Aw Diddums

Funny how we think we know something, and it’s not what we think. One of the changes I had to make to the report was to add ‘n/a’ to the Abbreviations list, “… for ‘not available’,” said our contact.

If she said it was ‘not available’, then that’s what I would put… but I was a little surprised. I always took it to mean ‘no account’. I looked it up, and sure enough, the nearest free dictionaries said it meant ‘not available’ or ‘not applicable’.

As it happens, I can remember why I was convinced it meant ‘no account’ – my father told me. I would have been filling in an application form or something, and he was advising. He said “put n/a…. no account.”

He wasn’t an ignorant man, and I couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t mean that to some people anyway, so I added it to my search term. It started popping up alongside the word ‘banking’. Ah. Yes, that figures… I’m my father’s daughter.

Having a quick breather while somebody else takes over the master file. It’s a mishmash of bits and pieces sent by various different writers to make one (in)coherent whole, so of course the margins and fonts and things are all over the place. I’m the one supposed to format it consistently. Last night I finally got the hang of what I was doing, and reduced the entire thing from 210pp to 180pp. That included 4 figures, 52 tables and an uncounted host of text boxes.

It’s not particularly straightforward, even when working from a stylesheet, as different writers tend to have different quirks and tricks when using MS Word, and sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what somebody has done. A lot of time can be spent undoing the knots. I swore if I came across more of these glitches, I would skip over them and ask someone else to sort them out in the background, but when you’re trying to make sure everything fits correctly on a page and that the tables don’t spill over, it’s hard to make yourself move on. It nags at the edge of my mind and I end up going back and tinkering.

A couple of days ago I had this email conversation with my sister:

Diddums: I wish the writers would not be ‘clever’ with the formatting… I was struggling to reduce the white space under a text box which had been edited to be smaller, and I couldn’t see any settings under ‘box’, ‘paragraph’ or ‘border’ that needed to be changed. Eventually I managed to select the white space, looked in the menu, and it turned out to be an invisible autoshape sitting under the text box. After that I was able to reduce it to the same size… but I don’t see any need for it. It’s not smart when others are going to handle the document after them.

Sister: Plenty of moaning goes on about that on the editor lists.

It seems I’m a true editor.

Actually I tend to feel a bit ‘off’ about editors in general; not through working with them, as the ones working with me have a good sense of humour, though they can get a bit stressed when deadlines loom large. It’s more that editors are hard to deal with en masse. When I went to those same moaning editor forums frequented by my sister, some of them struck me as an awful lot more pedantic and acerbic than I am… and I’m quite bad! Some had the attitude that you couldn’t be an editor if you didn’t have the training and experience; in one way I know what they mean and there is truth in it; but in another way it’s a little bit too “keep off my patch.”

People can always learn, like we did.

I didn’t stay on those lists. Life seemed a lot quieter and pleasanter when I wasn’t getting irate about other editors whose views weren’t mine. Perhaps I got tired of the unending complaints about greengrocers’ apostrophes and ‘less vs fewer’. It’s all right for me to complain about things, of course, such as invisible autoshapes where you don’t expect them…

Following on from yesterday’s post Minimal Capitals… today I was watching one of those antiques game shows on the TV and a dealer used the phrase ‘minimal furniture’ about an item.

After reacting with “there’s that word again!” I thought about how odd the phrase was. I think he meant ‘plain’. ‘Plain’ would be much less of a mouthful, just as ’sentence case’ is less of a mouthful than ‘minimal capitals’… but maybe it arises out of an urge to make it sound a positive thing.

I’m used to the following terms:

• small capitals
  
• title case
  
• sentence case
  
• lower case
  
• upper case

This one (in an editor’s style sheet) threw me: minimal capitals.

At first I thought she meant small capitals, and checked with the other editors, who said they didn’t know what was meant. I looked on the internet for some examples but didn’t have much luck. As far as I can make out, it is a vague way of saying “as few capitals as possible.”

I didn’t think she meant that – she was differentiating between ‘bold capitals’, ‘minimal capitals bold’ and ‘minimal capitals without bold’. As for small capitals, nobody was using them in the entire document. I decided that’s what she probably meant anyway, but my sister thinks it’s supposed to mean ’sentence case’. That sounds more likely… but what’s wrong with just saying ’sentence case’?

It doesn’t actually matter, as all that’s wanted at this stage is consistency, and nobody bothered to follow the style sheet. But it bothers me. Is it a recognized term, ‘minimal caps’? Sometimes I prefer working on my own, it’s less confusing…

I have been looking on-line at the spellings supersede and supercede. There are a lot of claims that supercede is incorrect, whereas the Oxford English Dictionary (unless this information is out of date) claims that supercede is valid and disputed rather than incorrect.

‘Disputed’ it could well be, because so many spell it that way – and not without reason.

A comment on this site says that the Scots used superceid.

I do have a preference for supercede – but that’s probably because I’m a cantankerous Scot who was brought up to spell it that way.

