ROGUES, WIDOWS AND ORPHANS

Wily words.

Lee, a senior editorial manager at Penguin Random House, wears her erudition lightly and gleefully as she considers ways published words can go wrong, sometimes unintentionally (typos) and sometimes not, causing effects from embarrassment to scandal. Ranging through time and place, she looks at a host of vexing issues, such as plagiarism, censorship, grammatical errors, and blatant hoaxes. Scribes, she reveals, made errors so often that a “vibrant and visceral lexicon” developed to describe them, such as, for instance, metathesis (transposing words or letters) and haplography (missing a word). The advent of printing led to the professionalization of copy editing and proofreading. For some readers, finding examples of bad writing—from egregious errors to florid style—has become a way of bonding: “The real joy is in the shared experience, the fervent discussion in the book club, the late-night texting about that truly atrocious metaphor, the unifying power of a collective ick.” The author considers censorship, from Thomas Bowdler, who sanitized Shakespeare’s plays, to obscenity charges against Lady Chatterley’s Lover to present-day book bans. She acknowledges the slipperiness of detecting plagiarism, which often “isn’t an out-and-out land grab, more a crossing of friable and invisible boundaries.” For some writers, word trouble means writer’s block or rejection letters; for published writers, critical reviews; for publishers, the challenge of encouraging potential consumers to make reading “a habit, or possibly, like morphine, an addiction.” Lee pays serious attention to the threat and consequences of AI on writing and publishing: “AI can give us a dopamine hit of word salad that will almost immediately wear off—unlike words written by a real person that have a chance of resonating and staying with us forever.”

A sharp, witty look at writing, reading, and publishing.