I grew up to be a fanatic about the English language. In my years as editor, I’ve been known to wrestle with a pressman over a page that was about to go to press with a grammar gaffe in the lead story. I’ve pulled out perfectly good strands of hair (my own) over a faulty apostrophe that made it into the paper — you know, an “it’s” that was supposed to be an “its,” or vice versa.
A run-on sentence like the one on the front page of Saturday’s Tracy Press — “Daylight-saving time begins Sunday, move clocks forward one hour at 2 a.m.” — can put a damper on an entire day for me. If only I’d stayed up a little longer Friday night to proof pages, I could’ve turned that comma into a semi-colon.
Truly, my newspaper-reader-soulmates are the ones who stop me on the street or e-mail me when they’ve found an especially egregious language error in the paper (not to be confused with fact errors, which are another story.)
Just last week, Aaron Carter e-mailed with angst after he read the tease on the front page of Friday’s paper: In 1906, an earthquake and fire devastated the city by the bay. One hundred years later, officials are preparing for another terrible “tremblor.”
“I’m certain the person making the entry intended to use the word ‘temblor,’ which is defined as ‘a quaking,’” he wrote. “I am hopeful the writer did not intend to use the word “trembler,” which is a noun used to describe a person who trembles or who has trembled, or who, by nature, is a trembler.”
He’s right, and I'm trembling just thinking about that misspelled temblor.
Jane Devlin, another Tracy Press reader, called me recently to tell me that we should have corrected a source’s grammar rather than repeat the mistaken use of the word “like” in a direct quote. You know, we were, like, adults, speaking like kids, and we should, like, know better.
That just warmed her up to talk about other modern-day problems with the language.
“You know what really sends me over the edge?” she said. “When someone replaces the word ‘said’ with ‘go.’ That, to me, is a crime.”
Jane and Aaron remind me of another astute reader named Mike Blake, who started e-mailing me in 2002 with lists of annoying mistakes from our paper — words that sound the same but mean something different, like “patients” used in place of “patience,” and typos that change meanings, like “math lab” rather than “meth lab.”
I’d dutifully pass them on to my young staff (all college graduates who majored in English, journalism, rhetoric, history or political science, mind you) as Lessons From The Outside, which always carry more weight, you know, than those from ever-picky editors.
I eventually convinced Mike to work as a part-time copy editor for us. By day, he wrote software over the hill, and by night, he’d proof our pages — and save our bacon.
Alas, he moved on and bought a farm in Vermont. His wife, Margaret, recently asked about the New Year’s baby who weighed 15 pounds, 14 ounces, as she’d read on the Tracy Press Web site. She was pretty sure we’d meant to write 5 pounds, 14 ounces.
Uh, yeah. We ran a correction on that slip-of-the-finger on the keyboard.
Meanwhile, I’ll have three other editors read this column before it hits the press, so I’m pretty sure it will be typo-free.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Sward.