Just as I dialled up to check a few sites on the subject, thinking ‘dictionaries, dictionaries’ to myself, my eye was caught by my daily horoscope. It said:

The dictionary may define an obstacle as ‘a person or thing that obstructs progress,’ but today any obstacles you face will have quite the opposite effect. When someone tells you ‘no’ today, all you’ll hear is a challenge to change this person’s mind. You are up to the task, and you’re eager to make all obstacles disappear.

Good. It’s supercede. Diddums has spoken.

Edit Feb 2008: There were several comments to this post on Blogigo and they can still be found there. Quite a few folks seem to feel the same way about supercede. I reposted Bunnyman’s comment below.

Bunnyman wrote at Dec 3, 2006 at 18:51:
My two volume “New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary” lists both forms but words the distinction as follows:

supersede Also (earlier) -cede. L15.

The L15 refers to use of supercede beginning around the late fifteenth century. It doesn’t say anything about supercede being wrong.

Perhaps it is just a Scottish quirk but I’ve always used the -cede spelling. Supersede sounds more like some kind of humungous, prize winning vegetable.

Quite a strange place that Everything2.com, I’ve added it to my list of Very Odd Encyclopaedias. It doesn’t yet have an entry for “Diddums” though it does suggest that “Bunnyman” might be an unsavoury character, quite mad and having some anti-social habits. Seems there’s even a bridge named after me.

Well at least it has some good “vegan pizza” recipes.

‘Tis the voice of the sluggard;
I hear him complain
“You have waked me too soon,
I must slumber again.”

Who wrote that? Well ’tis buried deep in the bookcase somewhere – I believe it’s included in two volumes of poetry called Come Hither, but I don’t feel like tearing apart the swaying bookcase to get at it. Not at this time of the morning.

Staring out at a day that’s all too dark, preparing to do some editing work. Somebody’s security light is on over there. It’s never, ever off (at least at night), and that really irritates me.

I hate, hate, hate, getting up when it’s still dark.

I blame those terrible winter mornings back in Edinburgh when the blizzards raged in the streets outside and we still had to go to school. I never really liked school. It wasn’t too bad once I got there, but on the whole school was a burden I could easily have done without. My stomach clenched with fear and dismay when, in the pitch black of night, someone turned the main bedroom light full on. “Time to get up for school!”

Being ripped untimely from the quiet, snoozing warmth of the home when it was still black outside, to spend my day with the sneering visages of my peers and teachers – it didn’t seem right to me.

I notice that my attitude didn’t change a whole lot when I started working in an office. My joy at landing a job changed to terror when it dawned on me that I had been landed by the job.

More days of getting up when it was freezing cold and dark, with slick slippery frost on the pavements, to go somewhere (initially on a roaring, squealing bus) when my stomach was still plumping up the pillow beneath its head and groping sleepily for the clock. This time the aim was to spend the day with the polite but distant visages of colleagues. I wonder if it is a more relaxing business to rise early in a hot country? When there is ice lacing the window panes, both inside and out (as it used to do before we got any double-glazing), getting up before the sun is the last thing you feel like doing.

That old feeling of reluctance lingers. As a teleworker, when I don’t have to step outdoors if I really don’t want to, and ‘work’ involves making coffee and sitting down at my own friendly computers at my own slovenly desk – that’s heaven compared to what went before! (Apart from certain drawbacks, but we won’t address them here). Once I would have killed to be allowed to do this. But I still find it incredibly hard to get up when it’s dark outside.

I was kept up all night by Microsoft Word. Even when you think you understand it and can find your way around it, doing things other people don’t even know Word can do, it still has the ability to baffle. I looked up a few ‘Word help’ sites on-line, but they don’t say very much, are too basic, and are chirpy and cheerful at a time when I’m keen to wring someone’s neck.

I enjoy the challenge of reducing a wild, fighting document to something pliant and beautiful, but when I think of all the time and sleep I’ve lost, and the frantic rush just before a printing deadline when everybody’s waiting for me to come up with the goods, and Word isn’t letting me do something that should never have been a problem in the first place… that makes me quite angry.

My printer broke down in the middle of it all. No, actually, I was glad. I’m usually upset when things of mine break (I don’t know when I last broke a mug) but I didn’t like this printer. Even as I turned away from its rapidly cooling corpse and my forehead met the desk with a thump, I thought to myself “I can buy a new printer now. And it won’t be the same make!”

I lifted my forehead off the desk and pointed my mouse in the direction of Amazon.

Not just because I’m a shopaholic who was fed to the back teeth with her old printer anyway, but because I felt bad about it and wanted to leave that moment behind. Move on, move on, move on. Get from a bad place to a good one. Despair begone and hope enter in. I didn’t want to fork out for a new printer, which was partly why I was upset, but let’s just get one and get it over with.

In fact there’s such a bewildering choice out there it took me two nights. I talked to everyone and read all the reviews and shopped around from site to site. I stared at pictures and thought about what I needed. I narrowed my shortlist to two printers – one laser and one inkjet - and they were so much the opposite of each other in their pros and cons that I couldn’t decide! I slept on it, hoping for a definite decision during the night, but in the morning was still irresolute. So I bought the one I wanted instead of the one I thought I should probably get. I bought the Canon inkjet.

