Against whatever

I have a weak spot for anything headlined “Against [whatever].” I cannot resist. A cranky, contrarian opinion against something the rest of us agree is just fine? Bring it. Please.

I was under the impression this genre began with Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, “the mother of all contemporary click-bait intellectual polemics,” as a 2014 New Yorker article described it. But the same New Yorker article claims the structure originated in classical times, as speeches for the prosecution. Recent examples I’ve enjoyed include “Against the Writing Center” in the Chronicle of Higher Education and “Against Copyediting” in Lithub.

I shared the Lithub essay at my job and the copy editors were appropriately outraged, especially since the author, Helen Betya Rubinstein, is one of them—a former copy editor herself. (Copy editor, two words; copyediting, one. This is the kind of thing I can never keep straight.)

Rubinstein is right about a few things: that copy editors occupy an odd status, for example. They’re at the bottom and the top of the hierarchy at the same time. Rubinstein was poorly paid, and yet her decisions carried the weight of settled law: “The writers and editors I was ostensibly servicing were surprisingly deferential to my pencil marks,” she writes. But after five years of focusing on hyphens and commas, she’s thoroughly burnt out, and wondering if copyediting is “the least meaningful work a person could possibly do.” (No. No, it isn’t.)

Workplace burnout, wondering if you’re wasting your precious hours on earth—that I can understand. But then come the grandiose claims: “It’s clear that copyediting as it’s typically practiced is a white supremacist project.” Classist, sure. But I doubt she spent most of her time at the unnamed publisher copyediting books from so-called “nonstandard” English into “standard” English. I suspect she was copyediting mainly white people with weak grammar. 

And even that sentence—was she copyediting mainly white people? Or was she mainly copyediting white people? Or would mostly be better? Or some other construction entirely? This is the kind of thing I like to ask a copy editor. Because languages have rules. All languages. African American Vernacular English has rules just like “standard” English: the coffee be cold does not mean the same thing as the coffee cold, to give an oft cited example. You can’t just improvise or guess.

After nearly 15 years of writing under the careful supervision of a copy editor/fact-checker, it makes me terribly nervous to write without one. And yet here I am.