Wednesday WOrd

fedric

If anybody knows what the above word means, then I’d love to hear from them.

It’s one of a number of bizarre words which I have come across in a book that I am currently reading,  by one of my favourite authors, Gerald Seymour.

The Collaborator is the first of his books that I have read since he moved from Transworld to Hodder and Stoughton. While the story line is as good as any he has written, it appears that the manuscript wasn’t proofread before printing. Commas abound where they should not, and are not where they should be.  There are sentences that I’ve had to read several times to try and understand their sense, before concluding that there isn’t any, and mysterious words, as above, that I have never heard of.  I’ve given up counting the number of times “if” has been misprinted as either “is” or “it”.

The paperback version is printed on nice bright white paper, and sports a fancy cover, but it’s absolutely swarming with punctuation errors and typos. It reads as if it had been dictated over a fuzzy telephone connection to somebody with limited knowledge of the English language and poor keyboard skills,  who had then typed it up as best they could and printed it without any checking for errors. If the author was anybody other than Mr Seymour, I’d have given up on it by now. It’s the worst example of sloppy editing that I’ve ever seen.

I wonder whether Mr Seymour read the finished product, and if so, what his reaction was.  I can’t imagine that he isn’t able to spell or punctuate, nor that he makes up nonsensical words, so who is it who has done so with his manuscript, and shouldn’t somebody competent have checked the proofs before final printing?

Man Reading

I am borrowing this from a post on Mya’s blog as an experiment to see what term brings the most traffic to my blog. Currently “female urination” is the leader of the field. Can “man reading” beat it? (I’m not going to mention testicles for the moment).

Curiosity led me to follow Mya’s link to the blog of Brennig Jones from where, quite unbeknown to him, I stole his “Man Reading” painting.

Now, I am a philistine, a cultural strawweight, and if not proud of the fact, I do at least recognise it. I prefer cinema to theatre, pop to classical, Gerald Seymour to Shakespeare, and pretty pictures to abstracts. But I do love this painting of the reading man. The mad hairstyle makes me want to reach for the shears. The very emptiness of the shelves speaks volumes. The shadow on the wall looks like a ballet dancer with one thin leg and one thick. And behold the toilet chain hanging from the ceiling, which is not, of course, a toilet chain at all, but an ingenious way of lowering and raising the swaggy lace curtain. Fabulous!