A quickie post because there’s lots to do today and I was away yesterday, dealing with conference stuff. One of our conference participants has published two books of genre fiction–maybe I won’t identify the genre–and sent me a copy of one. I read the first three chapters on my way home, and I can’t believe how poorly copy-edited the book is–or, more likely, not copy-edited at all. It started with tussled for tousled on page 3 (“I playfully tussled his hair”) and just went on from there. Ugh. That’s a flat-out error–and there were others!–but there were also lots of borderline usage issues that a copy editor would have questioned. I will stop short of saying the whole thing is poorly written, but it’s not impressive.
And yes, I realize that if I had a copy editor for this blog, I would use fewer parentheses and em dashes, make fewer punctuation errors and be more precise in my verb-preposition pairings, but when I’m reading a published book from a reputable mass-market press, I do expect not to find three mistakes and eight or nine instances of questionable or infelicitous usage per (short) chapter! Except maybe I should, these days?
More amusing: as I sat on the bus to Conference City, I listened to a twentysomething guy’s cellphone conversation. There’d been some kind of regime change at the restaurant where he worked, and a couple of people had been fired, after which they’d all gone out to a bar and gotten hammered:
“Yeah, I tried calling him before I left this morning, but it was six a.m. and he’d gotten so drunk last night. He was practically coma toast.“
This, I liked.
Have you got any funny or infuriating grammar and usage anecdotes to share? Or any wonderful malapropisms?
Literature Should Mean Something in Your Life 