This, that, and the sirens

[mrissa]

There are few things I hate so much as being corrected when I am right. Receiving an edited version of a manuscript with, "They were especially hard on my servants and me," changed to, "They were especially hard on my servants and I," makes me want to be especially hard on she. With a hockey stick.

I'm also ready to scream at such corrections like, "Velvet feels rough when stroked against the grain. Are you sure you don't mean stroked with the grain?" Yes, rather sure, actually. It's a pretty specific sensation, and it's the one I meant to evoke, and I didn't use any words like "smooth" that contradict it. And inserting adverbs, inverting clauses, and breaking up perfectly good sentences willy-nilly -- YARG. (Yes, okay, sometimes my sentences are too long. But breaking up a sentence of less than two lines into two choppy sentences, when there's no jarring repetition of that structure in sight? BLERG.)

Let us not even discuss the elements of the fantasy genre this person apparently believes originated with Harry Potter.

I appreciate a good copy-editor. I just wish this zine had one.

The dysosmia continues at a rate of one or more events per day. This morning I spent some time looking for where Ista had had an accident on the rug, only to find that there was no such accident, and the smell morphed back into the lavender smell of the soap we have in the downstairs bathroom. Poor maligned Ista. Yesterday she smelled like anise for about five minutes. I hate anise. I have an ENT appointment next Tuesday, and I'm trying to maintain something like hope for it. The fatigue is back to its current norms after yesterday; I slept well last night, which was a relief but not a surprise.

Other than that, I have a long-scheduled outing planned for tonight, and I'm excited about that. Also, I have in my head the Toad the Wet Sprocket song that doesn't actually have the line, "There's something at the boat show" in it but we always sing it that way anyway. ("I wanna get me a little Bolivian baby." "She's got a tick in her eye." "I'm in love with your goats." "Forty-five virgins and a pelican." We're not actually big on the right lyrics around here.) And it's cool and rainy and happy.

Aaaand there go the sirens. Whee. I'm not finding anything online that says there's a torando warning in the area, and I would really like to continue to get stuff done up here in the office for awhile longer, now that the temperature is berable in it. Well, if the sky turns green, I'll head downstairs.

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I had that moment too. Then remembered it's the first Wednesday of the month.

I tend to favor "I wanna get me a little ophidian baby," by the way.

[fiddledragon]

*luagh* I did the same thing especially after the storms yesterday!

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Name the zine! The world must know!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Now that I've vented, I think the right thing to do is to talk to their main editbeing first. Main editbeing may not even know it's an issue.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Aaaah, you're so good-hearted and polite. :P

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, no, this is the Minnesota version of in-your-face and rude. Really.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

You live in a different Minnesota than the rest of us, I think. :)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I appreciate writers who appreciate good copy editors. I'm just sayin'.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to complain, because I don't want to be the kind of writer who's all "she didn't realize that the typo on page 6 was a deeper reflection of the narrator's life going awry, the fool, the FOOL! My prose is deathless!"

But really: harder on I? Come on.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I know, I know.

Have you ever read the version of Piers Anthony's But What of Earth that annotates all the changes and "corrections" made by a whole series of editors and copy editors?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I read that! The saga of the copy editors and their comments was better than the book itself. :)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. I've had one truly heinous CE experience. I sympathize.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

People who believe the understand the difference between I and me, and who wander around correcting other people self-importantly, are even more annoying than people who just don't know.

And whom, also.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing is, it's a copy-editor's job to fix problems with I/me, who/whom, etc. It's just that it's their job to corectly diagnose problems in the first place.

Most copy-editors I know don't correct other people in day-to-day speech, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are some out there. A good copy-editor has to be able to spot the difference between a writer incorrectly writing, "Him and John were going outside," and a writer having a character say, "'Me and John are going outside.'" They have to be able to spot usage on a higher level than just the basic proscriptions. They are worth their weight in saffron.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I imagine it's an occupational hazard for bad ones, like bad computer professionals (or wannabes) give random half-baked computer advice and criticism.

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Sorry that happened to you. :-( I hate to hear those stories.

More redundant suggestions

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about your dysosmia last night, and again this morning, and these are probably avenues you have already run down, but:

Some drug commercial last night mentioned "funny taste" as a side effect. Are you taking anything that might have dysosmia as a weirdo, very rare, side effect or interaction?

There must be ear-nose-throat guys who specialize in working with perfume industry noses and tasters of various ilks; can your doc consult any to see if there are similar cases on record?

Could you actually be loosing some olfactory acuity? If you were, might the dysosmia be you're brain attempting to make up for the decreased sensory input?

