More productive
◊ Production at the newspaper for the second night running. I am fucking sick of editing, proofreading, tweaking layouts in Quark, and waiting for the computers to unfreeze.
I scored a major coup tonight! I caught not one, but two mistakes that slipped past Ron, our super ninja volunteer copy editor. One of them was a tiny thing he had overlooked, but the other was a genuine cock-up on his part.
I bickered with him for a minute ("...But a number is always spelled out if it's under ten." "Yeah, but you always use numerals with figures and statistics...") and then busted out the hallowed AP style book for the last word in correct usage. I tried not to do a stupid-looking victory dance when it turned out I was in the right. "The Spartan Daily's dragging you down, man," I said.
I keep telling people not to fuck with me on the language front. I've studied French, Latin, and a little bit of Spanish, and I've been reading like crazy for all of my life. During high school, I had to study the subjunctive in two languages at once. English's pansy-ass grammar does not frighten me.
And punctuation? Punctuation is my bitch.