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.
Thank you!! When I copy edited for profs as a grad student, I was checking page reference of every quote (as in, I went to the library, got the book, checked they had the quotation right and referred to the correct page). I assumed this was the job. Naively, when I hired someone to proofread my first book, I did not realize other people don't do this. I wasn't expecting them to go to archives, but at least to save me from misspelling an author's name!
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.
Also this is a bit of what I was on about in this entry: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-my-attention-switch
Great piece!! (I also was bemused by The Swerve, but listened to it while driving so may have missed some important elements!).
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.
*approved list*
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.
Thank you!! When I copy edited for profs as a grad student, I was checking page reference of every quote (as in, I went to the library, got the book, checked they had the quotation right and referred to the correct page). I assumed this was the job. Naively, when I hired someone to proofread my first book, I did not realize other people don't do this. I wasn't expecting them to go to archives, but at least to save me from misspelling an author's name!