Now you know why I titled this blog the way I did. Copy editor is always two words, no hyphen. At least I thought so for most of forty years, but it turns out not. Heck, if a copy editor can’t be sure about how to spell his own job title, what does that say about the job itself, and about written English more generally?
In fact, it was two words when I started out four decades ago, a time when spelling it as one word was an act of self-destruction if you did that on a job application (some bitter experience from earliest days is showing – okay, fine, two words, I’ll remember after this). Having learned that lesson too well, I never bothered to double-check until the single-word version started appearing on my monitor a few years ago, at which time I Web-searched it and found that the spelling had in fact been wobbling recently and that copyeditor was on the rise. Madness. To put it more accurately, the consensus around the word was no longer stable. One highly esteemed style guide now called for the one-word variant, that other one called for two words. Webster offers copyeditor as a variant spelling, but Oxford does not, though it hyphenates copy-edit as a verb (admission – I’ve never done that). So, there’s my justification for making it two words: I’m simply following the standard house dictionary at most of the houses that send me work, which is plenty enough cover for me.
All of that amounts to a useful and more general lesson – words have their own life: they breathe, they shift around, and their meanings have fuzzy edges. Put it this way – a lot of them do: it’s going to be centuries before cat and dog are spelled any way except c–a–t and d–o–g, and both will always refer to animals well known. I expect that the spelling for parallel and momentum (and the great majority of words in the rapidly expanding universe of language, which I won’t list here) are going to hold up as standard for the next few centuries. But there are other words – most of them of more recent coinage, and most of them combinations – where the spelling has always wobbled, or has begun to wobble. You’ll notice soon enough how many of those there are. The point of a style sheet is to keep track of words like that for a given mscript. That’s why it matters how you spell them: a copyeditor (I’ll spell it that way from now on, in this blog) is expected to land on a certain spelling that the house will tolerate and then stick with it.
From one mscript to the next, you can let spellings wobble as a reflection of authors’ preferences and what their given field considers standard. But within a given mscript, no.
I’ve never been the first to invent a new spelling, but, I’ve never been the last, either. I’d say that the best position for a copyeditor to take is slightly behind the curve.
Also, “copy edit” is a group noun. Copy edits don’t exist – the term refers to the task as a whole. When an author thanks you for your “copy edits,” you could correct them, but why? Acknowledgments typically come in after the project is largely done, as a last-minute add-on. Some authors can’t help themselves, so why burden them? You sigh (a bit ruefully – there’s another one) and delete the s on their behalf.
One other term: in this town anyway (and it’s a big one), CEs don’t refer to the mscripts they copyedited – the usual verb when the discussion arises is handle: CE: “I handled Polish history for Jennifer last year.” ME: “Have you handled urban studies before?”