A cousin had arranged a temp job for me at a textbook house. That meant first meeting the woman I’d be working under, who would not be my cousin. It was 41 years ago now, so forgive me for forgetting her name. I walked into an office in one of Toronto’s inner suburbs, in a modern midrise office building like any other. One floor was a textbook house. Remember that I had no idea that I would be spending the next forty years passing through offices just like this, while rarely settling in: blocks of cubicles, my very first faux-mahogany desk, a squeaky roller chair, a reading lamp, a picture window somewhere over there that offered decent light but no view from my desk. Almost every office I ever visited for the next few decades, whether it was trade, or textbook, or academic, would have roughly the same layout and lighting. (If I was very lucky, it would be somewhere downtown.) The people I met on this day had all been teachers at some point and had a middle-aged casual/frumpy look (except for my cousin). None of them had turned into giant insects, but it was Monday. There was one other man in the crew, who gave off the male version of the same vibe. I was handed a test to complete – not a skills test (fortunately for me, because I had no skills) so much as a strengths/weaknesses test. Did I have a proclivity for this job? I finished it and handed it in. The woman came back with a worried look on her face and handed me a different version of it to take again, which I did. Was the second test to confirm that I was suited for this or to reaffirm that I wasn’t? I’ll never know. Anyhow, I must have passed through that first gate, because she handed me a manila folder with a sheaf of papers inside and told me to copy edit it at home and return it the following week.
It was five pages of a grade four geography textbook, a second edition, which I raced home and stared at. Lord was I ignorant. I was certain that I was supposed to use a blue pencil, so I walked down to the local office supply store (they still existed – I can’t remember when I last had a pencil in this office) to look for one. The only blue one they had was a soft crayon that I would have to sharpen after every letter. Oh yes, and no eraser would work with it. If I sound ignorant and anxious and paranoid, it’s because I was. I would learn much later that anxiety and paranoia are a CE’s friends, if you treat them right. You have to learn how to not let them overwhelm you, and eventually they won’t. My point is that if you don’t care enough to worry about minor details – and copy editing is mostly all about details – you’re in the wrong field. I was desperate for work at the time – for any kind of income – and that only added fuel to my trepidation. I was stone broke and the rent was due and I had to have this job.
So, I sit down at my father’s kitchen table that night and read the first sentence. The first sentence … receive? How do you spell that? Damned if I was going to guess at anything. I before E except after C, that much I knew, but I thought I’d better check twice. That’s when I realized there wasn’t a dictionary in the house. All I could find was a 30-year-old Junior Encyclopedia Britannica in my teen years bedroom, under a stack of Rolling Stones albums and my old baseball glove. Well, somewhere in there had to be the word receive. It took a while to find it. Still the first sentence, I encountered the first hyphen of my fledgling career, and, for that matter, my first bunfight. Snowcapped. Hyphen or not? I had no idea – the question had never occurred to me till now. I was eager not to guess, but how could I be sure which way?
There was no internet back then – there weren’t even home computers back then – but I can look today at what a Web search says. I see plenty of emphatic commentary on the question and no consistency at all. (What would I do now? I’d check the dictionary. Oxford gives it a hyphen, so I would go with that. Webster says one word, no hyphen. If the dictionary didn’t list it, and I was left to my own devices, I would have closed the space, no hyphen – a snowcapped mountain is a mountain with a snowcap on it, and snowcap never takes a hyphen, so why add one to the modifier? – but Oxford says the house will want me to leave it in. I’d better add it to the style sheet.)
I won’t go on about that first assignment. The point I’m making about that night is that I had had my first encounter with several things. First, the notion of greys – the first of how many over the years? It would be in the millions. No two dictionaries are the same, no two style sheets, no two houses, no two … Add to that, a lot of choices a CE makes will be abitrary because, well, just because. There’s a truism in Hollywood that nobody in the business knows anything. You could say much the same about book publishing, including on the production side. You every day run into scores of judgment calls. There is very little that can’t be picked apart and debated. Second, well, paranoia. Every book editor suffers from some of that, though I’d contend that freelancers are more prone to it than in-house personnel, or suffer from a particular variant of it. Most people have some of it coursing through their veins, but copy editors actually nurse it. We look for ways to befriend it. We genuinely want to get things right, yet on specific points, an open debate can always be had as to whether you did. Authors will have their own notions (consult my screed on world view), MEs another. METAPHOR #1: You need to get used to crossing that minefield. METAPHOR #2: You find yourself writing your own scripture and quoting it to your own purposes. METAPHOR #3: If you last long enough as a CE, you’ll be able to generate your own weather: “There’s no hyphen in snowcapped because I say there isn’t.” If you know how to state your case, the nitpickers will leave you alone (given that in their heart of hearts, they aren’t sure either).
ADDENDUM: Nitpicker is one word in Oxford and Webster but hyphenated in Webster when it’s a present participle: nit-picking. I just checked. Why on earth? Who decides these things? In a situation like like that, a CE will spell it according to personal preference injected with common sense, and then defend it. I do also realize that there are CEs out there who will rejoinder, “Of course nit-picking takes a hyphen, and here’s why …” That’s okay. Some contributor to Webster long ago decided it took a hyphen. It doesn’t make him dead-cold correct.