Beacon Books, a paperback house in the 1950s, managed to misspell Charles Willeford as Williford and Manly Wade Wellman as Manley on the covers of their novels. They of course left the accent off the “e” in Philip José Farmer’s name: buy a font with accents? There goes this month’s profits.
Gnome Press is also the outfit that spelled Frank Kelly Freas as Frease. Not once but six times as the credited cover artist on different books. It was pronounced “freeze,” but c’mon, shouldn’t *somebody *have noticed?
Yeah, Shakespeare couldn’t spell for shit, and neither could Chaucer. I mean, Shakespeare couldn’t even spell his own name!
And if you get a copy of Beowulf, watch out: The grammar is so atrocious you’ll barely be able to read it, and the spelling is so bad you’ll swear they were just making up their own letters.
I’m reading a post-apocalyptic “FUCK YEH AMERICA!!!” book right now called “One Second After.” I’m only to Chapter 2, and already he’s phrased the construction (or really the contraction) “should have / could have / would have” as “should of / could of / would of” at least twice. I can easily overlook an obvious typo or other technical mistake, but he’s actually typing out two words that sound like the contraction, which he must be unaware exists?
It almost makes me want to stop reading. If the stupid continues, I just might.
More stuff from the History Channel (I paraphrase somewhat below):
“The Wright Brothers had trouble controlling their airplanes.” No, they didn’t. Before building a powered machine, they learned to fly using gliders and studied the principles of flight thoroughly. Not only did they patent the three-axis control system, they were the only experimenters of the period who could control their planes perfectly once they were off the ground.
“Planes labeled ‘P-’ (like the P-51) were prototypes.” No, they weren’t. The prefix P- denoted “Pursuit” aircraft, i.e., fighters. It was changed to F- after World War II to reflect this. The prefix for prototypes is (and always has been, AFAIK) Y, as in YP-51 and YF-80.
If I ever write something*, I’m lucky that not only do I have friends who are published authors who could help me find a good editor, if not do it themselves (probably not), but I participate in many online communities such as this one where people with pro editing experience hang out, whom I could hire or wangle into doing the necessary work for me.
*I’m going to give NaNoWriMo another try this year
Shakespeare lived at the very beginning of the literate society. Comparing the changes in the English language from 500 years before him to 500 years after him makes it clear that the stability introduced to the language by mass literacy and the printing press cannot be overstated.
Certainly language and spelling does change over time, but until a spell-check is invented that can use the context to determine if the word is correct it’s pretty much useless. I only use it when I know I’ve misspelled a word, and I’m looking for the correct spelling.
This is an interesting one, in that I’m not sure whose job it should have been to correct it.
I’m currently listening to an audiobook which converts between UK pounds and US dollars whenever one or other is mentioned. That’s fine, but what is really bugging me is that the converted amount is almost always stated with much more precision than the original. An example would be, “He paid approximately 100,000 US dollars, or 74,823 pounds, for the land.” Grrr!
As I said, I don’t know who should have picked that up, but I really wish they had.
Is it in the original book, or an addition to the audio transcription?
The classic case of this is one of the Riverworld books, where PJF, apparently caught up in the US “Metrification” efforts, did such absurdly accurate conversions - mountains were “about 10,000 feet high, or 3077 meters.” Over and over.
I wonder if these are authors, or some ultra-finicky copy editor better at wurdz than, you know, how numbers work. In a current work, I’d bet it’s a senior “editroid” telling some junior to “go through and convert all these measurements/values” - and never looking at the result.
Granted, it is one of the characters speaking where I’ve noticed it, but she’s supposed to be an older, genteel, wealthy and wise woman. Why make her sound like an uneducated Podunk? If it is a quirk of speech he’s giving her, it’s a weird one. Besides, “could’ve” and “could of” sound exactly the same, practically speaking. So it’s more of an egregious spelling error than it is a manner of speaking.
And the unsuccessful ones can’t or won’t pay an actual editor. I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me to look at their books for free. And the few times I’ve agreed to look at just one chapter, they’ve been so problematic that it literally wasn’t worth the hours and hours I’d have to spend just fixing that one chapter. So I’d go back to them with a modest quote for services and it was always way more money than they’re prepared to spend. People don’t value editors. Especially when they think they are brilliant writers who have the Great American Novel.