Those two nights – it was a good thing I held back, as the price came down while I was staring at it. The other printer held its price steady.

I’m looking forward to it so much that just now I went back to Amazon and pulled down its picture just so I could stare lovingly at it. I showed it to Sharky, who was sitting on my knee. “Look – there’s our new printer.” He looked at it for a few minutes while I clicked back and forth between views, but he didn’t seem very impressed. I downloaded one of the photos so I could admire it when I leave the site. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before, not for a printer. Not for anything other than a kitten or a teddy bear.

Maybe I just needed something to smile over and look forward to. I’m not down in the dumps; just tired. It’s one of those times when things are breaking down all around you – the PC’s hard drive packed up recently, taking a handful of pretty graphics with it, and I’m still waiting for a replacement. I didn’t particularly miss the PC, sitting blank and empty beside me, but today it hit me that I miss Paintshop Pro.

Edit Feb 2008: Comments for this entry when it was on Blogigo:

1. drifting wrote at Sep 27, 2006 at 09:05:
Word drives me nuts sometimes. Microsoft applications are not particularly ‘user-friendly’. I get so sick of the auto-formatting that Word insists on doing when it thinks it knows what I want. Excel’s help is not very helpful. Access is a nightmare. I need a new harddrive but just can’t afford it at the moment with the car bill coming up….
It is nice to get that document obedient, though. Just takes a lot of frustration!

2. drifting wrote at Sep 27, 2006 at 09:07:
Btw, I have to say I thought your title meant you’d meant a human printer… hehehe! It’s probably just as well to fall in love with an inanimate object – less hassle!

3. Diddums wrote at Sep 27, 2006 at 20:07:
That would be a match made in heaven, wouldn’t it – an editor and a printer! Even better if it was a writer and a printer.

What I find with Word help is it tells you stuff you know already – the troubleshooting information is thin on the ground. It seems to assume you won’t or can’t get into trouble. Or maybe they don’t want to have a huge troubleshooting section in case people think it reflects on the product! It doesn’t really, especially if it tells you what was going wrong in the first place. Then you would go “ah – silly me,” and fix it. I wish…

Television subtitles and captions (or rather the typos and mistakes we are regularly treated to) can be entertainment in their own right. Watching The People’s Museum just now, they were showing us a large and extremely ornate object – the Mayor’s Coach. It was apparently covered from ‘tip to toe’ with gold leaf and guilt.

Sounds about right to me.

The bathroom door was squeaking. The fact that I could hear it probably means the whole street has been annoyed by it for weeks. I realized it should be left till next morning – when oiling hinges you should make sure the place is well ventilated. Going to sleep surrounded by a spreading mist of WD-40 is probably not too bright. Yet there stood the door, squeaking at me. It would squeak if I got up in the middle of the night. It would squeak when I got up in the morning. When I finally went to bed, therefore, it was to the soothing aroma of WD-40.

Speaking of WD-40, I mentioned it a few days ago in this post. You’ll notice the hyphen is in use there as well as here. Later, when I was reading other blogs, I noticed a post by someone who wrote about WD40. No hyphen. I panicked. Which of us was right?

Off I trundled to check my can in the cupboard. No Googling for this information. The popular vote has been wrong before, and there’s no better source than the actual product. There, I could just about see the top of it, peeping over the Tupperware tub. Holding my breath, I drew it out. “Ahh – it’s WD-40. I’m right!” There’s a short list of suggested uses on the side of the tin, headed by ’stops squeaks’. It wasn’t working in this case, as I was squeaking excitedly and doing a little dance.

Sad, I know, but for nearly 20 years it has been my job to pay attention to these details. It’s impossible to switch off my niggle radar – my whole life is a kind of busman’s holiday. I just know if they put me in a reality show to swop lives with someone else, they would be forcing me to write ‘WD40′ without hyphens. “You must learn to loosen up. It’s good for you,” they would say. Then they would catch me red-handed, in the middle of the night, correcting my blog by flashlight.

Mood: Vainglorious
Listening to: Whirr of a sulky PC

I meant to go to bed at 2 a.m. after sending off the editing file I had been working on, but six hours later and I was still at my desk.

The PC had a serious failure – so bad that I took a crash course in MS-DOS (without a manual or a friendly techie leaning over my shoulder), found the bad file (in DOS, remember – no mouse or nice icons to click on! – nope, I was talking the computer’s own language here) – and had it all booted up again just in time for another day of work. (Yes, freelance editors work on Sundays).

This despite reading page after page of advice from lugubrious computer gurus saying “all you can do now is reformat and reinstall.”I’ll do that later – and not before I’ve backed up all my cat photos and snow scenes. Feeling eerily confident now…

C:WINDOWSSYSTEMDIDDUMSCLEVER_CLOGS.txt