Today, March 2, early in the morning, I lit a natural beeswax candle. It was a soft gold in color, smelled of warm honey and had a shape resembling a Douglas fir pine cone…a little bit elongated, as opposed to a short and stocky Ponderosa pine cone. The candle was brand new, so I needed two matches to get the wick burning. After I extinguished it, I watched the liquid wax cascade down from the pool surrounding the wick, onto the scales beneath (scales are what the individual plates of a pine cone are called). A few drops of wax solidified in the space between the layers.
The candle was lit in memory of my father Richard, who passed away two years ago on this date. Setting down the details of a candle burning made me smile at a memory.
A lifelong lover of words, Richard considered it his full-time job to critique the tiniest nuances of grammar and syntax. Being a writer myself, I usually enjoyed joining in on those discussions. I also see editing lapses everywhere. Many seem to be the result of hurry-up “writing:” clickbait followed by outrage followed by more clickbait followed by more outrage, all within five minutes on Twitter. Little random splinters of ideas, full of errors that could be caught and corrected if someone actually took a few seconds to re-read.
I also seem to be hyper-aware of mistakes of the spoken kind. I try to stop myself, but I often follow in my father’s footsteps, correcting the mispronunciations and minor grammatical lapses that affect my ears like fingernails on a blackboard.
As he aged, my father got more and more fussy with words and how they are arranged. When he could still see well enough to read, he would angrily give up on any book that had an editing mistake in it. He especially hated finding mistakes in books by authors that, in his opinion, could have benefited from a tough editor.
This behavior filled me with dread while I was working on my own book. Not only did I wonder if he would even find it interesting, but I lived in fear of the moment when he would find The Mistake.
Those fears turned out to be groundless. The book came out in October 2019, and he was so delighted and proud. One of his friends started reading it to him when she visited, and I think she was almost finished with the third chapter when he went to the hospital.
Even in his final days, he was tuned in to the finer details of the English language. The week before he died, I was visiting him in his room at the rehab center. We were discussing nursing care in Colorado. I remember saying something about the nurse-patient ratio…less patients per nurse, better care. “Fewer!” he barked.
I paused, took a breath, then repeated “fewer.” The other people in the room snickered.
I will probably never again have to ask myself whether it’s “less” or “fewer.” But this morning, I felt that same sense of being brought up short, questioning whether I had made The Mistake. Every writer experiences that anxious feeling when scanning over their published document for the first time. Did The Mistake slip by without being noticed? If so, can it be found and fixed before anyone else notices?
This morning, I felt that familiar little catch of anxiety. The grammar in question was in the narrative of Richard’s memorial, which I’d written in spring 2020 and was re-reading on the 2nd anniversary of his death. One of the images in the series is a photo of a little piece of paper that had surfaced in his apartment the week after he died. It’s a gratitude list. The handwriting is typical of someone with Parkinson’s disease, tiny and chicken-scratchy. The items on the list are: sobriety, family, friends, faith in H.P. [Higher Power], music, readings, memories. My narrative reads “Richard recently wrote this gratitude list, which turned up in his apartment.” My trip down memory lane was sidetracked by a sudden doubt: should it be “which” or “that?” I quickly scrambled for the answer on an online grammar site. For non-grammar geeks, i.e. 95% of the world, “that” is used for an essential clause, and “which” is used for a non-essential clause. The sentence was correct as written.
This episode was evidence that memories live on. My father’s voice will be correcting me inside my head as long as I draw breath.
In the grand scheme of things, chasing down and fixing The Mistake is a long-standing, honored tradition. I know this from personal experience, and also because I found this poem in my mother’s saved files after her death. She was also a writer, and therefore, she too lived in fear of The Mistake. The date of this poem is unknown but based on the gender-specific language, it was probably written in the 1950s or 1960s.
Typographical Error
The typographical error is a slippery thing and sly.
You can hunt until you are dizzy but it somehow will get by.
Till the forms are off the press, it is strange how still it keeps;
It shrinks down in a corner, and it never stirs or peeps—
That typographical error, too small for human eyes,
Till the ink is on the paper, when it grows to mountain size.
The boss just stares with horror, then he grabs his hair and groans;
The copyreader drops his head upon his hands and moans.
The remainder of the issue may be clean as clean can be,
But the typographical error is the only thing you see.
– Ruth Mellenbach in the Willcox (Ariz.) Range News
