The Copy Editor

Many times a week I’d been experiencing a mental event like this: I’d be reading an article about a flood in Mexico, which would lead me to thinking about a wedding I once went to in Cancún, which would lead me to thinking about marriage, which would lead to gay marriage, which would lead to the presidential election, which would lead to swing states, which would lead to a fascinatingly terrible country song called “Swing” — and I’d be three songs into a Trace Adkins YouTube marathon before I’d glance back down at the newspaper on the table.

It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. Their textbook function — to separate parts of a sentence “that need a more distinct break than a comma can signal, but that are too closely connected to be made into separate sentences” — has come to seem like a dryly beautiful little piece of psychological insight.

Thanks to Regina, and to copyeditors everywhere for making us authors look good.

I told him I saw only one mistake. It wasn’t a split infinitive, it was an unsplit word. He’d made the words “pipe dream” one word, with no space between them. I told him it should be two words, according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, which was my authoritative source in such matters.

He told me he didn’t care what Webster’s New World Dictionary said. It was his editorial, and he wanted “pipe dream” to be one word. He said I should delete the space I’d inserted between “pipe” and “dream.”

I did.

I never edited anything by Bob Bartley again.

Copyediting is something that’s done after the writers go home, said Merrill Perlman, retired director of copy desks at the New York Times and editing consultant and educator. Copyeditors are geeky and hard to manage. Few people understand what we do. When that happens, companies question our value and cut jobs. Said Perlman, ‘The copyeditor is dead.’

We must stop calling ourselves copyeditors, said Perlman. It’s a word (two if you follow ACES’s style) loaded with too many negative connotations. She suggested that we own a buzzword and become content editors. Copyeditors are expendable. Content editors are vital. It doesn’t matter if we’re coaching those creating the content or actually making the changes. It doesn’t matter if the work will appear in print or somewhere in the digital ether. No one knows what we know. ‘Our jobs are to educate,’ she said. ‘I am a communicator.’

For newspaper copy editors, among whose ranks I have joyfully punched the DELETE button for more than thirty years, grousing is both a recreation and an art form. We are employed to be skeptical. We are engaged to ferret out error, and when we discover it, we are like a trained dog that has scratched up a truffle. We savor, hoard, and chuckle over the riper excesses that we remedy. And if our accomplishment is sometimes to render the execrable merely mediocre, we have done all that could be done with it.

The New York Daily News chose the baffling headline “Kidnap Miracle.” As a reader, I learn nothing from this headline. The publication included a descriptive deck, which is helpful for clarification. But that is no excuse for writing a main headline that insinuates there is some way to abduct miracles.