RANT Deliverance! (with apologies to Cornel West)

Oh, the twisted road of word processing.

When I began working as an editor in 1984, only one person out of about 15 or so in my employer's curriculum and examinations department had their own computer. That person, still among my dearest friends, was writing one of the primary moneymaking textbooks for the company, so he rated the special treatment. The rest of us, as far as I remember, either typed or handwrote whatever we were working on and passed it off to the recently rebranded "administrative assistant" to key in the text on an IBM Selectric with an OCR ball so that the product could then be sent along to the data processing department for scanning. And they later became "information processing." The dark days.

Eventually we received our own computers, which were put to best use with the introduction around 1985/6 of interoffice email, which was great for running football pools and writing song lyrics for our house band, including the prophetic "Working at Home," which an enlightened manager allowed his writers and editors to do in the mid-1980s, thus these lyrics, 34 years before COVID:

We're all working at home.
Don't call us on the telephone.
You don't deserve us, so don't disturb us,
While we're working at home. (Paisan/Czar)

That's 1986, folks. Talk about prophesy deliverance (!).

When word processing truly hit, we worked in Lotus AmiPro, and I was still laboring in that program as of the late 1990s and early 2000s. I have some invoices from back then I can't access because it's kinda hard to find AmiPro-to-Word conversion software. I guess it existed at some point.

Then came the glorious Word 2003. I still receive files from publishers that have been created in that program. With the updates that came down the pike, it did everything I needed it to do, and I could find all the commands easily. Anyone who thinks Apple/Mac products are intuitive have a different neurological operating system than I do. When mi esposa hands me one of her infernal devices to figure out, I just want to throw up (my hands).

Word 2007 was hardly a step forward. They took all the functionality of Word 2003 with updates and placed it where it didn't belong. So for years I toggled between the two programs as circumstances required.

Everything was fine until sometime in the mid-2010s, when one of my favorite authors, an Aussie who found this blog back before Google developed its ever-evolving algorithms and has used me ever since, roped me into editing the papers and related materials for a conference he was heading up on, I believe, the digital humanities -- the first time that conference was ever held in the southern hemisphere. He was very proud, and should have been. However, it turned into one of the most hellish projects I've ever worked on.

I ended up receiving manuscripts from all over the world, many written by nonnative-English authors, which was bad enough. But because about half of these folks were leading-edge technophiles I also started receiving emails giving me shit for requiring that manuscripts be written in Word. That I didn't use Linux or some other noncommercial program branded me as a Luddite worthy of all the derision they could heap on me. And they did.

My Aussie pal had entrusted much of the project management to one of his colleagues, who was too busy running the conference, so that task also fell to me—as did things like properly positioning art within the Word documents, a job that I'd never even attempted. It was hell times four, at least. My requested rate skyrocketed, though, but no amount of money could have made it worth it, especially given . . . 

That because I was dealing with so many different sources of input, I had my first experience with Office 365, or whatever Microsoft was calling their online suite at the time. So I had to download  this program onto a new laptop I'd purchased in case my old one ever failed. That was after the three days of updates required when I first plugged the machine in, since I'd never even opened the box. To date, in 25 years of freelancing, I'm on just my third computer, as far as I recall.

So, here I am, dealing with a worldwide collection of goddamn malcontents on a laptop with word processing software with which I'm unfamiliar, doing tasks I've never attempted. I finally got the grasp of the whole thing by the time my work was wrapping up. 

My next move, naturally, was to uninstall Office 365, hoping to never see it again.

Big mistake.

Bill Gates might be out to save the world, but his small type ruined my life. Buried in the agreement to install Office 365 was that if it was ever uninstalled, said uninstallation would take with it all updates to previous versions of Word. I could almost handle dealing with an unadulterated Word 2007, for which updates could still be had. But being left with a virgin version of Word 2003, when they'd stopped supporting the product a year or two earlier? That realization caused a pit in my stomach that could very well have been one of the proximate causes of my guts exploding sometime in May 2020: a perforated colon (a semicolon in my vernacular), emergency surgery (positive for COVID on the operating table, which later turned out to be false; no doubt a joy for the surgeons), four months with an ostomy bag, and now a gut with multiple large hernias requiring very complicated surgery to get me looking at all normal again. (Surgery pending, but that's another battle and a major rant.) Imagine the moguls on a freestyle ski slope, and you'll have an idea of what my midsection looks like -- on top of a rather emaciated 152-pound frame. And I struggle to keep that weight.

