Confirmed, bad copy writer is bad.
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Diana Wynne Jones told the story of an American copyeditor who wanted to change “allotment” to “parking lot” for the US edition of one of her books. American children don’t know about allotments, she was told. Fine, but given that part of the point of that particular bit is that they get muddy feet and have to clean up, what does this say about American parking lots? Here they tend to have tarmac on them…
The same copyeditor wanted to change muesli to something else on the basis that it didn’t exist in America. Diana told her exactly how to get from her desk in the New York office to the nearest shop that sold it. (Again, there was a point: it was a faddish breakfast food at the time. And if the CE had asked what the point was meant to be, as she did in other cases, DWJ would have been happy to help work out something that would be understood…)
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Nowhere near as big or exciting, but in one of my first novels (“Starconvoy EH-76”, a sci-fi story loosely based on a WW2 naval convoy HG 76), I originally named the protagonist “Greg”.
About halfway through the novel I realized I didn’t really like “Greg” as a name for him, so I switched it to “Griff” with a quick Find and Replace.
Fast forward a few months when I have finished the first draft and am working on the 2nd, and for the life of me I can’t figure out where the word “griffarious” has come from…
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This is why I never use global search and replace when I’m copy editing. If I need to do a global change I find every single occurrence and decide whether to make the change there. It takes longer but minimizes embarrassing results.
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Reminds me of this blog post by Gail Carriger where she gives an account of the woes of this kind of stuff.
TL;DR: She ended up with 3 series set in the same universe - one with US English used everywhere, one with proper localisation, and one with UK English used everywhere, but with certain words (like ladybirds/ladybugs) changed for the US editions.
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It shouldn’t change it in the middle of words tho?
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This discussion reminds me of something I noticed in one of Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars e-books. I think it was Dark Force Rising. Han often uses “Kid” as a nickname for Luke in the films, and Zahn continued this in his novels. However, in this one, the word had been changed to “Lad,” which was quite jarring. Then at one point, I am certain I saw the word “Ladnapped.”
I began to wonder if this was some weird OCR mishap, seeing the < part of “k” next to an “i” and reading it as an “a”, leaving the remaining line of the “k” as an “l”. Now I wonder if this was some sloppy copyediting, but would they really change “kid” to “lad” anywhere?
Global search and replace will do exactly that kind of thing, so it would be what I’d guess.
At least when you use Word, if you select Find, choose Replace, and put greg into the upper bar and griff into the lower, and then choose Replace All, it will change every single occurrence of greg to griff, carefully matching capitalization. And if you get congriffation and aggriffate out of the exercise, Word doesn’t know any better. You told it to change that string of letters and that’s what it did.
I haven’t used MS-Word since it had version numbers, but any editor I’d use now (including LibreOffice) has the option for “whole word” match, so kid, kid’s, would change but kidnapped wouldn’t. (Neither would kids of course.)
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I’m 4 hrs from finishing listening to the Harrow the Ninth book it’s reached “that bit”. Now I’m painfully aware of how much faster I can read than listen as I just want to inhale the rest of the story.
I’ve closed the app and trying to save it to motivate me to keep working out. Wish me luck.
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I don’t have a choice: Steve Jackson Games and my four copy editing clients all deal exclusively in Word, including having style sheets and such that go with Word.
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Most GURPS authors I know are using LibreOffice, which produces better old-MS-Word-format files (from the point of view of the external software SJGames use for layout) than modern MS-Word does.
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Will it run on a Mac with an M1 chip, and can it work with the list of styles that come with GURPS manuscripts?
I haven’t the faintest idea. Since it’s entirely open source, the likely answers are either “yes” or “wait a few weeks”.
I did say “GURPS authors”. Since that wasn’t clear: yes, it can be used to produce files in the form that SJGames wants.
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Sorry! I slept badly last night and my brain isn’t coming on line very quickly today. Interesting, though I’m hesitant to undertake the work of learning a different program. But I have to grant that that does change the point from “I don’t have a choice” to “I do have a choice, but I’d rather stay with what I’m familiar with.”
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MS Word is… hmmm. “Not smart” isn’t quite right. It’s very particular.
For example, as pointed out, a standard “Find and Replace” will change words wherever they are encountered. You can circumvent this in some ways (searching for “case sensitive” words like “Greg” helps, but as luck would have it the particular sentence in question started with “Gregarious”, so it was still caught), but a lot of that requires a mind designed better than mine.
For example, my first two novels required HOURS of painful Find & Replaces to remove curly quotes (") with HTML specific code (as memory serves something like “ldquo” and “rdquo”, plus some brackets). I couldn’t figure out how to search specifically for left curly brackets, and so instead did a Find ", and then would skip each second quotation mark to make sure I only changed the left side ones… and when I got through the entire document, I would then do a Find & Replace for all the remaining quotation marks as right side HTML code.
It was… excruciating. Thankfully I have figured out a solution for that now.
There are lots of similar sorta problems for editing my work, which is why I am a writer, not an editor. But I have to do some of it myself, because I am too poor to afford all the editing my work would require without at least some polish… plus, I think that would basically be somebody else writing my work at that point, and I don’t want that.
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It is rather baffling that simple features found in a lot of programs used for coding haven’t been implemented in other writing programs.
Simple things like giving a summary of what your find/replace will do and allowing you to select which instances to implement.
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Or a regex replace, re: previous comment by Marx:
sed global replace:
's/"([^"]*)"/\“\1\”/g'
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Google docs at least has this.
And as we’re doing relevant xkcds: xkcd: Regular Expressions
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Regular Expressions! That’s the bunny. I do not understand Regular Expressions like, even a little bit.
I have a tutorial I follow in order to convert my Word documents into HTML-ebooks, and I just copy and paste the relevant bits. Because it makes slightly less than zero sense to me.
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