyhow-there could be a proofroom in the crypt of a cathedral. That it was a proofroom, I had no doubt. But I was wrong. What I had discovered was a shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Peace, and the activity inside was identified on a signpost as the Perpetual Rosary of Peace. A score of kneeling nuns were individually reciting a common prayer in Latin over and over again. It was shiftwork and intended to last indefinitely. Gary Mawyer Editorial Assistant
1028
Vol. 141, April
THE JOURNAL OF UROLOGY
Printed in U.S.A.
Copyright © 1989 by Williams & Wilkins
INVESTIGATIVE GRAMMAR Virtually all printed matter goes through the hands of one or more copyeditors on the way to press. There's a lot of printed matter in the world, so one would expect there to be quite a few copyeditors. But in consorting with various kinds of publishing enterprises, I've met easily twice as many editors as copyeditors. Editors, like writers, are almost common fauna in comparison to copyeditors. So where are they? Even more puzzling is the question where they come from. There are no schools for copyeditors, no copyeditorial training programs, no boards, no certification. In the publishing hierarchy, they rate one level above proofreaders, so we might suppose that they evolve from proofreaders, the way amphibians once evolved from fish. But proofreaders are, if anything, even rarer than copyeditors. This cannot be the answer. The ultimate mystery, of course, is where copyeditors go in the end. They do not generally become editors. It is as if the theory of evolution does not apply to publishing personnel. There are fossils enough, but they show no progression. These are whimsical suggestions. The unromantic reality about copyediting and proofreading is that most people doing those jobs hold them only for a short time. Few people are prepared to regard juggling manuscript and page proof as a profession. And there is no mystery in that at all. Far from being jobs of prominent note, an important part of that kind of work is to make the result invisible. A properly edited piece of writing will not look as if it had been edited. A well-proofread page or proof will have no typographical flaws. Yet this success results in invisibility. Distorted text and typographical errors are visible irritants to readers, and stand on the horizon like Mount Everest to the suffering authors, but just let the job be done right once in a while and see who notices. And yet for authors, especially for authors in technical fields, overlooking the existence of these self-effacing ink handlers and their potential for mischief is a great hazard. I recall a case in a law publishing house where a proofreader took exception to the licensing fee for fortunetellers in New Orleans and inserted a new zero before the decimal point. I recall another case in medical publishing where a copyeditor felt the work 'microorganisms' was too vague and went through an entire manuscript changing 'microorganisms' to 'bacteria.' These examples are extremes, one diabolically subtle and the other infernally wholesale. Both were corrected in time; but they could have easily slipped through. One assumes that all editors occasionally feel something clutch at their guts when they wonder what might not have been caught. Authors should always read all their proofs as carefully as possible. I wish it was unnecessary to say that.
People who do copy work for a long time tend to fall into one of two camps, psychologically speaking. The largest camp is the camp of the progressively more indifferent. To these, often the fastest workers, it makes no difference what the words actually say. It's not that they notice but don't care; it's that they don't notice. Their approach is hieroglyphical. They have eyeballed so many sheets of symbol-covered paper at pointblank range that printed language no longer has intellectual content for them. If it ever did. Perhaps this condition is comparable to snow-blindness. The other camp, much smaller, is composed of copy workers who have come, rightly or wrongly, to revere print. A printing press is like an altar to them. Ink is their communion wine. Perhaps the camp of the indifferent is peopled with those who shrank to fit their jobs, and the smaller camp of people who reverence print have made the job grow to fit themselves. It's the old difference between factories and crafts. These are often secret, or at least unobvious, attitudes. An unfailing test to distinguish between them is to raise the subject of computerized printing. The real print worshippers will then either tell you that there is no substitute for hand-set type, or launch into maudlin reminiscence about that awful day when the scrap-metal man came and hauled perfectly usable linotype machines to the junkyard. Since this page is already cluttered with anecdote, no further harm will be done by telling a true story which must mean something, though I myself have no idea what. Some years ago I was wandering in the crypt of the National Shrine, which is a large Romanesque cathedral on the grounds of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. At first I thought I had the crypt all to myself, but slowly, after the manner of ghost stories, I became aware of a distant soft babble of voices, a sound at once as familiar and as strange and unidentifiable as words heard in a dream. I resolved to follow this sound to its source-in part to make sure it wasn't an hallucination. As it became distinct, I began to recognize it as the sound of a proofroom, the old-fashioned kind of proofroom where readers read aloud to one another in pairs. The only mystery was whyhow-there could be a proofroom in the crypt of a cathedral. That it was a proofroom, I had no doubt. But I was wrong. What I had discovered was a shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Peace, and the activity inside was identified on a signpost as the Perpetual Rosary of Peace. A score of kneeling nuns were individually reciting a common prayer in Latin over and over again. It was shiftwork and intended to last indefinitely. Gary Mawyer Editorial Assistant
1028