As Good as One's Word

I can't tell you how frustrating it is (for me) to be around people who try to convince me there's no longer any value in striving for perfection when it comes to the everyday use of the English language. And it seems that as time goes on, this mindset only continues to spread.

While I was in college, I dated a guy (an engineer) who claimed that language was becoming less and less important as the global population sped toward an increasingly technology-heavy era, filled with scientific breakthroughs, new inventions, etc. He claimed that the time of words was over, and that the here and now from here on out would be numbers and equations.

"But how, just how do you expect all these scientists and mathematicians to communicate with each other if no one knows how to write down all these theories and scientific findings?!" I lamented.

"They won't need to," he said. "Now we have the technology to talk across oceans with the internet and e-mail. There will always be a paper trail, you just have to back it up (save it to your hard drive)."

We broke up.

But he was not the first person to raise these points against me, and he certainly hasn't been the last. People ask me all the time, "Oh, what do you do?" "I'm a copy editor." "Really? What does that mean?" (I am not joking.)

Recently, someone actually took this conversation so far as to ask me, "Aren't you worried they're not going to need you any more?" They = the world.

The truth is: yes, I am. And articles such as The New York Times' "In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors" provide mixed emotions for me. On one hand, it's a little depressing that copy editing has been taken for granted in recent times and that the situation is only going to get worse. On the other hand, it's nice to know that someone noticed what's going on and wrote about it.

Who knows, maybe copy editing is a dying art form and I'll eventually have to jump ship. Or, maybe it will become one of those professions that, one day, is realized by the world to contain only a few. Maybe we'll be called in during special reports on CNN, like those incredibly specialized experts that make you wonder, "Now how exactly does one become an authority on meals containing flour served in the British royal palace between the years 1770 and 1774?"

I'm sure there's still hope, even if sometimes it seems like there isn't.