Word Perfect 

I’ve been working with an editor on my latest book, I’ll be Your Server, a series of reflections on servants in the Bible. As we go back and forth on placement of commas or singular versus plural verbs, I’m aware that we’ll not catch everything we should. I’ve increasingly accepted that there are no perfect books. All my books, and I assume all other books as well, have errors: typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, or whatever.

My son, Matthew, is an excellent proofreader. He invariably catches numerous errors in my drafts. But even he doesn’t catch everything, and within about 17 minutes after opening my latest book, he can be guaranteed to find at least one more elusive typo. Sigh…

This leads to acute schadenfreude [pleasure at someone else’s misfortune] when I discover the typos of others, and I’m reminded of their humanity—and mine.

Three examples. A music organization in Spokane proudly advertised its upcoming “12-hour continuous recital.” Unfortunately, they omitted the “i” in “recital.”

The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, at the University of Texas in Austin, published its commencement brochure describing itself as “The School of Pubic Affairs.” The School duly issued an apology for what it termed its “eggregious typo.”

Then there is the so-called “Wicked Bible,” published in 1631. It proclaimed in Exodus 20:14 that “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

I’ve recently read Dreyer’s English, by the former copy-editing chief of Penguin-Random House, Benjamin Dreyer. He notes how difficult it is to attain perfection in editing and even he continues to find errors in books that he has edited.

Writers and editors are uncomfortably aware of the first part of Alexander Pope’s line, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” But we turn to you, dear reader, to embrace the bit about forgivenes.

[300 words]

 

 

Welcome Words, Wicked Words, Wasted Words

 

Welcome Words, Wicked Words, Wasted Words

This month’s 300-words entry is late: Sue and I were in Pennsylvania helping take care of our twin grandchildren, Sophie and Hazel, until earlier this week. It was a delight to hear first-hand their steadily increasing vocabularies.

Words were much on my mind during that visit, both because of the girls and the two books I’d taken along to read.

One was specifically about words and the comedian who became legendary for using bad ones: George Carlin. The book, Carlin’s autobiography, Last Words, described growing up in New York and how he became a nationally renowned comedian. The book’s downside was the gratuitous foul language and the depressing accounts of his drug and alcohol abuse. Still, the examples of his comic routines highlighted his remarkable facility with words.

The second book was a novel selected for a mindless read. (I’ll mention neither the author nor the title to protect the guilty.) It purported to be a crime thriller. But the real crime was that the book was an appalling waste of words. The protagonist lacked any credibility: a former homicide detective who had palatial homes on the East and West coasts. He was also a lawyer and a pilot who flew his private jet to his English estate. The dialogue was painfully predictable and the story ended with one significant plotline unresolved. In brief, this was one of the worst written books I’ve ever read. I kept hoping that it would get better; it didn’t.

Two lessons. First. I was reminded that writers should never send readers away disappointed. Give them something: amusement, hope, entertainment, information, inspiration, whatever. Second, I should have remembered John Ruskin’s words: “Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.” Too late.

[300 words]