Tiptoeing through the minefields

If you think about it at all, which, come to think of it, is highly unlikely, you’d have to conclude that proofreading a newspaper column after it’s been published and in the hands of the paying customers is a tad late.

But old habits die hard, and even though I read and re-read this column until I am blue in the face before sending it (the column, not the face) off to Bangor via touch of computer key, I make a final meaningless read on Saturday morning. The ritual is mainly for reassurance that some inscrutable computer in this modernized process of getting word to paper hasn’t hiccupped and spasmodically swapped the lead paragraph, say, for the bottom line. Not that that wouldn’t improve the product on most days.

And so it was that when I made the routine check last Saturday morning, I immediately wished I hadn’t. For there in the last paragraph, bigger than Billy Be Damned, was a wretched concoction that might as well have been adorned with flashing neon lights, so vividly did it jump off the page and grab me by the throat.

In suggesting the potential for unpleasant experiences should dogs be allowed to accompany their masters attending the National Folk Festival at Bangor I had written of “accidental canine deposits stuck to the souls of a guy’s gum rubbers…” No computer glitch, that.

In abject mortification I contemplated the fallout from the embarrassing gaffe. Some readers – the majority, if the gods were kind – surely would read right over the malfunction. Others would graciously cut me some slack, understanding that I had been victimized by momentary severe brainlock, typing “soul” when I obviously meant to type “sole.” (Under the circumstances, the urge to call these people my … sole … brothers probably should be resisted. But I can’t, and so that pretty much puts me right back in the soup, I suppose.) Finally, a high percentage of readers likely would be convinced of something they had long suspected, which is that I can be rather a clueless dope at times, the wick cut a little close to the candle.

The inevitable e-mail messages, for the most part, were short, to the point and mercifully lecture-free. Typical was the note from Jim Corliss, Newburgh’s Piper Mountain Christmas tree guy: “Huh? ‘Souls of a guy’s gum rubbers’? You losing it?”

Well, sure. But, as time marches relentlessly on, aren’t we all?

Anyone who strings words together on the printed page for a living has had what I call The Experience in edging across the minefields of language. You’re cranking it out in good shape at the keyboard, all cylinders firing. You are thinking one word but the brain inexplicably kicks out something that merely sounds the same (close, but no cigar), propels it down the arms and out through the fingers onto the work sheet or computer screen, no warning bells activated, no red flag of caution hoisted. “There” for “their,” perhaps.

“Two” for “too,” or “bow” for “bough,” and you roll on, none the wiser about your flub until it shows up to eternally haunt you in cold, stark and irreversibly permanent print.

As long as we’re doing True Confessions here, you might as well know that you are reading a guy who once wrote about driving a “steak” through the heart of a vampire, and who has also written “hair-brained” for “hare-brained,” only to smarten up a day late and a dollar short with the aforementioned pointless Saturday morning proofreading exercise. The experience is not unlike dropping a routine infield fly with the bases loaded, two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and your team ahead by one run.

As well, I have commiserated with other writers who have written about the railroad “magnet,” Cornelius Vanderbilt; policemen in “plane” clothes; and “bails” of hay in an East Corinth farm field. Been there, done that stuff, I can rightfully say. By virtue of my “souls” for “soles” and other such misfires, I am a life member of the club.

No matter. The words of the late New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott put things in perspective. Woollcott once wrote that he counted it a high honor to be a member of a profession “in which the good men write every paragraph, every sentence, every line, as lovingly as any Addison or Steele [perfectionist 18th century British essayists] and do so in full regard that by tomorrow it will have been burned, or used, if at all, to line a shelf…”

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.