Editing opportunities abound in life’s daily struggle

Like many another formerly ink-stained wretch, I find that old habits of the newspapering trade die hard, proofreading being a case in point.

I can’t read a newspaper or a restaurant menu or the sign out in front of any place of business without mentally editing it. And if my mail is any indication, neither can many readers, be they formerly ink-stained wretches, ex-teachers or the guy working the night shift down at the local car wash.

It is a curse of the damned, to be sure. The main finding while in the throes of the malady is that a bunch of people walking around out there obviously missed school on the day the teacher taught spelling.

“Vinelhaven,” reads the caption under a shot of Vinalhaven harbor on the television screen, and about all we can be thankful for is that the caption guy didn’t go with his second choice, “Vinylhaven.”

A newspaper obituary from the spell-it-like-it-sounds approach to writing reports that a recently deceased World War II veteran served on “Quadjuline” Island in the South Pacific, which is about as good a mangling of “Kwajalein” as we can hope for in our lifetime.

“‘Oh, for a proofreader…” writes a loyal reader and longtime pen pal from Ellsworth who would be mortified should I blow her cover. She encloses several clippings from Maine’s Largest Daily, collected over the past several weeks.

“Your paper has had some dandies lately,” the lady advises. “Near as I can tell, some guy married his mother-in-law, and one who died in Calais was to be buried in Calias. And speaking of Calais, I hope I may be forgiven for once telling a tourist who asked how far it was to ‘Kal-lay’ that by my reckoning it was about 2,500 miles…”

Included in her collection of misfires was a classified ad seeking to find a Hancock County black and white short-haired cat lost between “Korea” and Dedham, which seems a hopeless task, considering that the search area involves two continents and a wicked big ocean. Confining the search to an area between Corea and Dedham would seem to bode better for the lost kitty. Another ad announces that another lost cat’s identifying marks include a “scared” nose and ear. A caption under a photo of an up-country sporting event mentions the “site” on a young man’s rifle. And so on.

Punctuation is another fertile field for the roving editors among us. Reader Mary Gray of Orrington sent an e-mail suggesting I check out a news story from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which ran in the BDN. It told of two Mainers who had returned rare books to the widow of a St. Louis author named Doty.

The article reported that the two men “had been called to St. Louis in 2001 after Doty’s death by his widow, Dorothy…” Gray wanted to know, “Was Doty done in by Dorothy, or by a comma?” Good question.

Sometimes, a reporter can be done in because he hasn’t done the math before committing his words to permanently unforgiving type. Exhibit A from my dawg-eared folder of such misfortunes would be an obituary which reported that a deceased Maine veteran had been born in 1933 and had “served with the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.”

Considering that the man would have been 12 years old when that war ended, this is truly one for the record books. A Korean War veteran, most likely. But a participant in WWII (The Big One)? I don’t think so.

There is no law mandating that retired editors and their nitpicking counterparts who run about looking for typographical errors to grouse about must confine themselves to the printed word. Editing the speech of the television/radio crowd can be a hoot, as well.

Providing ample fodder for the diversion are television reporters and anchors who feel compelled to precisely separate one syllable from another and hammer it home in a pedantic manner that would make your old sixth-grade grammar guru cringe from the assault on her finely tuned sensibilities.

Such two-syllable words as “warden” and “garden” and “student” take a beating in the employ of these tormented souls, essentially coming out as two words (“war-den” and “gar-den” and “stu-dent”) rather than the compacted “wardn” and “gardn” and “studnt” pronunciations that the dictionary suggests. Only a tin ear can save the listener from being driven nuts.

Should ever the night come when some story reported on the six o’clock news involves a war-den named Gor-don who liked to gar-den when he was a stu-dent, I would hope that someone would just shoot me.

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