19 replies to this topic

[puppytreats]

Kathleen O, on 24 May 2013 - 05:10 AM, said:

But I myself make silly "principle / principal"-type mistakes all the time because I've become too reliant on automatic completion and spell check. Oh, and because computer keyboards allow you to type faster than you can think. It took a bit longer to pound things out on a typewriter.

I confused them all the time, even before I started using computers. I always have to have a dictionary and grammar or style guide available.

[Jack Reed]

dirac, on 23 May 2013 - 04:11 PM, said:

Copy editors can have their own weird biases and gaps in knowledge, but that's another thread.....

Okay.  If I can spin that thread for a moment, Calcium Light Night, the title of the last Ives piece in the suite Martins assembled for his first ballet, and the name he gave to it, was - and may still be - an annual overnight custom at Yale, involving the use of metallic calcium, which burns, in portable lamps - calcium lights - and in which custom the composer participated while a student there; whence his musical representation of it.  It's not obvious whether the gap in knowledge here is Gottlieb's or his editor's.

With all of this, maybe we don't even need mention an ordinary typo, but in Arlene Croce's review of the premiere of Calcium in the February 20, 1978 New Yorker, reprinted in Going to the Dance, describing the action on stage, she says, "bodies are clamped together, then slid apart."

With all its technical faults, this review is a bit of a mess, but no less worth reading, not least for the use of "pissed off" in the second part.  There, Gottlieb wonders about hard-working Hubbard Street's success, but it strikes me that it's not for nothing it's based in, and named for a street in, the "City of the Big Shoulders," as Carl Sandburg fairly characterized Chicago.

[kfw]

Speaking of bad editing, Calcium Light Night always comes to my mind as "Calcium Night Light"!

[Jack Reed]

Tsk!  It used to be spoken of that way, back in the day.  But Ives had a lot more in mind than a little something on your bedside table to keep you from being afraid in the dark!  Quite a tumultuous evening, in fact, though none of this is represented as such in Martins's (how's my punctuation, folks?) ballet.  Nor need it be, as far as I'm concerned; the near-violence late in the ballet Gottlieb refers to seems to come out of the music, even if something else went in.  Martins's tumult is of a different kind.  (I wasn't crazy about his ballet when I first saw it, but I thought it was a very fine and strong piece of work, partly because of being all of a piece.)

[dirac]

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Tsk! It used to be spoken of that way, back in the day.

Well, Balanchine liked it enough to stick it in to his own ballet. That would certainly be good enough for me.....

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With all of this, maybe we don't even need mention an ordinary typo, but in Arlene Croce's review of the premiere of Calcium in the February 20, 1978 New Yorker, reprinted in Going to the Dance, describing the action on stage, she says, "bodies are clamped together, then slid apart."

Hmmm.  I read it as the same tense -   bodies are clamped and then are slid.