That word "neen" / restrictive "that"

[Thomas Paikeday]

Hi Allan,

First, off-topic: Thanks for the acknowledgement of my ADS paper
proposal.

I think you were kind to the copy editor fresh out of college indulging
in what I call "teach-your-grandmother-to-suck-eggishness" (my word of
the year 1990).

I was not so kind to someone (editorial director with an M.A. from
Leeds) at Penguin Books (1990 gives it away) who had apparently never
cracked a dictionary. She objected to abbreviations like "usu." and had
a problem with the meaning of "He consummated his infidelity by going
off to live with the other woman." I gave in on "usu." but told her
privately about the sexual and non-sexual meanings of "consummate." But
the company President kept bugging me. So at three strikes I sent a
four-page memo to him with copies to 21 consultants (headed by Sister
Jessica A. Bell, SSA, M.A., M.Ed. - Hi Sister, if you are listening) who
had voted for the sentence.

At the next conference, the edit. dir. had gone on to other endeavours.
But since "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum," I am glad to add that both the
President and his edit. dir. are hopefully enjoying their Philadelphia
cream cheese.

Retributive justice: My contract got broken in four places and the
remaining copies of the dictionary were pulped. That was my third bad
experience with a commercial publisher. I decided never again to offer
an unfinished dictionary to a third party. Enter Lexicography, Inc.

TOM PAIKEDAY
www3.sympatico.ca/t.paikeday/index.htm

AAllan at AOL.COM wrote:
>
> Larry wrote:
>
> << I suspect that the imposition itself follows from the "logic" that if
> you can't use "that" with non-restrictives (as in the final two
> examples in the right column), you "shouldn't" be allowed to use to
> use "who"/"which" with restrictives (as in the last two examples in
> the left column).  The fact that no actual speakers or writers would
> obey this constraint if they weren't forced to at penpoint doesn't
> stop the editors or mavens. >>
>
> I'm not the first to call this practice by copy editors a "which hunt." I
> found it especially excruciating when I published a textbook years ago with a
> certain publisher (not my nice current one, Houghton Mifflin), and they
> assigned my book to a copy editor fresh with a B.A. in English. Now this was
> a book I had written and rewritten so that all the kinks were out, so the
> editor didn't have much to do. But for a copy editor to read through a whole
> book and do nothing is like a state police trooper issuing no traffic
> tickets, so maybe for that reason this editor made a point of changing
> restrictive "which"es to "that"s. I changed some of them back, bolstering my
> argument by pointing out numerous places where even this "which hunter" had
> not noticed restrictive "which"es, because they were so natural.
> - Allan Metcalf