I was reading a forthcoming book recently, because I’m writing a review. It contained a quotation from another work: Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.
You panicked me for a second because I thought you meant the novel Les Miserables was written by Boublil and Schonberg, which more or less upended my entire world until I parsed the sentence correctly. I think with some of these kinds of errors, it's a sign of how much people assume a sort of historical constancy about everyday things--or even about certain kinds of sociopolitical markers into the past, with no sense of how much is fairly novel in the world, fairly modern or recent, etc.
Couldn’t agree more. Some books seem to be published without any editing whatsoever. I’d add another thing that happens a lot nowadays: choosing names for characters who are immigrants/foreigners they could not possibly be called. Why do British writers pick names for Polish/Slavic characters that don’t exist, or aren’t Polish/Slavic at all? It is actually quite easy to prove the name doesn’t exist because Poland is one of the countries with an officially approved first names (Denmark is another). It is not like there’s a shortage of Poles you could consult. Why conjure up a ridiculous name that will make Polish readers raise their eyebrows or worse, disparage your entire novel on SM because neither the author, nor the editor, thought of checking? This goes for place names, too. Do make the effort to use diacritics. I read an otherwise wonderful non-fiction book a couple of years ago but a Polish town was spelt with an o instead of an ó, and again I felt slightly slighted.
I've done some freelance copy editing, and I always do some fact checking! But I came up at the end of the age of tabloid newspapers, so my trainers were sticklers for, you know, accuracy.
You panicked me for a second because I thought you meant the novel Les Miserables was written by Boublil and Schonberg, which more or less upended my entire world until I parsed the sentence correctly. I think with some of these kinds of errors, it's a sign of how much people assume a sort of historical constancy about everyday things--or even about certain kinds of sociopolitical markers into the past, with no sense of how much is fairly novel in the world, fairly modern or recent, etc.
Couldn’t agree more. Some books seem to be published without any editing whatsoever. I’d add another thing that happens a lot nowadays: choosing names for characters who are immigrants/foreigners they could not possibly be called. Why do British writers pick names for Polish/Slavic characters that don’t exist, or aren’t Polish/Slavic at all? It is actually quite easy to prove the name doesn’t exist because Poland is one of the countries with an officially approved first names (Denmark is another). It is not like there’s a shortage of Poles you could consult. Why conjure up a ridiculous name that will make Polish readers raise their eyebrows or worse, disparage your entire novel on SM because neither the author, nor the editor, thought of checking? This goes for place names, too. Do make the effort to use diacritics. I read an otherwise wonderful non-fiction book a couple of years ago but a Polish town was spelt with an o instead of an ó, and again I felt slightly slighted.
I've done some freelance copy editing, and I always do some fact checking! But I came up at the end of the age of tabloid newspapers, so my trainers were sticklers for, you know, accuracy.