A while ago, we reported on the death of .um, an almost-completely unused domain name that had been set aside for the United States' "minor outlying islands." The domain had been kept alive by the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, but it evidently grew tired of maintaining something that was little more than an online oddity.
Now David A. Utter, writing for WebProNews, has stepped forward to argue that getting rid of .um was a big mistake. Think of the punny possibilities that the domain name presents: Cerebell.um, he suggests, "would have made a great name and domain for a neurology conference." Tedi.um, he adds, "could have been the home for another social networking site."
There's another reason that .um is worth saving: The domain name could help give those "minor outlying islands" a rare moment in the limelight. After all, they have a bizarrely fascinating history, says Duffy Gillman, a computing manager at the University of Arizona who was kind enough to drop us a line:
The story gets weirder yet — the islands so grouped are specifically those claimed under the "Guano Act of 1856", which permits any US citizen to lay claim to "any island, rock, or key" on which a deposit of guano is found, provided no one else has claimed the island. That we have not had a surfeit of domain names like aquari.um, alumini.um, and ohandah.um, nor a rush of bat-dropping prospectors trolling the seas, clearly indicates the poor coverage these minor islands have received to date.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which shut down the domain, says .um could be reactivated if some other institution decides to step up and take it over. –Brock Read
16 Responses to In Defense of ‘.um’
fullprof99 - March 27, 2012 at 5:45 am
This works both ways. I once (seriously) had an inexperienced copy editor change “Austrian” to “Australian” AFTER a piece had been correct in both galley and page proofs, a third grade level error. I first had the opportunity to see this error in the published piece. I also have had editors leave out chunks of material without any note.
However, editors have saved me from several gaffes over the years that I might not otherwise have caught myself.
The ideal is a sane, intelligent editor and similar author. Track changes/comment is generally helpful here.
Kim O'Connell - March 27, 2012 at 8:13 am
When
I was an editor, I used to deal with people like this all the time. I
remember one writer who quite rudely insisted that the phrase “pouring
over a book” was correct. I told her to invest in a dictionary. But I agree with fullprof99 below. As there are difficult writers, there are difficult, obstinate editors. As a
freelance writer, I try to just go with what editors want, although I
have balked at really stupid edits (like the time an editor added THREE
factual errors into my opening paragraph, and when I pointed them out,
she said, “Well, let’s just go back to what you originally wrote.” Um,
if that’s acceptable now, why the need to mess with it in the first
place?). Another time, I had written that William Howard Taft was president first and then a Supreme Court justice AFTER his presidency, and an editor just switched that order around because it just “seemed wrong.” A quick check of a basic resource like Wikipedia would have set him straight. And, sadly, I didn’t get to check it before it went into print. Anyway, both difficult writers and difficult editors could learn from this piece.
Lara Zielinsky - March 27, 2012 at 8:33 am
Wonderful post! There are so many writers who need to read this, whether they are writing for academic or commercial publication.
sand6432 - March 27, 2012 at 9:28 am
I have run into two curmudgeonly “difficult” writers in my career: Jacques Barzan and Thomas Sowell. It is well known that Barzun had little use for copyeditors, and it was my misfortune as a young copyeditor to be assigned the task of editing a volume of essays that included one by Barzun. I do not recall having done very heavy copyediting, but I do recall to this day the ferocity with which Barzun objected to just about everything I had suggested. By the time I encountered Sowell I was an acquiring editor, and I handled two of his early books at Princeton University Press, the first being his revised dissertation on Say’s Law. I don’t recall having had any trouble with Sowell over copyediting at PUP, but when I was later director at Penn State University Press and we had agreed to publish his book titled “Race and Culture,” I soon learned that he had become resistant to copyediting, so much so that he refused to accept any changes recommended by one of our top free-lance editors. In response, I said we would publish the book only if he agreed to allow us to include on the copyright page a notice to the effect that the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors in the book attributable to the author’s refusal to accept copyediting. Sowell refused, and we mutually agreed to cancel the contract. That action also required us to return to the NEH the subvention it had awarded us for the book, though the NEH, as I recall, kindly allowed us to deduct the cost of copyediting, which was over $2,000. In trying to find a reference to Barzan’s jaundiced view of copyediting via a Googlke search in writing this comment, I came across this essay by Sowell in which he refers to Barzan’s view but also recounts his own experiences with copyeditors, whom he considers the “bureaucrats of the publishing industry”: http://www.tsowell.com/About_Writing.html. Without naming names, Sowell refers to his experience with us at PSUP thus: “Fighting back always entails the possibility of losing. But, with intrusive editors, not fighting back guarantees that you will lose. After engaging in a tug-of-war with one publisher over their editorial fetishes, I simply offered to return the royalty advance and cancel our contract. He accepted. Months went by before I found another publisher—but it was one offering a larger advance and less copy-editing. It didn’t have to turn out that way, of course, but faint heart ne’er won fair lady.” He went on to publish this book with Basic Books, and it did very well in both sales and critical reception: http://www.amazon.com/Race-And-Culture-World-View/dp/0465067972. Some day I’ll have to go back and compare the copyedited MS (which I still have) with the published version to find out just how much less copyediting was done by Basic Books.—Sandy Thatcher
MJ Devaney - March 27, 2012 at 9:49 am
Very interesting stories, Sandy. I wonder why Sowell wouldn’t accept the notice on the copyright page, though, given that he apparently doesn’t hold back in making his views about copyediting known. MJ Devaney (freelance editor for PSP)
April Michelle Davis - March 27, 2012 at 9:51 am
Many writers seem to be defensive about their work because they believe that editors are changing it–and not necessarily for the better. These writers don’t seem to fully understand that editors are trying to help the writers speak more clearly and to be consistent–both of which give the writers more credibility and help to sell books.
