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September 29, 2005
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lionel award
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I'd intended to pass this award out to exceptionally untrained, unqualified, justifiably defensive editors. And then I switched to editing, myself. Examples have been few and far between, but finally, we have this question from a paid editor:
Edi-(cough)-tor: "Is it proxyable or proxiable?"Me: "Um. Well. First of all, proxy isn't a verb. Second..."
The original Lionel still has the all-time dumbest such query, when around her 10th year of taking up valuable headcount she sent to scads of editors an e-mail with the subject line "What's an editing pass?" (You there—yes, you—the engineer or janitor or actress or lawyer or student. What's an editing pass? See, even you knew.) Other random Lionel anecdotes: she complains to co-workers that NPR is too right-wing, and she recently proposed the inclusion of poetry readings in writer/editor meetings.
posted by john at 11:53 PM • permalink