And coming back to the zinc thing (but this is the last time I'll mention it, I promise), because it's so tempting, might you need a higher level of zinc than usual? I don't recall whether you ruled out zinc by taking supplements or by some sort of testing, but maybe you need a little more than the norm?

As always, feel free to use this handy Vorbarr Sultana shopping bag, for my ... impertinence. :)

I need good copy editor, too

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

"your"

Re: More redundant suggestions

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thanks for trying to be helpful, and for putting enough hedges around it that it doesn't come off as lecturing.

The only drugs I'm taking are birth control, a multivitamin, and iron, so we've looked into that. I may end up switching methods of birth control if we don't find anything else wrong, not because there's a clear mechanism for it being the problem but because it's one of the only things we could change just to see. (All readers please note: if I want your advice on birth control options, I know where to find you, so please don't share unsolicited tidbits on this one.)

My ENT may send me to a more specialized ENT if she finds it appropriate. We'll see.

The dysosmia is coming in the middle of other tastes and smells that are perfectly clear and not very weak, so I doubt that my brain is filling in for lack of acuity in that way.

And the zinc thing was actually tested, not just automatically supplemented, but there's also zinc in my multivitamin. So.

Re: More redundant suggestions

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I figure it's *really* unlikely that I could come up with a solution, but Just In Case. (My aunt spent a couple of months getting brain scans and going through the ringer with her doc because she was loosing vision in her left eye, only to be told by the specialist she was *finally* referred to that it was a cataract and why hadn't anyone else bothered to look in her *eye* for the cause. ::sigh:: Her doc though she was too young for cataracts to be an issue... I'm glad yours is being more thorough.)

Re: More redundant suggestions

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have no complaints about my doctor. I wish she had an easy answer for all this, but I don't think it's likely her fault that she doesn't.

Re: More redundant suggestions

[pameladean]

Just an anecdotal note -- when I was on high doses of progesterone for various problems, I had, not exactly dysosmia, but issues with smells. Some were stronger, some weaker, things tasted odd or different. I believe some pregnant women report similar effects. So it's not a crazy thing to try, not utterly, should other options not produce a solution.

P.

Re: More redundant suggestions

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

One of the things that most commonly causes that in pregnant women is elevated prolactin levels. They tested for that. I don't have it.

But maybe other things cause it, too; who knows.

[pameladean]

I had that siren moment too (and I was in the shower, argh), and what I thought was, good grief, is the Mississippi finally coming to get us? Then, as per above, I remembered that October started on Saturday, so this is its first Wednesday.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The Mississippi loves us and would never hurt us. Not like those scary things, hills.

[brooksmoses]

*shakes with laughter*

And here you'd nearly convinced me over the last two weeks that I was close to being a Minnesotan at heart, with all the "this is rude, for a Minnesotan" and all the related things.

But no, you have to spoil it with something like that. Where I grew up, the hills protected us -- we never had to worry about tornados. Or floods.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I went to college in a part of Minnesota with hills, and they didn't protect us from the tornado. It hit the stuff on top of the hill and also the stuff in the river valley. Which had flooded the previous year.

[brooksmoses]

Oh, I know they don't do that in general. It's when you have enough of them, and when they're sufficiently large to break up the storm patterns (and to not leave much flat land left to flood).

Though that probably requires hills that are also mountains.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

You know, it belatedly occurs to me that writing a novel in a future strand of English which is intended as the century-on consequence of a global population dieback and the surviors assembling a society which forcibly merges UK and US English and now contains elements of both is going to give me merry hell with copy-editors if the thing sells.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Masochist.

Get a "Stet" stamp.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

It shouldn't be any problem for a competent copy editor. If the language has settled--so that, for example, everyone says lift rather than elevator and everyone says truck rather than lorry--just provide a style sheet of correct words. If the language is still in flux, just give the instruction that no changes are to be made between the two dialects.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. I understand that Paarfi has had occasional difficulties finding a good enough copy-editor as well.

I wonder how they dealt with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Emergence?

Maybe it's time for another run of STET stamps, with a better-chosen font size this time. (Pamela and I did a run for the Scribblies many years ago when there'd been a bit of a copy-editing incident.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I use the word "comprise" in technical documents just to see if editors break it. At one time I was convinced that NASA had a requirement for all its publication to use the word at least once, incorrectly. (The whole comprises the parts. The parts compose the whole. The whole is composed on the parts. NASA wanted "comprised" to equal "composed"/ It actually does in some of the more permissive dictionaries now, but I'm not yet ready to concede, because I think it's a useful distinction.)

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

And don't forget Duran Duran

"She's a paper towel"