johnbarnes - March 27, 2012 at 10:41 am
I’m a difficult writer, without apology. I have found that being difficult, over time, keeps your work out of the hands of pushy incompetents and officious dullards, who abound in publishing, and causes editors, as a precaution, to steer your work toward people who can deal with you, which means, in my case, careful readers who think about what is in front of them, and can accept the possibility of misspellings and malapropisms co-existing with difficult ideas expressed precisely, catching the first two but not assuming that the latter should be replaced with a vague rephrasing of convention.
In 30 commercial novels I have had about ten excellent copy-edits, which I appreciated very much, and about 20 of the other kind, which consumed weeks of my time restoring things that were right in the first place. I’m moving over to self-publishing along with much of the rest of the world; one already noticeable difference is that when I hire a freelance copy editor and am the person who signs the check, the stylesheet is respected and adhered to, from the first (quite probably because the contract specifies that they may query without changing an unlimited number of times, but I reduce the payment after a specified number of reversals on matters of fact or intent. So far, after two freelance copyeditors who have both done satisfactory work, I have not had to invoke any penalty, or come close to it).
At least half of the bad copyedits I’ve had were produced by copy editors who pretty clearly did not understand where or how the content or ideas of this book deviated from the “standard” version, and fixed it to make it like the others. I thought for a long time that this was because I wrote genre fiction, but eventually learned that cases like the ones fullprof99 and Kim O’Connell mention are remarkably common. A colleague spent two weeks of his vacation time identifying and extracting factual errors inserted in a biology textbook “because they made more sense,” i.e. the organisms were not apparently conducting their biochemical business in a way that was approved of by a humanities graduate whose uncle was a publisher.
Barzun’s published work is renowned for its clarity, precision, and incisiveness. It would not have been if he had politely acceded to copy editors, and there would have been less of it if he had spent his time negotiating to get what was right in the first place restored to its rightness. Sowell, meh. His style is more fluent than most academics, his content conventional for a conservative economist.
The only reason to explain a STET or a NO is to prevent introduction of the same error elsewhere in a later phase of editing. Otherwise it was right in the first place, the copy editor was wrong, it should be set as it was, end of story.
Nottie Knickers - March 27, 2012 at 11:28 am
Having supported my writing career with an editing career for over ten years, I find myself on both sides of the debate. Good editing is not arbitrary, but there are as few good editors as there are good writers. I once took my name off a book because the editing was so shoddy; in one instance the editor even replaced my political views with her own archconservative ones. When an editor takes major liberties with a text, the writer is well within her rights to stand up for herself.
That said, most of the worst writing I’ve encountered as an editor has come from writers who refuse to take criticism. I’ve seen it in writing groups too: the worst writers get defensive and launch into windy explanations; the good writers say “Thank you” and ask for the next comment.
I’ve come to the conclusion that, to be a writer of any merit, you must constantly question your ability and consider ways to strengthen your work, whether those ways come from your own ideas or from others’ suggestions. And to be an editor of any merit is to embark on a long and humbling process of examining and justifying every opinion. As the saying goes, “Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
dottyeyes - March 27, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Experience tells you that few things are black-and-white. I vacillate between an eye-rolling attitude (“How could she write so badly?) and a humble one (“Oops! I totally missed the author’s point”). I worry that many necessary changes might look willy-nilly to an author. Ambiguous antecedents (“companies must give their manufacturers several options if they offer value to them”) and missing verbs (“This process is efficient, inexpensive and addresses the problem”) often don’t jump out as confusing or incorrect to an author.
