Marcial Arts and Letters

As Nietszche put it, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Consider the subjunctive mood, which expresses an improbability, a wish, a desire. None of us is baffled about the subjunctive in such clearly contrary sentences as “If I were queen.”The subjunctive construction that is contrary to fact most often perplexes and troubles even longtime editors. “If” does not always introduce a contrary condition. Take a look at sample sentences from one of our encyclopedia projects:“If a samurai were convicted of raping a woman who did not live on his lands, he was banned from participating in military service for 100 days and could have one side of his head shaved.”“If a boy were artistic, he might learn how to paint the pages of books with designs called ‘illuminations.’”“The chemise could be sleeveless if it were worn under a bliaut with long sleeves, or it could have tight, laced sleeves if the bliaut were sleeveless.”
None of these sentences expresses the contrary-to-fact condition, yet the presence of “if” seems to trigger the automatic use of the subjunctive “were.” These sentences express what Words Into Type calls merely a “contingency,” a hypothetical. The subjunctive usage here is incorrect. All these instances of “were” should be “was.”  

Editors are both lauded as heroes and reviled as villains. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Editors,” Gary Kamiya tells us that the job of editors can be to toil as “craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons—sometimes all while working on the same piece.”

We at Schlager Group come out of the old-school Scribner tradition of forelock-tugging amanuenses (from Latin a manu—“by hand”—and in servus a manu—“enslaved servant with secretarial duties”), trained to efface the self. It is not we who count; it is the prose we shepherd from manuscript to book page. One of our style guides instructs the copy editor in the proper way to address queries to the author: “Never use the first person. Editors must pretend that they do not exist.” Even so, I have been ill-used as a spittoon perhaps as often as I have been praised as a guiding muse.

Kamiya tells us that “the art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It’s about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It’s a handmade art, a craft. You don’t learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.”

I would be interested to hear the thoughts of our editors and writers alike on the arts of writing and editing and the uneasy alliance of writers and editors.

In the meantime, I will return to my job (in Kamiya’s words) as  Mr. Wolfe, the problem solver from Pulp Fiction (“You have a corpse in a car, minus a head. Take me to it.”)

Long ago and far away in a cubicle at the offices of Sports Illustrated (at Time-Life as was) in New York City, a dear friend of mine, Benita Korn, put out a weekly memo to the copy editors and proofreaders lovingly entitled “Tirade from the Triangle”–the Triangle being in those hazy days the room to which were relegated the–gasp!–smokers among us.

A digression: We can call it a “cubicle” even though it was triangular in shape because the word cubicle, in fact, does not suggest a cube shape but instead derives from the Latin cubiculum, itself from cubare (”to lie down”). I started on the Sunday overnight shift at SI in 1977–waiting long hours for copy from the last games played and horse races run and Olympic medals won. Believe me, the cubicles were frequently employed in the context of their first meaning found in Webster 11: a sleeping compartment.

In honor and in memory of Benita, I have begun this blog from my desk in Vermont, far away from the Schlager Dallas office staff and all of our various freelancer writers and editors, as a way to discuss the trials and tribulations of editing. I will be reviewing and commenting on a variety of language mortifications and misusages, gaffes and clinkers, follies and misadventures, peeves and perplexities. I hope you will join in the fun.

To future readers: I know at least two punsters and funsters among us who will be goading us at every turn. To the punsters and funsters: Be kind, you two. You know who you are, Henry and Tom (B. not S.).