Curios

Copy editors take to the streets?

Yikes! Have stressed-out copy editors turned to violence?

The copy editor’s lot is not an easy one. The work is exacting, even stressful. But is the work so stressful that editors have taken to the streets to settle their differences—over style guides, open compounds, and serial commas—once and for all?

Not yet.

Except, of course, in the strange and wondrous minds of The Onion satirists in the article “4 Copy Editors Killed in Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence” (January 7, 2013).

Here’s an excerpt:

“‘At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,’ said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word ‘anti-social’ had been corrected to read ‘antisocial.’”

Read the complete article.

Photo, “Montreal riot police at play,” by scottmontreal. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0).

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Winter Word Art

If you ever find yourself buried under an avalanche, survival experts advise that you first clear the snow surrounding you then spit into it. Whichever way the saliva goes, up will be in the opposite direction.

Let it Snow! Rosemarie Jarski, 2004.

Photo courtesy of The Hannah Collection.

Bookshelf: More Mini Book Reviews

More three- to five-word book reviews of Christmas gift–worthy books.

A few gift-worthy books. Photo by John Hannah.

A few gift-worthy books. Photo by John Hannah.

Skipping Christmas, John Grisham, 2001.
Seasonal stress. Strategies. Stuff.

Canada’s Stonehenge, Gordon R. Freeman, 2009.
Archaeology. Antiquities. Alberta.

The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer, 2011.
Children’s classic. Collaboration. Commentary.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.
Understandable. Useful. Usable.

The Canadian Press Caps and Spelling, 20th edition, James McCarten, ed., 2012.
Canadianisms. Clear. Concise.

British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas, Derek Hayes, 2012.
Explorers. Engineers. Exhaustive. Entertaining.

The Journals of George M. Dawson: British Columbia, 1875–1878; Volume I, 1875–1876, Douglas Cole and Bradley Lockner, eds., 1989. The Journals of George M. Dawson: British Columbia, 1875–1878; Volume II, 1877–1878, Douglas Cole and Bradley Lockner, eds., 1989.
Geology. Geology. Geology.

Above Stairs: Social Life in Upper-Class Victoria 1843–1918, Valerie Green, 2011.
Aristocracy. Attitudes. Affectations. Artifice. Aegis.

Letters of E.B. White, originally collected and edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth, revised and updated by Martha White, 2007.
Private. Poetic. Perfect.

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OED crowdsourcing redux

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The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary want your help in tracing the history of particular English words and phrases.

What’s old is new again. In 1859, the British Philological Society launched an appeal to the British and American public “to assist in collecting the raw materials for the work, these materials consisting of quotations illustrating the use of English words by all writers of all ages and in all senses, each quotation being made on a uniform plan on a half-sheet of notepaper, that they might in due course be arranged and classified alphabetically and by meanings.” The society’s goal was to create a new dictionary “worthy of the English Language and of the present state of Philological Science.” (The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester, 1998)

The result, after 50 years of toil and tens of thousands of quotation slips? The Oxford English Dictionary.

The philologists and lexicographers are at it again. In October 2012, the OED launched “a major online initiative that involves the public in tracing the history of English words.” This time, however, the public is being asked to submit contributions electronically, to OED appeals, rather than on half-sheets of notepaper.

Currently, the OED is looking for help with tracing the history of the following words:

Watch the video of OED’s appeal for contributions to FAQ.

Video © Oxford English Dictionary.

Photo, “Yellow Umbrella,” by solidether. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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Bookshelf: Mini Book Reviews

Three- to five-word book reviews of Christmas-gift-worthy books.

Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams, Barry Gough, 2012.
Mariners. Myths. Mystery.

The First World War: Volume I: To Arms, Hew Strachan, 2001.
Monumental. Might. Mayhem.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman, 1998.
Personal. Pleasures. Passions.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (CBC Massey Lecture series), Margaret Atwood, 2008.
Timely. Thought-provoking. Treasure trove.

Photo by John Hannah.

An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill, 1936.
Craftsmanship. Common sense. Composition.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 1951.
Disturbing. Dark. Dystopian.

The Canadian Press Stylebook, 16th Edition, Patti Tasko, ed., 2010.
Policies. Procedures. Packaging. Pointers. Pitfalls.

Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, Dorothy L. Sayers, 1972.
Period piece. Peerage. Police. Pursuit. Proof.

