Julian Vigil, an instructor in English at Luna Community College, said the other day, “You NEED proofreaders at the Optic.”


     We HAVE proofreaders. Amy Beveridge, one of Vigil’s colleagues, is a regular part-time proofreader; Carol Aragon, a long-time journalism teacher at Robertson High School, fills in during vacations, and Dorothy Trujillo Maestas, who retired from community college teaching in San Diego, has her blue pencil at the ready. I am the other proofreader.
     Any newspaper on the planet is going to hear suggestions such as “Hire a proofreader.” But what the general public doesn’t know is that correctly spelled words have a way of becoming uncorrected, usually overnight. Nobody can explain why, although some of have conjectured that it’s something in the water that turns the properly spelled words into typos, or maybe even little gremlins who hang around composing rooms and do their dirty work while the staff is gone for the day.
     Now that newspapers have entered the electronic realm, the gremlins have become much more sophisticated, sometimes committing errors during the few minutes it takes for the composing/pressroom crew to shoot the page to a negative and then to a metal plate. And if these gremlins drink the wrong kind of water, we really suffer. Thus, we proofreaders need to be exonerated for many of the errors.
     One alert reader noticed a page one photo in Wednesday’s paper, concerning a fiesta scheduled for later this month in the Valley. The large banner, photographed by editor Jesse Gallegos, contained its own typo: entertianment; also there was a superfluous comma. Some readers expect us to correct even those kinds of errors.
     As a junior high school student during the days when the entire class had to participate in class spelling bees, I would occasionally win, provided we weren’t required to use the spelled word in a sentence, “to make sure you know what it means.”
     I got through the two cees and three esses in “success,” and when it came time to use the word in a sentence, I said something like, “The teacher asked us to spell the word ‘success.'” “Down you go, Arthur, and don’t think you’re funny,” came the stentorian words from the teacher, a nun whose rosary around her waist looked like heavy duty tire chains. What did I do wrong? I did, after all, use the word in a sentence.
     Since then, I’ve decided people who struggle with spelling need to suffer as well.
     Accordingly, in 32 years of teaching, I have never spelled a word for a student; rather, I advise them on how to fix the problematic part. For example, if a student asks, “How do you spell ‘accommodate,’ I will tell the student the word has two cees and two ems. For a word like “allotment,” often misspelled, I tell the students it contains two ells and two (separate) tees.
     What has not helped us spell as well as we’d hoped is the spell-checker, a standard part of most computer software. Most programs flag a questionable word, suggest other spellings and even have a feature for “learning” the word. A strange nickname, for example, can be “learned” so it doesn’t get flagged each time it’s used.
     When we began using computers for the Highlands newspaper, La Mecha, the rule was to run everything through the spell checker. An inattentive reporter ignored the spelling suggestions on a number of words, and thus they became “accepted.” So each time the writer misspelled one of these words, the computer let it pass. And that’s the source of a lot of flak we got from Highlands readers. It then became possible to construct a sentence such as the following, which the spell-checker will accept, but which is devoid of real meaning: Dew yew sea what eye mien?
     Because they are ever-alert to similar-sounding words, spell checkers are notorious for lulling people into complacency and often give rise to puns and malapropisms. We get expressions like “When you give blood, you do it in vein.” or “The study of ancient alphabets is in runes,” and “You could have knocked me over with a fender.” A good speller would have used “ruins” and “feather.”
     Often in their haste, people jot down what they think is correct. Thus we get the following published excuses for missing school: “Please excuse Nancy for missing school yesterday. She fell out of a tree and misplaced her hip.”
     “Please excuse Cindy, as she is suffering from very close veins.” “Nancy missed school as she was administrating.”
     “My son was bothered by very loose vowels.”
     Would Vanna White of “Wheel of Fortune” ever suffer from an obstructed vowel?
     Many of us are familiar with the classic reportorial faux pas in which the writer identified a man as “a defective on the police force,” and exacerbated the error the following day by acknowledging the error and writing, “It should have read that he is a detective on the police farce.” A young reporter, writing about a long-running musical in his town, identified the performance as “Lame is Rob” in the place of “Les Miserables.”
     The Optic’s claim to fame reportedly occurred in the 1950s, when a regular feature of the newspaper was birth notices. It is said the Optic had the following typo: Mr. and Mrs. _______ are parents of a sin born at St. Anthony’s Hospital. The next day, the story goes, the Optic ran a correction: Mr. and Mrs. ______ are parents of a ton born at St. Anthony’s Hospital.
     Gremlins infested the back rooms of the Optic 50 years ago, as they continue to do today. And that’s why we need all these poofreaders.

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