Fast-forward to March 2021, as my life is crumbling on a number of different fronts (although there are the occasional joys over the years, such as sons marrying wonderful women and the onset of grandparenthood). Because I'd been using laptops for years, I'd also been using external keyboards, for both the size of the keys and the number keypad to the right. I've also never used a touchpad. Ever, ever, ever. First thing I do is find out how to disable the fucking thing.

Late March 2021, the keyboard functionality fails, somehow also on the external keyboard, which my laptop will no longer recognize. Story of my life, along with many family members being medical mysteries (unfortunately my medical history is rather obvious) . . . even the Geek Squad is baffled. They asked, "Have you tried an external keyboard?" I'm sure the obvious Do you think I'm a goddamn idiot came through in my voice. They pushed as many buttons as they could and did whatever their geekdom could pull out, but no keyboard response. At least my data was still accessible, not that I need 95 percent of it. After my publishers get my work, I could delete it from my system and no one would care.

So, cheapskate that I am, I wander over to the laptop aisle at Best Buy and purchase the second-cheapest laptop on the shelf, figuring that I do no gaming, I'm not making any videos, I'm not streaming porn. My computer usage is entirely limited to word processing, email, internet searches for work, and YouTube. The greatest gift I've ever received was for Father's Day about four years ago when my sons signed me up with YouTube Premium, which I'd never do on my own. I told them to keep that up and they never needed to buy me another Father's Day present. We've all held to that agreement. All for the music, and plenty that's not available on any other streaming service.

Also, idiot that I am, I didn't realize that I was purchasing a glorified tablet. No storage space for software and certainly not for my 20 years of unnecessary work files. So while I'm still with the external keyboard and an old TV monitor for my screen, which I don't mind at all, I'm thrown into the world of external hard drives and, later, cloud storage. Am I done yet? By no means.

I did buy an external hard drive about 15 years ago, but of course would do backups about once every six years. The only thing worthwhile on there is a bunch of my wife's old recipes, from the days when she could still negotiate a Mac computer. So I had that. A friend who's worked for Oracle for decades sent me a solid state drive that he was no longer using that I now use as my primary storage, which was great until it no longer would recognize my new rig. A six-dollar cable from Amazon fixed that problem. (As he says, "Trust the Buddha and buy good cables.") Then I had to figure out, a state that  comes and goes, how to back that up to my old external hard drive. 

And then comes a new client a month ago that insists that everything be backed up to the cloud, a place I'd never been. Why I all of a sudden wanted to listen to a new client about something they'd have no way to verify is a mystery to me, except that my client base is shriveling up these days and I want to make folks happy. This whole "Land on Demand" thing was out of control years ago. I aim to please.

So, Google One. My Oracle pal assures me that it's easy with good support. Uh-huh. After installation, nothing seems to be working the way it's supposed to, and I spent two hours computer-chatting with Cynthia or Diane or Elmo or someone, with no resolution. Then they start emailing me asking for my opinion on their support. I let them know I was having many troubles and their chatline was worthless. So what do they ask me for? Not only screenshots, but I'm supposed to capture the movements in progress of what's happening on my screen when I do certain things and send that to them. I can do that about as well as I can touch my right hand to my right elbow. I finally cancelled the subscription, which I'd had for less than 24 hours. I asked them what would happen to the 30GB of files or so I'd uploaded. Could I still access them with my free 15GB that comes with my Google account? Yes, of course, but nothing would be updated.

While I was pondering my next step (Dropbox is far, far more expensive, but at least I'd sort of used it before), Google One fixed itself overnight. All of a sudden, icons I didn't see before were where they should have been the previous day, I can do backups, etc. A few mysteries remain, but I'm still in the game . . . for my new client who's now gone silent on me when I have many questions to be answered on a book of Catholic litcrit. I was told years ago by one of my university presses not to even bother with a medium edit on literary criticism, because the authors usually suck and are resistant to editing. 

Does anything make any sense?

