Friday, October 14, 2016

Not Knowing at All

I'm sitting here negotiating the uphill slope of six consecutive indexes -- none of them short, none of them nonscholarly -- and thinking back on one of the many times I've submitted an index on a topic about which I had no clue.

After decades of doing mostly nothing but reading scholarly tomes, I've learned to identify minor concepts about which authors feel a particular warmth. When they see the term in the index, I imagine them getting that tingle up their leg.

So I'd plucked out some obscure term used once in the book and threw it in the index, because I knew the author enjoyed putting that bit of text in the book.

Author's response: "It's good to work with an indexer who understands the material."

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