Bumfketeer wrote:
Only 20 years? I'm pushing 40 years at this point.
Well, Tom, as I said before, I will be rescued by retirement or death soon, so I will hang in until then.
I do find it interesting how quickly this trade began to vanish. And there was really no technological advance that caused it to do so, as was the case with printers.
There are reporters who seem overjoyed by it. I guess the next time one of them writes about the day Pearl Harbor was bombed - Dec. 7, 1951 - our readers will get a real education. (That was caught on the desk here.)
Interestingly, and not that it makes it any better, a friend I see a couple times a year who is a mailman gets the Wall Street Journal and reads it religiously. When I saw him a few weeks ago, he mentioned to me that he can't understand the sudden abundance of typos, grammatical errors and errors of fact he is seeing in that paper these days.
Not to put down mailmen, who are swell people doing a great job, but he is not a student of the language by any means. If he is noticing, just imagine what others are seeing....
He is far from the only one of the "ordinary" folks who notice. Last summer when I was on vacation in SC, my car needed an unexpected repair. A nice, older (probably in his late 70s) man from the dealer drove me back to my friend's house, and in the course of our conversation he asked me about my job. I explained copy editing, and he, too, commented that there didn't seem to be much of that in the newspapers anymore, that he and his friends regularly see so many errors (this was in
Charleston Post & Courier territory). When I told him how newspapers have gotten rid of so many editors and combined copy editing with pagination etc., he was horrified.