Quotes by Copy Editors

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.