I spent about a half hour explaining to someone why and how to use paragraphs. “But… long paragraphs are okay, right?” “Sure, if you keep to the same subject. Every time you changes subjects or speakers, you have to start a new paragraph.” “But… what’s wrong with long paragraphs?” :smack:
It’s an egregious grammatical error. “Of” is a preposition. That’s not the part of speech that goes with “could”. “Have” is a verb. Do not use prepositions when you mean to use a verb.
This is why I hate “intend on.” “I do not intend on letting that happen.” No, you mean “intend TO” because you need a goddamned verb, not a preposition.
Does it say where this woman is from? I’m thinking it might be a regional thing.
Though it makes me cringe, a lot of people from my neck of the woods say “dint” instead of “didn’t,” even ones who are pretty intelligent and well-read.
FWIW, I once worked with an EFL teacher who apparently never grasped he was pronouncing “would’ve” wrong (“would of”). I’m still not sure he really knew the difference.
If it helps at all, people feel the exact same way about writers and artists: we should be willing to work for free, or for a pittance, because we live in a magical fairyland where rent and utilities can be paid in charm.
My point isn’t so much about linguistic change, although there is a bit of that at the end with Beowulf, but about how recent the fad for consistent spelling is. We have no evidence that Shakespeare even spelled his own name the same way twice (admittedly, we have very few of his signatures at all… ) and it just wasn’t seen as a problem in his day and age. Even the Corps of Discovery (Lewis and Clark’s team) wasn’t too hot on consistent spelling, and they were reasonably well-educated men on an important mission from [del]God[/del] Jefferson.
Claiming spelling irregularities portend the end of literate culture is therefore so shockingly ignorant of both history and linguistics that, frankly, I’m surprised it isn’t used in more Kids These Days rants. Guess I’ll have to settle for the crypto-racist ramblings about how music today isn’t, why back in my day, records meant something and only the Right People made hits…
Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” was incredibly in need of an editor. I attribute it to it being a kid’s book, but run-on sentences other problems scream out for an editor. There were some things that made me think that no one had even down a read-through before publishing it. While reading a lot of books aloud to my kids over the years, errors seem to be magnified but “A Wrinkle in Time” was truly horrendous.
I’ve emailed a couple of authors with mistakes, Adam Rex and Colin Meloy, and they both immediately responded and Cced their editors. In both cases they were missing words, and both had updated the Kindle versions within a couple of weeks when I rechecked. So perhaps crowd sourced editing is a possible solution for the future?!?
There is no perfection, when it comes to the printed word. There is only “damn good” and “I’m a naive reader who didn’t notice the flaws”.
The latest book by my favorite author (name withheld, but she’s sold millions and millions) had multiple typos, non sequiturs, and repetitious passages that had obviously never been re-read after the rough draft, not by the author, the line editor, the structural editor, not anyone. This isn’t the laissez-faire attitude toward a publisher’s cash cow or a particularly new phenomenon, either. Her first novel, published in 1991, had multiple speakers in single paragraphs, among other problems. This from a Big 5 imprint.
It’s just too damned hard to get everything right, all the time. We are imperfect beings. It is an imperfect world. Any piece of writing can be line-edited until there’s more red (and blue) than black. *Any *piece.
On the one hand, I can see your meaning in the overall sweep of language development and history.
On the other hand… horse 'ockies. We don’t live as isolated zones of education with irregular access to teachers and standards. There is one widely-accepted way to spell about 90% of the words in common usage, and using ‘variant spellings’ is not a sign of genius, creativity, evolving language or any other faux cultural-liberal positive. It’s just sloppiness, especially in commercial writing.
You want to use ‘nite’ or ‘thru’ or even ‘tho’? Fine. (Just don’t expect to get away with it in any kind of professional or serious writing.)
You want to let ‘nihgt’ or ‘threw’ or ‘thogh’ stand in a finished piece of writing? Don’t give up the day job. And don’t fall back on arguments about how our noble ancestors did it in antiquity (say, 1850) unless you want your next surgery performed by a guy who can’t spell appendix and just wiped his ass with his fingers.