Going Which Hunting

Moi lamented to me recently about a book she was reading off the clock that was chock-full of "which"s that should have been "that"s. I am at the end of a 500-something-page copyediting job that was much the same. Probably 300 of them in there, and only a handful needed the comma before "which" instead.

(Entry title courtesy of Fowler, Modern English Usage, a required text for us in senior year of high school. I think we used the 1897 edition; four pages devoted to "which" and "that.")

Fowler (not an endorsement of the seller)

Interesting project, though, from two perspectives, neither of which deal with the quality of the text, unfortunately:

1. This is the first of 18 volumes by this author, translated and reprinted from one of those romance languages, that the publisher will be doing over the next decade or so. It's a name that you'd know if you followed twentieth-century theology, I think. I'd call that an annuity. I'm presuming I'll be copyediting all of them.

2. Given that this volume -- actually a reprint of three books in one volume -- has been published numerous times before, in different languages . . . and probably in English before, but this is based on a translation . . . I'm copyediting with a rather light touch. The last situation I would want to create is, "Such-and-so maintained this bit of jargon until the 2014 XZX Books version, in which he wrote. . . ." I mean, how do I know? They sent along the original-language edition, but that's not going to help much.

* * *

A website developer told me that Google eventually moves you out of its rotation if the posting becomes infrequent. Sure enough, this blog is no longer getting hits when people search "editing" or "proofreading" or "indexing." So I might begin to post more . . . and actually back to on-topic stuff. I've probably said that before, too.

BSL 101: British as a Second Language

A book had been lurking on my schedule for months. Author told me about it last fall and sent me a draft in November to begin working on it. A few weeks later came a replacement chapter, then another. Thankfully I hadn’t begun working on the original yet, but I requested that when the entire manuscript was set, that’s when I should receive a complete new version. Author agreed.

Then the author said, I believe, one of the other chapters was undergoing heavy revision, or there was a new chapter or something, so everything’s on hold. OK.

Revised manuscript comes in February, followed by an email that some of the documentation needs to be reworked, and here’s what needs to be done. I wrote back and said, again, when you have a complete, finished manuscript, please send it to me. My point was not to be a jerk, and I explained that to the author. I’m not the one closest to the material. I’m not the subject expert. It’s not up to me to make substantive decisions about what’s in or not in the books.

About five hours later, the author sends me the completed manuscript, which I’ve now returned to the author, edited and tidied up. Great book, author is very pleasant. All’s good, although I do have one concern. Author said that the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript is August. I have a feeling the copyedited manuscript will not reside unmolested until then; rather, I fear that the author is going, by way of fact checking, to show this manuscript to a bunch of potential buyers of the book and tweak it for the next five months.

So, of course, down the line, some poor sap of a proofreader might be seeing When Versions Collide.

Oh. That would be me. Happy days.

The author is publishing the book with a UK press, so when the original manuscript came in last November, I had Colleen (dba interngirl) go through their 20-page style sheet and try to highlight all the differences from Chicago and any weirdness that didn’t look Amerkun. She marked plenty.

All her work was mostly for naught as I needed to refresh myself on all of it five months later anyway (formatting, a lot of things), but the press’s style sheet did spell out for me some things about British English that had baffled me. I’m not sure it does any less now.

Full point after abbreviation only where last letter of word omitted: Dr, Mr but etc., Prof., but not after contractions or in acronyms: Dr, St, Mr, BBC, UNESCO, USA. Note especially: ed. / eds, vol. / vols, Ch. / Chs, but the exception: no. nos.

Let that roll around in your head for a minute.

I’d always wondered why I would see “ed.” but “eds” in bibliographies when dealing with British works. Now I know. I probably miscorrected it in some volumes years ago. Live and learn. But to me, that’s too much to think about. Just put a damn full stop at the end of the abbreviation.

Include ‘e’ in forms such as: ageing, judgement, likeable.

> Use –ize and –ization; recognize, criticize; but use analyse, paralyse, electrolyse. Note that a number of verbs have no alternative to the ‘ise’ spelling, including: advertise, advise, circumcise, compromise, despise, devise, enterprise, exercise, franchise, improvise, revise, surmise, supervise, televise.

