The editor is in

After I graduate as a linguist/editor/geologist, I hope I will be able to get an editing job.

But I really don't know where to begin to look. I'm hoping that my capstone editing class this term will point me in the right direction.

I also wonder how good of an editor I am. At my internship, I will often suggest a change in a manuscript and then submit it to one of the main editors--then later I will see it again and I will see that my changes were not incorporated. That makes me think, "Is my editing out of line? Am I going too far?"

Other times I see when my changes were accepted, and that's a good feeling.

This week at work we were doing some final read-throughs before sending the journal off to be printed. I got my hands on a paper copy of an article that the other intern had read through. I found myself disagreeing with many of her changes, so I marked my disagreement and explained why I disagree. It still waits to be seen who they decided is right.

I do lots of editing these days, both for my job and for my editing class. And as I make decisions on what things to change, I often find myself in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, I'm a descriptive grammarian, and I don't want to make changes that I think are unnecessary. On the other hand, both my job and my class (and most other places, I think) have us more-or-less follow the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style, so I have to follow what Chicago says is "right."

In linguistics, we talk about two competing ideas, descriptivism and prescriptivism. Prescriptivism relates to prescribed rules that people "should" follow. You've heard them all before: when you answer the phone, you should say "This is he"; you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition; you shouldn't say "Me and John went to the store."

Descriptivism, on the other hand, is interested in what people are actually saying and why they are saying it, rather than what they "should" be saying.

In high school, I was very much a prescriptivist. I would go around learning new prescriptive rules and correcting people. I became an English Language major, hoping that I would learn even more rules. But what happened instead was that I was converted to descriptivism. It really makes more sense. A lot of our rules are completely arbitrary and foolish. Many of them exist because early grammarians in the 1600s and 1700s were studying Latin and tried to apply Latin's rules to English, not realizing (or perhaps ignoring) that English most definitely is not Latin! English is a Germanic language with influences from other languages, including Latinate languages, but it is not Latin. Yet many of the archaic, nonsensical prescriptive rules still occur today. I think a lot of prescriptivists will follow those rules to show how intelligent they are--but I think the descriptive approach is even more intelligent.

I will admit that I am perhaps more of a prescriptivist than I would like to believe. For example, when I see someone use an apostrophe to make a word plural, I think of them as less intelligent. When I see someone use an apostrophe to conjugate a verb, I think of them as even less intelligent. There still are some stigmas attached, fairly or unfairly, to certain forms. But I try to be understanding and rational about most grammar usage problems.

This week I found a very entertaining website, the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. It has tons of pictures of people using quotation marks incorrectly. Maybe it's a bit prescriptivist, but people need to realize that if they use quotation marks in those ways, there are some consequences, not least of which is that people may question their intelligence. But what makes this site so entertaining is that the quotation marks completely change the meaning of what people mean to say. There are countless instances of businesses offering some "free" service or product. They use quotation marks around free to emphasize it, but instead they end up implying that it really isn't totally free, that there is a catch. Some of it can be very funny.

But my problem with this site is that it does tend to cater to the prescriptive crowd. There are many pictures on there in which I think the quotation marks are perfectly acceptable; in fact, there was one where I thought the quotation marks were better than no quotation marks, yet people were making fun of it. On one caption, the blogger ended a sentence with at, and one of the comments was, "Is there a blog for unnecessarily ending a sentence with a preposition?"

Ms. Know It All, do you even know why ending a sentence with a preposition is so "wrong"? Well, the morphology of the word preposition is pre-position, meaning it should come before something else, but the morphology doesn't reflect actual usage. It appears that the "never end a sentence with a preposition" rule began with John Dryden in 1672, and he probably said it was wrong because Latin doesn't put prepositions at the end. But English isn't Latin. Countless esteemed writers, such as Shakespeare, put prepositions at the end of their sentences without a problem. It's just something we do in English. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says, "The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake. You can avoid the construction but you should do so at your peril."

(By the way, Merriam-Webster is probably the most authoritative dictionary. Noah Webster created the first influential American dictionary, and then people started colloquially calling dictionaries a Webster's, so then other dictionary companies called their dictionaries Webster's Dictionary. The original Webster company went to court, but the court ruled that Webster's was in colloquial use, so they didn't have a copyright to the name. They had to switch to Merriam-Webster's instead. So if you find a dictionary that says Webster's, I would be a little leery, because it's a misleading title.)

This week I had a dream that I was applying for a job opening. I was a little worried, because I had submitted my resume but I forgot to update it in the past year. We had to take a test that had very convoluted, complicated questions. One of the questions asked us to identify the split infinitive. I thought, "I don't know if I want to work here if they care about split infinitives."

An infinitive is a phrase like to go, to see, to be, etc. Splitting the infinitive is putting a word between the to and the verb, like to fully understand. The rule to not split an infinitive (like I just did) is one of the stupidest rules there is. They said you shouldn't split an infinitive because you can't split one in Latin. But you can't split an infinitive in Latin because infinitives are one word in Latin. It's ridiculous! When Star Trek premiered, people were up in arms because it said "to boldly go." If people are going to get upset over something like that, I can only imagine how often their blood pressure rises.

One of the problems I encounter often in editing is the use of they to refer to a single person of undisclosed gender. If you don't know someone's gender, you can't say he because that gets the feminists angry, and he or she is just awkward and cumbersome. Some people have tried to overcome the problem by inventing new pronouns. When I was in high school, I tried to make thon a popular pronoun (I didn't invent it, I just used it). Like "Thon didn't use thons blinker" or "I can't tell if thon is a boy or a girl." Mostly it just confused people.

But now I realize how foolish that is. If you're trying to change the language, why not use something that people already understand--they? It is completely understandable to say something like "Each student is trying their best." So much better than "trying his best" or "trying his or her best." Some people have taken feminism too far and even say "trying her best." Using they, them, and their is the best solution. When I come across singular they in a manuscript, I flag it--not because it's wrong, but because I don't want someone else to change it! I want to help it become a standard, nonstigmatized pronoun. It just makes perfect sense.