OCHIENG: The annoying habits of some copy editors

In Summary
Having been chief sub-editor of a busy daily for years, I know how time-consuming — and annoying — it can be for a sub-editor to squander precious minutes turning a plethora of words from italics to Roman and from caps to small letters, and vice versa.

Another thing is that the Nation Group’s owners and directors do not like italics because — and I agree — when overused, such slanted letters can seriously strain the reader’s eyes.
By Philip Ochieng
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In the Noachian deluge of rules in which the German language founders, I know only one Ararat. The great American satirist quips about it in “The Awful German Language”, included in Your Personal Mark Twain (a collection of skits published in Germany in the 1960s).

It is that the initial letters of all German nouns must be capped.

The reason this rule is as secure as the Rock of Ages is that it brooks no exception. But the list of exceptions to every other rule in the German language is longer than the list of examples. English — a first cousin — is the only other language I know which misuses the word “exceptions” in this way.

FRUSTRATIONS

But the fact is that I paid dearly to acquire my German. That is why it exasperates me whenever, in this column, my instruction to cap the initial of a German noun is ignored. That was what happened to such German nouns as Eke and Umlaut in last Saturday’s piece. It frustrates my efforts as a language teacher in a country where language teaching is approaching its nadir.

No, I don’t think the sub-editor did it consciously. I know a million factors that could have been involved. One concerns deadlines.

Having been chief sub-editor of a busy daily for years, I know how time-consuming — and annoying — it can be for a sub-editor to squander precious minutes turning a plethora of words from italics to Roman and from caps to small letters, and vice versa.

Yet that is precisely what a language column demands. That was why, at the beginning, the managing editor asked me to send the Saturday column as early as Monday to allow the sub-editor time enough to get its ilk out of the way long before the more perishable (news) material begins to threaten to overwhelm him later in the week.

Another thing is that the Nation Group’s owners and directors do not like italics because — and I agree — when overused, such slanted letters can seriously strain the reader’s eyes.

That is why italics does not appear in any of the group’s publications, except (a) for the titles of publications, and (b) for words foreign to English.

As the Daily Nation’s chief sub-editor and later managing editor in the 1970s-1980s, I was more keenly aware of that dislike than most other members of staff.

It was only when it fell to my lot to write a language column that I found it necessary to ask to be allowed to use italics rule to facilitate my explanation of words.

Ordinarily, however, whenever I sent material from my computer into the Nation’s system, the italics would simply disappear.

So the editor and I agreed on a system by which I would Roman-cap all the words I wanted italicised, and then the sub-editor would return those words to italics and, in the process, upper-lower-case them.

But, as I say, many factors may force the sub to ignore them — causing annoyance to all knowledgeable readers.