The Kind Of Detail I Care About

[dr_pretentious]

Only two of the stories we bought for the anthology have appeared elsewhere. One of them, by an elder statesman of the genre, had been out of print for so long, no electronic copy existed when we requested reprint rights. I have been checking our electronic version against the original as it appears in a book, making sure no errors got introduced in the process of scanning it and running it through optical character recognition software.

I care about whether a comma appears between the "Oh" and the "shit" in "Oh, shit" or "Oh shit." If a character uses that expression twice in rapid succession in the same paragraph, but one instance has a comma and the other doesn't, I can't be at peace until I know which the author intended. Or, at least, which the author allowed to go to press when the story was first published.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at one in the morning.

Apparently I'm doing the work I was meant to do in the world.

Comments

[jr0124.livejournal.com]

I care about commas, too! It's the classic distinction between "Let's eat, grandma!" and "Let's eat grandma!". I found a more recent one that's just a hair more subtle: "Fuckin A Dude!" or "Fuckin' A, Dude!"

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I half-wish I could use that second example with my students. It cracks me up every time I think about it. Living with small boys keeps me in touch with my inner Beavis and Butthead. : )

[elphaba-of-oz.livejournal.com]

Isn't it possible that the author intended both? Oh shit. Oh, shit. I can say it that way. Is he allowed to write it that way?

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

That would be my first guess, too, unless there's a reason to think otherwise.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Certainly possible, but punctuation really took a hit in the OCR conversion process. There were commas and apostrophes that got converted into 1's, for instance, and periods that got entirely lost. I cleaned up all the obvious stuff months ago, and developed an anthropomorphically adversarial relationship with the OCR program the author used. Will not let it slip one past me!

[leapfaith.livejournal.com]

So, is it nicer to be kept awake worrying about commas or by a newborn? Just curious...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Commas. Definitely commas.

Human brains are hardwired to find sounds of infant distress Very Stressful. A comma problem requires my attention, but does not set off a cascade of stress hormones in my amygdala.

(Though I wonder whether that might not explain the vehemence of certain grammar purists I have known...)

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey.