One thing I cannot let go of is the spelling. There were a few deliberate misspellings (“herts,” “dauhter”), attributed to a child, that I knew to stet, but there were also spellings that were not wrong, just different, and that the author might not want to change. For instance, we prefer the fancy spelling of “catalogue,” ending in ue, and, as I said, we double the unstressed consonant before a suffix: “totalling,” “traveller.” (My autocorrect only very reluctantly tolerates these extra l’s.) Fortunately, George Saunders is not on autocorrect, and he accepted these curlicues. The narrator wouldn’t use them, but the reader doesn’t notice. In fact, a New Yorker reader might notice if we left them out, and the point is not to let the orthography distract the reader from the meaning.
I stopped short of querying the spelling of the name of the narrator’s daughter Lilly. I would have spelled it with just one l, but she’s not my daughter; she’s the daughter of a narrator voiced by George Saunders, and who knows better than that narrator what he wrote on his daughter’s birth certificate? Yet when a character says that his company will “garner” the narrator’s wages and is corrected by the narrator’s wife, Pam—“Garnish,” she says, harshly—I can’t resist taking it to the next level. “To garnish” is to finish off a cocktail by adding, say, a slice of orange (where is that Negroni?); the correct term here is “garnishee.” True, under “garnish” Webster’s lists “garnishee,” but it is our style to use the spelling preferred by Webster’s—the word printed in boldface and accorded a full definition—not the word in small caps buried under another word. Webster’s includes a lot of words that people spell and use in nonstandard ways. (Lu Burke once jumped all over me because she thought that I had let “minuscule” go spelled with two i’s because Webster’s includes the barbarous spelling “miniscule” to guide people to the right one.) So I garnish my proof with this query. My reasoning is that Pam is correcting someone, and she is smarter than her husband, so shouldn’t she get it right?
The editor dutifully passed the query along to the author, and later told me that he turned it down, saying, “I don’t think this guy should know more than I do.”
Fair enough. Garnishee my wages. Anyway, spelling not point. Point is words—right words in right order, for devastating effect. Job of copy editor is to spell words right: put hyphen in, take hyphen out. Repeat. Respect other meaning of spell: spell writer weaves.
Chapter 3
THE PROBLEM OF HEESH
I HAVE ALWAYS CONFUSED SEX AND gender. From the moment that Sister Mary Abram instructed us in French class that the table (la table) was feminine, I have been dubious. I wanted to know why, and she couldn’t give me a reason. She tried to get it through my head that language isn’t logical—or, rather, that certain idioms are not reducible to logic. There’s no reason that the table is feminine: it just is—always was, ever shall be. So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom. This same Sister Abram once defied anyone to tell her she couldn’t say “my most favoritist thing.” The gender of la table might not change, but the meaning of gender would, as would Sister Mary Abram, shedding the Old Testament name and jettisoning the habit, and busting out of the convent to become a hot chick whose most favoritist thing was smoking cigarettes.
In my junior year of college, I took a course called Women in Literature, with Elaine Showalter, a trailblazer in the field of women’s studies. It was a contentious time. The honorific “Ms.” had just been coined, Gloria Steinem had recently started Ms. magazine, and Norman Mailer was brawling with feminists at Town Hall. But feminism was new to me, and I had it confused with wearing pants and hating my mother and being bitter toward men. In class, we read the seminal works by women: The Yellow Wallpaper, A Room of One’s Own, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. (Back then, someone would have taken exception to the word “seminal” in that context; what did semen have to do with it?) And one of the things we discussed was sexist language. Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?