Wednesday, July 30, 2008

$@*%! Editors!

When I read about Giles Coren, a writer for The Times in the UK, I was reminded of that old saying, “An egotist is a self-made man who worships his creator.”

I’ve met plenty of creative people with enormous egos, but Giles seems to be so full of himself, I’ll bet the airlines make him book a second seat (maybe a whole row) to make room for his ego.

Giles wasn’t especially pleased when an editor changed one single word of his restaurant review, so he sent a 1,000+ word email to complain about it. Another UK publication, The Guardian, got hold of that email and published it on its web site.

You can read the entire email here, but fair warning, it’s rather explicit.

Here are some choice excerpts (I bleeped out the naughty parts):

I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that f***ed up my review on saturday.

I love the arrogance of the “we discussed … how that wasn’t going to happen anymore” construction. I’ll bet Owen, whoever he is, remembers it as more of a rant than a “discussion.”

Now to Giles’ specific complaint. In his original copy, the final sentence of his review read:

I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.

But here is that final sentence as it appeared in The Times:

I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.

See the glaring difference? I didn’t either, at first, but Giles did. The second to the last word, “a,” got left out. As Giles points out:

There is no length issue. This is someone thinking “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate c**t and i know best”

Well, you f**king don’t.

Giles then goes on and on about the Yiddish origins of the word “nosh” and its potential sexual connotations because that indefinite article was dropped. That’s news to me. But to his credit, Giles does offer some constructive input on preventing these sorts of misunderstandings:

Why would you change a sentence so that it meant something i didn’t mean? I don’t know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of f**k up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.

Don’t you just love it when people start talking in one-word sentences? I. Sure. Do.

But here’s what really got his knickers in a knot:

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, sh**iest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable.

Ending on an unstressed syllable? Oh, the humanity! Here’s more:

When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not f**king rocket science … I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. F**k. f**k, f**k, f**k.

Giles, I may not know as much as you about meter (okay, “metre” for you Brits), but I think three “f**ks” would have been plenty, much better rhythm than the four you used.

I doubt if The Times ever printed a correction, but if it had, it probably read something like this:

In a recent edition of The Times, one of our restaurant reviews ended on an unstressed syllable. We regret the f**king error. Won’t. Happen. Again. Ever.

Posted by Richard Bloch

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