Chewing Over the Issues

What it feels like to be a born proofreader

Proofreading is one of my mutant talents. “Can spot a typo at 20 paces!” This is the best description I’ve come across of the “something’s wrong there” feeling I have when I’ve noticed a typo.

From Making Light.

The proofreader’s sense that “something is wrong at this location” is a genuinely weird phenomenon. People who have a serious case of it will “feel” a typo go past when they’re riffling through pages too fast to be reading them. They’ll gradually sense the presence of a typo in their peripheral vision — for example, in the small print on a poster located eight feet up on the opposite wall, when they’re concentrating on reading something right in front of them.* When they’re proofreading, sometimes the typos on the next page will “light up” as soon as they turn the page. They’ll still methodically read that page against the setting copy, but there’s a good chance that the typos they saw in that first moment will be the only ones on the page.

If you can get enough of these people together for a conversation, it’s fascinating to hear them discuss the experience. For some, the misspelled text flashes the first time they see it, or is a different color, or floats slightly above the surface of the page, or vibrates. For me, there’s a bump at that spot, about the size of a caraway or fennel seed lying on the desktop underneath the paper. My mind can feel it, though my fingers know it’s not there.

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

(Source: nielsenhayden.com)

Don’t mistake expressing contempt for taking offense

From Hoyden About Town.

Dear people out there in the world,

If you and I are discussing something, and you say something that sounds racist/sexist/homophobic/classist/ableist (or otherwise marginalising towards certain groups of people), and I say to you “Wow, that’s a pretty bigoted word” please don’t think that you have offended me and that I just need to grow a thicker skin and not get offended so easily, and why do people look for stuff to go around getting offended about etc etc. (Oh no, the PC brigade is running wild!)

I’m not offended by those words. I’m contemptuous of those words, and I’m letting you know that using them just made me think less of you – less admiration, less trust, less enjoyment in your company. I don’t hold you personally in the same contempt as I do the words that you just used, at least not yet. Whether I end up doing that depends on how you react to having your word choices challenged.

How to restore my former opinion of you? Acknowledge that the words you used have their origin as tools of social exclusion, the disdain and scorn of those who appear “different” – even if you didn’t mean them to be at the time, even if they’re just words that everybody in your family uses and you never thought about those words that way – and that now that your attention has been drawn to this, you don’t want to use them that way again.

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing.

On injury, apology, “political correctness”, and Charles Dickens

By Dave Hingsburger:

Do you know how Charles Dickens responded to a letter from Eliza Davis? Probably not. Let me tell you, I think you might find it instructive. During the writing of Oliver Twist, the character of Fagin is referred to in the first 38 chapters, 257 times as ‘the Jew’. As the series appeared, first in serialized form, Ms Davis felt that Dickens, in his portrayal of the character and his constant reference to him as ‘the Jew’ was inciting hatred against Jewish people. When Dickens received the letter, the book form of Twist was being typeset. In fact the first 38 chapters had already been done. He stopped the process and in the remaining book the term is barely used again in the next 179 references to the character.

Dickens did not stop there. In his next book, Our Mutual Friend, he created a Jewish character named Riah, whom he gave words to express the prejudice and the injustices that are perpetrated on his people by the current bigotries and attitudes of the day. It seems that Dickens, didn’t leap to defensiveness. Instead, he recognized he had done harm and sought to actively redress the harm he had done. He never began to bemoan restrictions placed on him by oversensitive, politically correct readers hell bent on limiting his rights as an artist. No, he recognized that instead of limiting his vocabulary, the challenge was to increase it. He was challenged to use new words to characterize ‘the other’ and in doing so elevated the use of language from vilification and victimization to revelation and respect. Eliza Davis gave him a gift, in thanks, inscribed with these words, well worth noting: “To Charles Dickens … in grateful and admiring recognition of his having exercised the noblest quality men can possess-that of atoning for an injury as soon as conscious of having inflicted it.”