What the British taketh away in punctuation, they add back in unnecessary letters. I’ve never liked “judgement,” and of course. “acknowledgements” is the bane of editors and proofreaders everywhere in the United States. I don’t know what’s up with Use –ize and –ization. Nor do I understand the -lyse exception, which they don’t identify as such. In the book, I ran across other -lyse words. Do they fall under this rule? Could be argued either way.

Ellipses: … No space between points; space after only if leading to new sentence, no extra point if at end of sentence.

OK, class. Think about this one. Not only are the butt-ugly “points” (wait, here they’re not full points?) set tight, but no space around them, unless the following bit of copy is a sentence. Let me demonstrate:

The umpire was hot...and tired.

The umpire was hot, tired... He threw the manager out of the game for dropping the M-bomb.

I actually grew to like this style in the course of copyediting the book. Not saying I’d want to change to it, but it is efficient.

The ellipses, that is. Not the umpiring.

Round brackets should be used within round brackets where necessary. Square brackets should normally be confined to editorial comment.

By this point, I’m enraged. It’s like, “What the hell have you people done to our language?” I want to go into a Sam Kinison rant, “Have you ever heard the word ‘parentheses,’ people? What the hell is a ‘round bracket’?” So, in this book we have some parenthetical — I guess that would be round-bracketal — in-text citations that read “(blah blah blah (Smith and Jones 2000)).” Joyous.

Use minimum numbers for number spans except in ‘teens’, e.g. 25–8, 136–42, 150–1, but 12–16.

Whatever.

Formatting:

En Rules (and Em Rules)

> An en rule is longer than a hyphen and is used to replace ‘to’ in number spans, e.g. ‘24–8’. As there is no en rule key on the standard keyboard you should indicate en rules between numbers using the normal short hyphen.

> The en rule is also used to link two items of equal weight, e.g. ‘Nazi–Soviet pact’. To indicate words which should be linked with en rules (rather than normal hyphens) type a double hyphen, e.g. Nazi--Soviet pact.

> Spaced en rules are used as parenthetical dashes or pauses. Type a single hyphen with a space before and after to indicate a dash.

> Only use em (—) rules to indicate a deliberately obscured word.

So, em dashes don’t appear. An em dash is for their purposes an en dash with spaces around it. In the bibliography, instead of the 3-em dash for a repeated author, they use an en dash.

And what everyone wants to know:

> If following UK style, always use single quotation marks for dialogue and quoted material in the text. Reserve the use of double quotation marks for quotes within quotes, e.g. ‘Edward found the trappings of “royalty” hung heavily.’

> In UK style the full stop only falls inside the quotation mark if the material quoted is a complete sentence, e.g. He called it “my house”, even though it belonged to Clara.

Now, I think I get it. But why oh why did they use double quotes in the last example, and why did they refer to a “full stop” when a comma appears? Is a comma also a “full stop”?

I’m going to have to relearn all this stuff again at some point. I think I’ll see this book again even before it goes to the publisher. Just a guess.

Getting What You Pay For

I do some work for an Internet publisher that has a help desk for its writers and editors -- and wannabes. This missive came in today.

Message: This my second massage to you.I have read your contribuors articles which is very informational and intrested contribute my knowledge through but i am from india.Indians also have good knowledge in all areas & one of the biggest English speaking country in the world other wise our mother tounge is HINDI.If possible give a chance to indians including me to share our knowledge through you around globe . Thanx and regards.

A friend passed along an interesting article a few weeks back relating to the fear of the coming hundred years being the Chinese century. One of the article's points was that the next ten years might be the Chinese decade, but that the century will belong to India because it is an English-speaking country, and 5 billion people don't want to learn Mandarin. Not that one person's email in search of employment to a help desk halfway around the world should serve as a proxy, but this person obviously feels his English is good enough to write for money. That's telling.

english, sort of

I received today the following email:

Dear sir or madam,
We, is member of DragonFord Corp is a professional pharmaceutical, chemical, intermediate, raw material, veterinay,agrochem,ceramics foam filters,adhesive tape.
At a customer’s oriented, cooperative, positive and effective ways, we have enough confidence to cooperate with our partners in a pleasant way.
If you are interested in this, please contact us at any time. Let's have a good start.
Waiting for your comments, thanks a lot in advance!
Yours faithfully Mr. Bob

============

What I am interested in is making their English passable to the people with whom they are trying to correspond. I informed them that I accept PayPal.