Referenda or Referendums? You decide...

Spiffing – another aggressive simpleton sticking their ignorant oar in.  A deep breath and a focussed but alienated mind tries to make the best of it.  In a world ruled by such overbearing non-entities that is about all one can do.  Or is it?

Feedback is an awkward business at the best of times.  Plenty of people, even professionals of a variety of kinds, interpret this as giving someone a list of mistakes in something they did.  One could argue that objectively, those are the thing(s) that need changing.  Why would we not just be happy with that?  Well, first, giving someone a list of their mistakes, even if they are one of the few freaks who actually want that, is at best a muted perspective.  In anything but the shortest effort, what has been done well, or at best what should be left alone, is not known to the subject.

Sadly, to those the feedback is being given frequently do not help the situation.  I have heard plenty of supposedly intelligent people mis-read balanced and insightful feedback, deliberately or otherwise.  Just as frequently they are someone who lays claim to knowing about something and has an accompanying obnoxious self-confidence that is fragile in a way that attracts the cruel (enter the commentator, stage left).   They are the majority of those who think that because something in what they did was good, that it should be expanded or somehow focussed upon beyond what it was.  Not only is that unlikely to make the good thing better—a moment’s thought would tell us it will make it manifestly worse—but it does nothing for the things that do need to be improved upon.  Thus, this giving of feedback does little to improve the situation.  Perhaps what needs to happen is that the Observer needs to relay feedback that is no more objective than the Observed can handle.  And if the sub-editor has changed those capital ‘O’s to lower-case ones, can they change them back please.  And no, do not delete that sentence from the copy, either.

And that is what I am getting at.  In case you are not aware of the process—why should you be—journalists, commentators, columnists, writers and critics churn out (sorry, ‘lovingly construct’) prose for your delectation.  This text, called ‘copy’, is sent to a publication and it is then read by section editors and sub-editors.  The former is there to decide whether or not the piece will see the light of day, the latter is there to correct typographical errors, and if they are a copy-editor as well, make it fit into the layout the (section) editor has specified.  Nice and easy? 

Well, it can be.  And at other times it cannot.  Giles Coren, a Food critic in The Times, once ranted about the sub-editing of his work when a letter ‘a’ was removed from the final sentence of a review he wrote.  Reading that last sentence, it is not hard to see his point (http://order-order.com/2008/07/23/sub-standard).  Trouble is, such subtleties are rather eclipsed by another Evil.  And it is an evil with a capital ‘E’. 

I suppose at this point I should rant about the misuse of English.  The sheer assininity of people too stupid or lazy or charmless to pick up a dictionary or even use MS spell-check.  Sadly, the software is mis-named: if it followed the rules of grammar, or even just meaning, it would be called ‘spelling-check’, because that is what it is, something that checks spellings.  Not something that checks spells.  There are endless rants one could have about people who say ‘myself’ and ‘yourself’ when they mean ‘me’ and ‘you’, and writing ‘which’ when what they mean is ‘that’.  The sharpest rants are reserved for the clearest evidence of illiteracy of all: writing ‘your’ when they mean ‘you’re’.  All such rants would be ‘right’.  At least in as far as we speak English now they would be – and that of course is the defence that many leap upon to justify their mistakes: “English is a developing language, you can’t stop it evolving”.  No, love, we cannot, however we can understand that ‘might of’ sounds lazy, childish and ignorant, where ‘might have’ is actually clear, is understood, and is what you mean. 

But I am not going to rant.  People make mistakes, and if you give them feedback and insodoing are more objective than they are, they will fail to understand you.  And if the ‘mistake’ is a deliberate one to get a subtle point across, and it gets missed out, who knows what might happen.  I will stop here, simply because if the copy-editor who is trying to fit this into the layout cannot do so, you will not read this sentence.