AAaaargh!
I work with a very sweet, very competent lady who is from Japan. Her English is quite good, considering she’s been in America for only a few years.
My job is, essentially, copyediting. We’re producing a large city budget document for public consumption. She’s the finance whiz, and I’m the copy-and-production whiz. She gives me edits to the document and I perform them.
But her English is not really great. She often asks the meanings of very common words. We had an argument a while ago about the correct placement of the semicolon and comma in a sentence structured like the following:
I was told to reverse the semicolon and the comma, and had to support my stance with the Chicago Manual of Style before she relented and saw that I was right.*
Now I’ve received her final batch of edits, and she’s more concerned with commas and such than with the fiscal numbers. AND SHE’S ALWAYS WRONG! She wants me to delete commas that need to be there. She wants me to insert commas where they shouldn’t be.
And, the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as my motivation to Pit this sweet lady: she’s trying to get me to change all instances of “per capita” to “per capital.”
I cannot stand it anymore. I think I shall do all her edits exactly as written. It’s easier than having these stupid arguments.
It’s not that I’m a fussy English teacher or something. I’m not emotionally invested in the language of this budget. I’m not even particularly expert in matters of style, merely competent. I just feel that it’s about as pretentious for her to tell me (wrongly, foolishly) where to place commas, as it would be for me to tell her (no doubt, even more wrongly) what her financial figures should be. This is called division of labor. Just let me do my job and you do yours. Sheesh!
*I’m aware that the other construction could be valid in some cases, while changing the meaning of the sentence. But in the particular case we were discussing, as in most constructions like this, the semicolon should have come before the “however.”
