A Word, Please: Angst over high tech and low grammar

People often ask me whether, as a copy editor, I’m driven to distraction by errors I see in others’ writing.

The short answer is: not in informal writing. If you write “it’s” in place of “its” or write “then” instead of “than” on an Internet message board, I figure you made an error in haste.

If you do so repeatedly, I figure it’s your prerogative to be bad at English. For all I know, you could be a brilliant scientist horrified at my ignorance of a giant meteor hurtling toward my house or radioactive marshmallows in my morning cereal.

If I’m not smart about your thing, you don’t have to be smart about mine.

But lately, I find myself increasingly irked by little issues in professional publishing. As the irritation becomes more intense, I’m forced to acknowledge why: Lots of bad editing adds up to a direct threat to my own livelihood.

When professional publishers adhere to high editing standards, it reinforces the importance of clean copy. But when their standards slide, editing no longer separates the good outlets from the bad.

That is, when Joe Sportsfan says on his Facebook page that the Yankees are better “then” the Red Sox, he’s reinforcing a difference between professional and amateur writing. But if the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all start getting sloppy about “then” and “than,” they lower the bar for everyone.

Every error in professional publishing makes the next one seem a little less awful, and those of us who get paid to catch errant “thens” in place of “thans” are suddenly worth a lot less.

The day’s not far off when computers can do my job better and cheaper than I can. But until that day, I’ll be appalled at every little sign that my stock’s on the decline and heartened by signs that editing standards still matter.

For example, fresh on the heels of not one but two columns I wrote mentioning misused “whom,” I ran into yet another “whom” error.

“You gave us a list of names of our associates whom you claim betrayed us,” a character says in the novel “Assumed Identity.”

Granted, the error is in dialogue, so the author could claim that the mistake wasn’t his own. But that would be hard to swallow.

More likely, the author simply didn’t know that when the object of “claim” isn’t a pronoun but the clause “who betrayed us.” “Whom betrayed us” doesn’t pass the litmus test of swapping out another subject and object pronoun. You claim “they” betrayed us or you claim “them” betrayed us? Clearly, a subject pronoun like “they” or “who” is needed here.

Another mistake I caught recently appeared in some marketing copy I was editing that promoted a concert by a Columbian rock band. The problem: the band is from Colombia, which makes them Colombian, not Columbian.

Then there was an article I was researching about a stationary store. Technically, that was accurate because the store was not on wheels. But because it sells paper products, it should have been written “stationery.”

But despite the mistakes I’ve noticed lately, I’ve also been impressed by some matters that writers —including amateurs — got right. For example, a Facebook friend recently posted a video she billed as a “sneak peek.” The impulse to mimic the form of “sneak” by incorrectly writing “peak” is tough to resist.

I was equally impressed by this sentence in an article I edited: “Create visual interest by painting the back of a bookshelf a complementary color.” Very few people seem to know the difference between “complement,” which is something colors do to each other, and “compliment,” which is something a flatterer does to another person.

As long as people respect the correct ways to use these words, my skills will continue to be valuable — right up until the day I’m replaced by a machine.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.