In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics.
--David Runciman (2014)
Sooo, I'm indexing this rather horrid monograph that was and is so painful that I interrupted the index to proofread a book from the same publisher by a world-renowned philosopher whose name I've see in a hundred bibliographies. That good book come and gone, I'm down to the last 50 or so pages of the horrid one, and every five I go, another 10 seem to add on. Like eating vegetables as a kid. And, of course, there was the typical lattice of coincidence, as the topic of the book for indexing wove in and out of the book for proofing.
The difference in scholarship between the two is like a line from Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren about a hot 40-something, what today might be called a MILF, if I'm using the term correctly. From her 20-year-old daughter: "People look at me like I'm a raisin and at my mother like she's plum pudding."
I've not done the calculations, but I suspect that as a percentage of income I'm now more of an indexer than a proofreader or certainly a copyeditor, which has its pros and cons -- one of the cons being that of the three things I do, proofing and copyediting are more or less enjoyable, yet every index is a chore.
How you say . . . beggars/choosers?
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