There are plenty of misconceptions about the discipline of copy editing—not to mention the temperament of the copy editor. Foremost among them is the idea that the laws of language are cold, hard, and immutable, and that a copy editor ought to guard against the perversion of the texting, tweeting masses. In practice, though, the principles that govern usage are ever-changing and open to interpretation; the trick is knowing when, and how, they should be broken.
Cathleen Schine’s new novel, “The Grammarians,” is a rich study of the factions that attempt to define how language should be used. Schine, a former copy editor herself, gives voice and backstory to the opposing teams: the prescriptivist, who, pun intended, follows rules to the letter, and the descriptivist, who, rules be damned, strives to make the written word more closely match its meaning. “The Grammarians” personifies this conflict with a set of twins, Laurel and Daphne. When they’re five years old, the girls’ father inherits an old copy of Webster’s Second, and places it on a literal altar for their perusal; they collect and play with the quirkier words they find like other children would play with paper dolls. We follow Laurel and Daphne into adulthood, in New York City, in the nineteen-eighties. They move in together and get jobs: Laurel starts as a kindergarten teacher in a private school on the Upper West Side, and Daphne answers phones for a downtown alt-weekly. As twins in fiction are wont to do, the two switch places one day, and Laurel, as Daphne, stumbles her way onto the paper’s copy desk. When the real Daphne returns to work, she excels as a copy editor; in the ensuing chapters and years, she goes on to become the copy chief and a renowned language columnist. Under the guise of “The People’s Pedant,” Daphne writes screeds about grammar and usage—much like The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, if she were more concerned with correcting speakers’ conversational tics. “I am a professional scold, and I like it,” Daphne realizes, after she’s gained notoriety.
As Daphne’s prescriptivism becomes more pronounced, it seeps into her relationship with her sister, who has discovered the wonders of Fowler’s Modern English. “He saw language as if it were living and breathing and muddling through like everyone else,” Laurel remarks, of Fowler. The book leads her to seek out more historical examples of language in its natural habitat, including letters collected by the Department of War. “The misspellings strike her as painfully eloquent, not mistakes at all, but cries of the heart, documentation of upheaval in a family, in a social order,” Schine writes. Laurel turns the letters into poetry, and breathless critics liken her creations to the revelatory samplings of a hip-hop artist. But, as Laurel awakens to the raw beauty of idiomatic writing, Daphne clings harder to the regulations that she sees her sister as flouting. The rift that’s been developing since the girls moved out on their own deepens into a full-on split.
I’ve been copy-editing professionally for six years now, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t guilty of some of Daphne’s judgment when I’m off the clock. But, as I watched Laurel exhort the vitality and depth of imperfect grammar, I kept thinking about how she was the one who had awakened the People’s Pedant in the first place. While Schine’s twin grammarians advance distinct philosophies, the rest of us must reconcile the two, and consider each writer’s words on their own merit. “Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors,” Daphne says early on, before occupational hazards wreak havoc on what drew her to the job in the first place. But sometimes those misconceptions stem from the tools at the author’s disposal. Mediating between the Laurels and the Daphnes can be agonizing, but, at its finest, copy-editing ought to be an exercise in empathy—to serve the source text, the writer, and, above all, the reader, who should never sense that such deliberations occurred.
