Why I love copy editors
When I first left university I worked briefly for an investment bank. The phrase 'fish out of water' doesn't cover just how unsuited I was to this job, to that whole world. But I did learn some useful skills. One thing that the bank took very seriously, oddly, was the written word. Documents and letters were always checked again and again. One day I was responsible for a letter to a client called Angus. The letter was, as always, checked by a number of senior people before it went out. But despite all that no-one noticed that the letter was addressed to 'Dear Anus.' The spell check didn't pick that up because 'anus' is a word. Of course, Freud did have a hand in this. The client was a horrible man and we all secretly wished to insult him. But, for me, the incident has stayed in my head mainly because it demonstrated how a number of well educated people can look at a document carefully, even a short document, and fail to notice a significant...