Yup. Grace of my dad, I happen to have a quite Germanic last name, which in Eastern Europe is very often identified with Jewish folks. However, my dad’s family were actually from the Belgian region that borders on Germany & France. Having done a bit of genealogical research on my roots, I have marriage and baptism data going back to the start of the 1800s, all of which confirms that we were definitely French-speaking Christians, despite the Germanic/Jewish surname.
As @dicktater points out, this would be a very dangerous dataset if it falls into the wrong hands…
Coming to TPM comments late again. I have lots of questions about the NYT! Most involve what seems to me its chaotic editing and many-tentacled attempts to attract subscriptions, from the Wirecutter, Puzzles, The Hunt (to all of which, I confess, I am addicted, esp. Spelling Bee) to Athletics and the Sunday Review or Opinions or whatever they’re calling it this month. I also don’t understand why so many of their “serious” news articles read like not a word but a sentence salad.
Well, I can’t speak to their marketing strategies at all, but as far as the ‘chaotic editing’ and why their news articlesoften read like sentence salad (really, the same ‘WTF is up with the editing?’ question), I can tell you that about… I wanna say between 5 and 10 years ago (I don’t remember exactly when it was), they completely dissolved their copyedit department.
They’ve since restaffed, but narrowed its focus. Not every article goes through copy, especially for the things that get pushed on the web, but don’t make it to the print edition. Generally, if you see garbage prose online, it hasn’t gone through copy at all.
They must have been depleting that department even before 10 years ago. But the sentence salad thing seems to me maybe related to more than what I think of as copy editing. A sentence here, a sentence there, let the reader try to piece together a narrative out of all of this – and save key info for the last para or two, when most people have stopped reading. Maybe a weird way of appearing to be “objective”? Might this approach come in response to orders to copy editors and reporters from corporate higher ups of the type you have criticized? I should add that I have been less struck by this phenomenon in the last few years.
Silly anecdote. Maybe 35 years ago (or more – time flies) a NYT copy editor retired to my town in the Berkshires and made himself a constant presence at town committee meetings and through letters to the Berkshire Eagle and North Adams Transcript. A horrible man. He always knew better than anyone else, but there are always people like that. What made him horrible was his nastiness, which could get really personal. For instance, once I wrote a letter to the Eagle (criticizing a selectman’s lament that our town’s biggest budget item every year was for our schools). The retired copy editor guy did not respond to me publicly but did send me a letter in the U.S. mail in which he attacked me personally. It was very unsettling (and very un-Berkshirite – and I won’t edit out either “very”). I soon learned he sent letters like this to people regularly. At some point he and his (apparently mute) wife moved away. Good riddance.
Copy editors must be the bane and savior of reporters. Their work certainly must delay publication if only by a few hours. Hence their role is not web-friendly.
He sounds it. Some people are like that, yeah. And honestly, as far as ‘delaying’ publication goes… for a normal-length article, first read-through takes about 2h. Usually there should be at least 2, preferably 3 between 2 different copy editors… because the more familiar you become with a piece, the less you can actually edit it. It’s why editors need editors more than most normal reporters/writers do: the brain knows what the text is trying to say, and just begins to fill in the gaps, glide past mistakes, etc. You really can’t even stop it, because it’s not a conscious decision, it’s just something your language center is doing to try to understand what it’s seeing.
So when an editor (whether a copy editor or a line editor makes no difference) writes something… we’ll often feel like ‘hey, I know what I’m doing, I’ll edit it on the fly as I go’ (something I try not to do here, but still fall into) and by the time we have the piece finished and are considering a quick once-over before we push it out… our brains have already gotten to the saturation point. You generally get 2, maybe 3 read-throughs for something new… but something you wrote? You might get the second look, but if you’ve gone back, revised, etc etc… lost cause from the jump. Someone else needs to do the editing.
I often tell my writers ‘my job is to help you by taking what you wrote, and making it sound even more like you, at your best’. That’s true of my team’s articles and op-eds, and it’s true when I do freelance work on novels and technical papers. If I’m doing my job right, nobody but the author knows I was there. But that takes time.
We used to refer to our daughter’s middle school orchestra teacher as a PBH - psycho bitch from hell. She wouldn’t even pass out the music for the secundo part until a week before their performance and then scream at them that they sounded awful (they did)
