From "My Life in Error/A copy editor recounts his obsession with perfection" by Benjamin Dreyer, the copy chief of Random House (NYT).
I don't want to send Dreyer into a blue funk, but if I were writing an essay that had the line "passing reference to barbecued chicken ribs," I would not also have "elbowed my husband sharply in the ribs." It's a repetition of a distinctive image — ribs — for no recognizable reason. That's a language mistake. Make it your husband's arm. You're in a movie theater. It was more likely his arm that you elbowed anyway, wasn't it? You just liked "ribs," but your feeling of liking it came, I'll bet, from having seen it so recently.
And here's the Wikipedia entry for Tuinal, a Eli Lilly sleeping pill introduced in the late 1940s and now discontinued:
Tuinal saw widespread abuse as a recreational drug from the 1960s through the 1980s. The pill was known colloquially under the street names "tuies", "tumies", "double trouble", "blue tips", " F-66's" (which were the markings on Lilly's capsule), "rainbows", "beans", "nawls" and "jeebs"....
Oscar Levant wrote in his book The Unimportance of Being Oscar, "If I had the choice between the most beautiful girl in the world and three grams of Tuonol [sic], I would take the latter."
Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia jointly committed suicide on March 1, 1983, by swallowing lethal quantities of Tuinal capsules at their London home....
In Ian Fleming's short story "The Living Daylights" (published in Octopussy and The Living Daylights, 1966) Commander Bond takes the drug before an assault on a KGB sniper: "He selected the Tuinal, chased down two of the ruby and blue depth-charges with a glass of water, and went back to bed. Then, poleaxed, he slept."...
In The Ramones song "Psycho Therapy", Joey Ramone sings in the second verse "I like taking Tuinal / It keeps me edgy and mean / I'm a teenage schizoid / I'm a teenage dope fiend."
In the book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996), Eliot Kidd refers to Sid Vicious taking "about thirty Tuinals" (a lethal dose for someone that doesn't have a huge tolerance to barbiturates) at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, the night Nancy Spungen was found stabbed to death and for which Sid was charged with her murder....
In the Lou Reed song "New Sensations", he sings: "It's easy enough to tell what is wrong, but that's not what I want to hear all night long, some people are like human Tuinals."....
American writer/poet/singer Jim Carroll is reputed to be the voice heard asking Brigid Polk about the availability of Tuinals between songs on The Velvet Underground's Live at Max's Kansas City album....
In the 2011 movie My Week With Marilyn, during a scene in Marilyn Monroe's bedroom, a bottle of Tuinal (misspelled "Tunial") can be seen on the bedside table, in reference to her dependency on barbiturates.
Many more cultural references to Tuinal at that Wikipedia link.
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20 comments:
He needs to get a lif.
Otoh, I am incensed when I see print and TV graphics with poorly kerned letters.
It's a curse...
The tyranny of repetitive language in writing. How much time is spent searching for some other word to avoid it.
Henceforth, the barbecued chicken ribs will be placed on hold to prevent the freewheeling pigeons from muting upon the fourth plinth. Cheers!
At a picnic, the wings probably were grilled, not barbecued.
I have a similar issue with numbers.
Example I read an article a few years ago about the readiness of the RAF. It said something like 48 of 72 are not combat ready. That is nearly half....
"I think it must hurt sometimes to live in your brain,". I'm passing this phrase for my wife's future use. She sometimes uses a less kind phrase.
Ain’t no big thing chicken wing.
I guess he couldn't poke his husband in the wing.
One of the infelicities in McCullough's "1776" was the use in successive sentences of the phrase that King George was 'greatly interested' in a topic. It was early in the book and I didn't find anything else to complain about. ("Brass cannon" is a phrase that sets my remaining teeth on edge but not everyone is the pedant that I am.)
I also hate it when people refer to "Fentanol." It's Fenta-nyl (fenta-nil) not fenta-nol.
That is all.
You don’t barbecue chicken wings, either. You barbecue chicken breasts or chicken drumsticks.
Here I had been envying people who were good at proofreading. I’m so bad at proofreading my own writing — I know what I meant to write and do I see what I meant and not what I wrote. Maybe proofreading is a skill that can lead to less happiness rather than more.
BBQ is one of those weird words. "Barbecue" seems to to ok these days, but when going into past tense or past participle, it uses a "q" instead of a "c". So, the writer or his copy editor isn't necessarily incompetent- one can't spell check every single word in an article, or are they supposed to?
A copy editor with an obsession for perfection should be a better writer.
"Not (entirely) displeased with my catch, he introduced me to his production editor — the person in a publishing house in charge of hiring copy editors and proofreaders.... In my early days, I would sulk in my office with the door closed if I found out that one of my books included a typo."
Did the writer friend appreciate that the error was pointed out? Pleased, but embarrassed? I don't know what the first part of the sentence means. I don't now much about writing, but is that one big sentence? It seems like a person using parenthesis, ellipsis and a hyphen in one sentence, doesn't know how punctuation works.
'I also hate it when people refer to "Fentanol." It's Fenta-nyl (fenta-nil) not fenta-nol.'
I would stop the cartels from manufacturing Fentanol with a nucular strike...
The Boss with the Hot Sauce
The Main Boy with the Joy Toy
The Master Blaster
Being the Grammarsmith that you are, I often wondered if you went through similar mental spasms reading our comments here; complete with incorrect grammar, misspelled words, morbid metaphors, arbitrary analogies, made up words, abundant alliterations, capitalization of words not needing to be capitalized, and run-on sentences that go on so long you forget what the topic was half-way through the thing.
Nucular Fentanol would be a good name for a band.
"Brass cannon" is a phrase that sets my remaining teeth on edge but not everyone is the pedant that I am.
Honest question, why is that?
I have many paperback books marked with corrections of typos I've found. Because I can, and why not? What is interesting to me is that I've re-read enough of the books that I've found more typos on the 2nd time through. Where was my brain when I missed them upon first reading? What did I miss twice that I might find next year, if I pick up Cryptonomicon again, or do another holiday reading of The Hogfather?
JAORE, thanks for asking, which makes me pin down my objection.
Even though it was a common enough term, it's a misnomer in that brass is not a weapons-grade metal. Cannon that weren't iron were made of alloys of copper, the best being bronze or 'red brass.'
But, I am not a metallurgist.
In the 40s, 50s and 60s, People not only believed in Freud (Science!) but they were dangerously naive in taking pills. Uppers, downers, tranquillizers, etc. "Weight-loss drugs".
Doctors handed them out like candy. Only old fuddie-duddies objected. Reading some Bios of the era, its amazing how many "Dr. Feelgoods" were giving famous people pills to lose weight, pills to sleep, and pills to counteract the other pills.
I appreciate the continuation of Althouse’s theme of meaningfully repetitive vs needlessly repetitive vs absurd substitute phrasing when a simple repetition would be optimal. Is there a pithy tag for this recurring theme?
Mothers Little Helpers
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