The Merciless Editor

There might be something wrong with me. I just can’t help myself. I can’t hear something, look at something, or read something without analyzing and, if need be, correcting it. This happens most often with the written word. I don’t mean just essays, poems, novels, short stories, posts, emails, and the like. Of course, I do it with them. But I do it with everything else, too.

Lately, I have taken to editing signs. What kind of signs? you ask. Any kind, including traffic and highway signs but also instructions posted in the men’s room at Peet’s (see Two Months to Perfect Coffee) and the announcement scribbled by my Vietnamese barber, who wants people to know that he reserves the right to refuse them service. He is not a native English speaker and, unfortunately, resorted to Google translate, coming up with: “Our Right is to the Refuse of You.” I told him to run it by me next time. I’ll correct it in the king’s English, and all he has to do is trim my eyebrows for free.

The other day, I had to stop my car for road work, and the sign on the shoulder said: “Be Prepared to Stop.” Instantly, I went into copy editing mode and reworked it to say, “Prepare to Stop.” It was shorter, pithy, taking up less space, and with a more actionable verb (prepare as opposed to be).

But then I realized that “Prepare to Stop” conveys the sense that you will definitely have to stop. “Be Prepared to Stop,” on the other hand, gets you ready for an action that is not necessarily inevitable. So, the county department of annoying roadwork may have been right, after all, even though my sign was more immediate and less passive. You can imagine how long I hung on the horns of that dilemma.

Last week I wrote about Tony Bennett in the shower (see Showering with Tony). Part of the ritual I do at the gym includes sitting in the sauna after working out. So, there I was this week, minding my own business and sweating like a hot yoga instructor, when I noticed a posted sign on the wall that included warnings, two of which said: “Staying too long in a sauna is capable of causing overheating,” and “Breathing heated air in conjunction with consumption of alcohol, drugs, or medication is capable of causing unconsciousness.”

I don’t know where all this “capable of causing” stuff came from or who thought it up, but it annoyed me so much I had to take a picture of it. Of course, I made sure I was alone, since taking photos in a locker room is capable of causing scandal, and far be it from me to encourage such behavior.

There’s also this thing going on in social media that is capable of causing me agita. It’s a compound subject followed by a single verb. You’ve seen it, heard it, and endured it burrowing into the soft folds of your gray matter, damaging your ability to communicate and bringing us all down to the level of savages. It occurs so much in Twitter and YouTube that it has almost become the norm.

I blame the Catholic Church, in whose Eucharistic prayer the priest says, “All glory and honor is Yours, Almighty Father, forever and ever.” It’s like swallowing a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar or listening to the guy at the next table slurp his Wonton. Speaking of church, with Ash Wednesday coming up this Wednesday (look for a Mittwoch Matinee post), it would be a good time to give up social media. Good, God, did I just give myself an unachievable goal?

I would be remiss if I were to let this post go without saying something about the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I’m not one for fact checking for two reasons. First, the kind of writing I do always includes a bit of fiction. It’s based in fact, of course, but facts loosely employed, sometimes to protect the innocent, sometimes the guilty, occasionally both. Second, fact-checkers are often ideologues with a couple of axes to grind, which they do with a vengeance.

But I have to wonder if I heard correctly. According to Putin, it was the Poles who colluded with Hitler to invade and destroy their own country. On its face, it is not only incorrect but absurd. You would have to have no sense of history to assert it. Or an extremely biased one, which Putin does. And all this time I thought it was Stalin who schemed with der Führer to carve up Poland and even had 20,000 Polish army officers massacred at Katyn Forest.

You might want to consider this a warning, a cautionary tale of sorts. If you start thinking like me, you’ll find copy editing exhausting, never ending, and thankless. It got me dubbed “ruinator” once by someone who was definitely prepared to stop (see I, Ruinator). And that’s exactly what she did.

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Image credits: feature by Davidson Luna; writing advice by Hannah Grace. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli, where you’ll find a copyediting heaven. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”