Horror story on copy editors

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:09 PM -0700 7/27/00, Rudolph C Troike wrote:
>A good copy editor is much to be cherished, but some, as Arnold noted, are
>rule-bound automatons. My favorite horror story was from Edgar Polome, who
>was editing the proceedings of a conference on Indo-European, and found
>that the copy-editor had translated all of the Latin examples into English
>because the publisher's copy-editing manual specified that this was to be
>done.
>
>         Rudy

and then there was the MIT Press copy-editor who helpfully corrected
the ungrammatical sentences in Robin Lakoff's _Abstract Syntax and
Latin Complementation_ (1968) but retained the cute little asterisks.

Larry