Indexers, like editors, regularly run into people who think human indexers have been replaced by computers. “Doesn’t Word have an indexing function?” they ask. “Can’t it index the book I’ve just written?” Those same people might also ask, “Why do…
Posting a blog entry today, I am, of course, tempted to write something farcical, outrageous, or dare I say, even foolish, it being April 1. But humour can be a dangerous thing when shared with readers unknown. Some so-called jokes…
If you are an editor, you likely have an opinion about whether political correctness is a force for good or evil, and will have fought your own anti-bias battles against certain words and phrases. Sociologist BJ Gallagher contends that “While the original…
Earlier this summer, editorial blogs and the editors’ corner of the Twitterverse focused on “Weird Al” Yankovic’s music video “Word Crimes,” with its list of grammatical errors and its condemnation of those benighted individuals who make them. Everyone from the…
Delete, search, replace, revise, revise, revise—changes and corrections are so easy with our electronic tools. But what if your words were literally cast in stone and you wanted to change them? Cemeteries are sometimes called “gardens of stone” and the…
Like witnessing the demolition of a derelict building, there’s something splendid about seeing a false language idol topple. And topple it did when the Associated Press Stylebook announced in March that it’s now okay to use “over” interchangeably with “more…
If you’ve ever puzzled over why “limb” and “debt” have a silent b, and what’s with the “i before e except after c” dictum when there are so many departures from the so-called rule, here’s the book for you. “For every quirk of spelling, there's…