It's Always More Complicated

I have previously, I think, complained that Academic Publishers Who Are In The Habit Of Charging An Arm, A Leg And Several Internal Organs for the works they produce, except for the brief period when they hold their annual sale, whatever they are doing with those ill-gotten gains, they are not spending them on due diligence in the editorial process.

This is not even those egregious instances where an early draft seems to have been dumped straight into the publication process (some examples of which I have perorated upon in the past).

But it is what I would have considered (maybe this is ok boomer territory) absolutely basic stuff, not the sort of thing that would require running the text past A Nexpert in the field. (Which they don't do either.)

And not even, not running it past a reasonably competent copy editor who would pick up things like OMG that is not the correct way to refer to Sir Somebody Something or 'your geography of London is a little hazy'.

It is actually incorrect English usage. It is grocer's apostrophe's (has that ship sailed? really?). It is letting 'between [X] and I' slide past when it should be 'between [X] and me', a distinction my mother made clear to me in my childhood. It is words which do not mean what, I deduce from context, the author seems to suppose they mean (e.g. 'avocation' does not mean 'advocacy').

I boggle. I cringe. I do the goldfish thing with my mouth. You are charging nearly £40 for the ebook, £70 for the hardback. I am sure the author is not coining it. Where is the money going?

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Dear Sir/Madam

IRREVOCABLE RELEASE OF YOUR PAYMENT

We have actually been authorized by the World Bank and international monetary fund(IMF),to investigate the unnecessary delay of your payment,Recommendation and approval of your claims for payment is certified as genuine. During the course of our investigation,we
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We have also agreed with the World Bank,international monetary fund (IMF)and HM Revenue that, we will handle this payment ourselves to avoid the hopeless situation created by these corrupt Officials.


We have obtained an irrevocable payment guarantee on your Payment,from the world Bank,international monetary fund (IMF)and HM Revenue.We are happy to inform you that based on our recommendation/instructions; your Entire contract fund,inheritance,Next Of Kin and Lottery claim has been credited in your favor through our overseas paying bank.

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I would happily let them keep some of the dough for the purposes of remedial English usage training for Mr Ebi and his colleagues.

This is an extraordinary story: As a young woman, Celia Robertson's grandmother was a poet of enormous promise, feted by the Bloomsbury set and with a bright future ahead of her. By the end she was a paranoid old lady, living in precarious destitution. What on earth went wrong? (synchronicitously, I read a review of Robertson's book about her grandmother in the most recent Literary Review yesterday; alas, it is not one of those available on its website, but the book sounds fascinating, if possibly extremely depressing). I am really a bit freaked to discover that this woman's brother won an Oscar for his score of The Red Shoes, a film which painfully and melodramatically dramatises the artistic career versus 'normal womanly life' conflict of its immediately post-war era, when I read the following:

Her analyst told her that she should give up writing altogether and concentrate on being a good wife and mother. She took this advice so completely to heart that she burned every piece of work she had ever kept, every diary, notebook and poem, in a big bonfire in 1951.

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Another intriguing family story: In the 70s, Yasmin Hai's father launched 'Operation English' to turn his Muslim children into model British citizens. But were Milly-Molly-Mandy haircuts and pantos really the answer?.

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Kira Cochrane studies the politics of pregnancy in Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret and Elizabeth Gregory's Ready. I am just a bit surprised that Cochrane is surprised by

all the vociferous, crowing critics of abortion, women who protest outside the clinic, for instance, before coming in to "calmly and rationally explain why they need to end a pregnancy in spite of their beliefs", returning to their banner-waving within a week.

And on a related theme, review of Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-parenting - reviewer suggests that actual 'hyper-parents' as defined by the author are probably an extremely small minority; also that all happy families are different (take that, Count Tolstoy!).

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Alexander McCall Smith on Barbara Pym: I can't quite put my finger on it, but while I am all for 'yay! Barbara Pym', feel that there is quite a lot about her and her strengths as a writer that are absent from this appreciation.

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And just because, Kathryn Hughes' review of the newly commissioned prequel to Anne of Green Gables, Before Green Gables

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From yesterday: debate over the fate of the semicolon. Not entirely sure that there is equivalence in usage of particularl punctuation marks in different languages? - is the French furore a bit of a red herring?