Editing Speech and Writing

When it comes to language, I used to be a prescriptivist, telling others how language ought to be used. Now I am a descriptivist, recording how language is used in practice.

Oh, I haven’t entirely given up my mission to get people to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I still feel that writing “correctly” can be important to the meaning of whatever it is you’re writing about. And I still cringe when someone (usually my husband) says “foilage” instead of “foliage” or “nucular” instead of “nuclear.” But that’s speech, which is very different than writing.

Of course, an editor can’t really edit spoken English aside from pronunciation. Well, there are malapropisms and misplaced modifiers.

Malapropisms occur when a speaker substitutes an incorrect word for a correct one. One headline that makes the rounds on Facebook is about an “amphibious” pitcher, when “ambidextrous” is meant.

Misplaced modifiers are descriptive phrases in the wrong place in a sentence. The classic misplaced modifier is Groucho Marx’s “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.” (A misplaced modifier is often confused with a dangling modifier, which happens when an introductory phrase modifies the wrong subject in a sentence: “Painting for three hours, the portrait was finally finished.” Who is painting for three hours? We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t the portrait. I once worked with a man who described any kind of grammatical mistake, even a subject-verb agreement error, as a dangling modifier. But I digress.)

One of the places I often encounter “faulty” grammar, spelling, and punctuation is on social media. I have to think twice before I share memes with errors in them because I’m afraid someone will think that I don’t know the difference. (I know Lizzie Borden’s name isn’t spelled “Bordon,” but I couldn’t resist the joke: “If you get any messages from my parents, don’t answer them. They’ve been hacked.” But I digress again.)

Speaking of memes, I once saw one that said one shouldn’t look down on someone who mispronounces less-familiar words. It means they learned them from seeing them in print rather than hearing them. One of my dear friends treated the word “sarcophagus” that way and came to me to learn the proper pronunciation. I was happy to oblige. (I’ve also heard of the phenomenon going the other way. Another guy I knew had only ever heard the name Sigmund Freud spoken. He wrote it down as “Froid,” a fair guess based on the sound, but outrageously inaccurate nonetheless. But I digress yet again.)

When it comes to language I do like, however, I love new additions to English. “Portmanteau” words are particularly fun. They’re made up of two words or parts of words smashed together to mean something new. One that everyone knows (but don’t realize is a portmanteau) is “smog,” which comes from “smoke” and “fog.” (I say I like them, but not the ugly portmanteau words that crop up, especially during the holidays. Nothing is simply a sale. It’s always an “aganza,” “palooza,” “bration,” or “thon.” The first million times someone did that, it may have been clever, but the shine has long worn off. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, back to editing. I hereby apologize to everyone whose infinitives I unsplit and whose prepositions I moved away from the end of sentences. I’m really sorry. My bad. Think of me as a recovering prescriptivist. Maybe not fully recovered yet, but I try.