On the one hand, I recently copyedited a trade book for a major publisher. In some cordial back-and-forth with the author, I had suggested a way to fix a dangler in the first paragraph of the book, and she had accepted the suggestion. To my dismay, I saw that the printed book introduced a new, very awkward dangler and a not-so-obvious comma splice in the same first paragraph. These errors were not in the cleaned-up manuscript I had returned to the publisher, so they must have been introduced at page proof. I’ve had an author tell me that standard punctuation rules didn’t work with his “special style.” And the author was writing a scholarly history book; he wasn’t James Joyce or e. e. cummings. Another author, a novelist, soundly rejected my suggestions for clearer attributions in her dialogue. Several reviewers later criticized the published novel because they couldn’t understand who was saying what in the scenes.
On the other hand, I’ve introduced errors in manuscripts or missed ones that wound up in print (only after a book was printed did I learn that the expression is not “bold-faced lie” but “bald-faced lie”). So it goes. But wise writers learn to trust a good copyeditor. Good copyeditors learn to “first, do no harm.”
dank48 - March 27, 2012 at 12:52 pm
I once had the opportunity to copy edit Barzun in a minor way; he’d written a letter to the editor of Verbatim, decrying the whole notion of copy editing. The thing was that Barzun didn’t realize that most authors (i.e. all the others) don’t send in copy that doesn’t need any copy editing. If he’d been on the other side of the desk, he’d have understood.
However, as a career editor, I certainly sympathize with several author comments above. There are, my first boss in the book biz liked to say, editors and meddlers. Editors fix things that are wrong and sometimes suggest improvements. Meddlers fool with things because they feel like it, because they can, and because they think changing something justifies their existence. My grandfather once said, “It’s a wonderful thing that we have college professors in this country, but where the hell would we be without the people who take the trash away?” That’s all I try to do; that’s really all any good editor is doing, with maybe a little sweeping up thrown in.
It’s a tough lesson, but there are people who won’t let their trash be taken away because they look upon the activity as demeaning and the people who perform it as beneath their consideration. They may or may not get what they deserve, but that’s not my call.
dank48 - March 27, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Excuse me. Is that “copyeditors” or “copy editors”?
dank48 - March 27, 2012 at 1:54 pm
James Thurber has a wonderful posthumously published essay, “He Edits Best Who Edits Least, Especially Mine.” (Title is approximately correct, anyway.) At one point he mentions that a New Yorker editor marked the galleys of a short story something like, “You used ‘gallop’ as a verb on galley 4 and again here on galley 25. Change for variety?” He went on to remark, “Shakespeare used ‘to be’ twice in one line and ‘tomorrow’ three times in another. Where the hell were the editors of The New Yorker then?”
baldrz - March 27, 2012 at 10:09 pm
Having found many inconsistent and orphaned reference callouts throughout an academic manuscript, I reminded the author, “Please check the references and callouts carefully.” ”I AM careful,” he huffed. Guess it was his evil twin who wrote the first draft.
johnbarnes - March 28, 2012 at 2:57 am
Both, frequently. Which is why I pay people to copy edit, or copyedit, my work. Unfortunately it is perfectly possible (at least for me) to be fussy about exact shades of meaning and simultaneously unable to notice notice verb you’ve typed twice and frequent absence article. A really good copy editor has a fine intuitive feel for what is deliberate and what is not, and preserves the deliberate (possibly flagging it as ill-considered, but understanding it belongs there). Average copy editors tend to turn written work into average work. Unfortunately they do this whether they are copyeditors or copy editors.
dank48 - March 29, 2012 at 2:17 pm
Then we are in agreement essentially. And lest I too readily identify myself with the “good editor” in my earlier note, I should confess to once having “corrected” vicegerent to viceregent, which construction, however logical it seemed to me at the time, suffers from the disadvantage of not being a real word. Too damn self-confident, too lazy to check the dictionary. The resultant embarrassment, however, was salutary.
We never outgrow our need for humility.
proftowanda - April 2, 2012 at 10:13 am
“First, do no harm” is the lesson that I had to learn in my first jobs, as a copy editor, and I thank the writers who taught that to me. Only later did I become an author, and I thank the copy editors who also taught me more that I had not yet learned. However, I also have had the other sort of copy editors, who did harm from the first page to the last, and I learned to withhold trust until it is earned. However, when it is established, a good relationship between an author and a copy editor can be rewarding and memorable for both — and for the fortunate readers.