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt, 2011.
Bizarre. Brawls. Bloodshed.

The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2011.
Denmark. Detection. Department Q.

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, 2012.
Reformation. Rogues. Royals. Retribution. Redux.

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Macmillan stops presses

Have you heard? Starting next year, Macmillan’s range of dictionaries will only be available online, following a digital-only trend established by the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

In “Stop the presses—the end of the printed dictionary,” editor-in-chief Michael Rundell writes: “the digital medium is the best platform for a dictionary. One of its advantages is that we can now provide all kinds of supplementary resources—like this blog. The blog covers a huge range of issues, from language change and words in the news, via innovations in language technology or unexpected shifts in grammar, to ideas for teaching English and guidance on common errors.” Rundell also counts audio pronunciations and always being up to date as benefits of going digital.

Read the complete post, or watch the video that appears at the bottom of this page, along with its associated comments (preview: some people aren’t happy).

So. Macmillan’s range of dictionaries are going exclusively digital; Encyclopædia Britannica has gone exclusively digital; the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has gone exclusively digital. Could the venerable Oxford English Dictionary—still available in print—be far behind?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j4o9_SKOYc&w=560&h=315]

© Macmillan.

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“The History of English” (video)

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Love history, the English language, surreal comedy, and voice-over artists with Oxford English accents? Check out “The History of English in Ten Minutes”; it’s 1,600 years of language history, crammed into ten one-minute tracks.

Track titles

  1. Anglo-Saxon (Whatever happened to the Jutes?)
  2. The Norman Conquest (Excuse my English)
  3. Shakespeare (A plaque on both his houses)
  4. The King James Bible (Let there be light reading)
  5. The English of Science (How to speak with gravity)
  6. English and Empire (The sun never sets on the English language)
  7. The Age of the Dictionary (The definition of a hopeless task)
  8. American English (Not English but somewhere in the ballpark)
  9. Internet English (Language reverts to type)
  10. Global English (Whose language is it anyway?)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s?rel=0&w=640&h=360]© The Open University; also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0: UK: England & Wales.

YouTube compilation: OUlearn (Learn with The Open University YouTube channel).

Voice-over: Clive Anderson.

Buying Twitter Followers: A Penny a Person

Psst! Have you heard? Many people, including politicians, celebrities, and reality-show hopefuls (but, we hope, not editors), are buying “large blocks of Twitter followers.”

So says Austin Considine in his article “Buying their way to Twitter fame” (The New York Times, August 22, 2012). He continues:

the practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.

Although Twitter “filed suit in federal court … against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers,” we suspect that few will be dissuaded from the practice; it’s cheap (as little as a penny a person) and easy (when we searched “buy Twitter followers” on Google, we received 8,490,000 hits), and we suspect that for every Twitter-follower provider Twitter shuts down, 10 new ones will emerge.

Read the complete article.

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Troubling trendlet: grouping books by colour

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In what can only be a sign of the decline of Western Civilization, there’s “a trendlet … kicking up dust on decor sites: grouping books on the shelf according to hue.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Certain design magazines and blogs want to convince readers to group books by hue—not by author surname, not by subject matter, and certainly not by Dewey decimal number.

To make matters worse, Random House is purported to be in on the trend.

According to Sophie Kohn in her article “Dewey decimal redux: should we organize books by colour?” (Globe and Mail, September 19, 2012), Random House will be launching a “Books are Beautiful” series in October 2012:

[thirty] iconic titles each assigned a specific shade by colour specialist Pantone … so that the collection forms a rainbow on your shelf. (The edges of the pages are spray-painted to match, ensuring that the book is a physical work of art from every conceivable angle—except if you open it.)

We hold out hope that this is a hoax since we haven’t yet found confirmation on Random House’s website or Twitter account.

Feeling brave enough to read the entire article?

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“The Apostrophe Song” (video)

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In honour of National Punctuation Day, we present “The Apostrophe Song,” a song that aims to “put the apostrophe back in its place.” It’s a four-minute tuneful celebration of the greengrocer’s apostrophe—Drive-by editing set to music, if you will…

The song was created for Cool Rules, an Australian writing-skills training firm.

Words and music by Shaun McNicholas. Vocals by Gypsy Lehmann.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc2aSz9Ficw?rel=0&w=480&h=360]