BUSYBODY EDITING, FUDDYDUDDY FEMINISM, AND A MODEST PROPOSAL JOHN L. DUSSEAU* A manuscript editor once had the temerity to rephrase one of Churchill's sentences because it ended with a preposition. In proof Sir Winston restored the original wording with this note: "This is the sort of change up with which I will not put." AU rules are meant sometime to be broken; otherwise the sun would still be revolving around the earth. The rule Churchill's editor tried to enforce was devised by Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century English bishop and gentleman grammarian, whose eccentric but influential Introduction to English Grammar urged its complaisant readers never to end sentences with prepositions. Presumably the worthy cleric would have us say, "Up to what are you?" Language is a capacious carriage that may not only change but also enlarge. Even today the tight rules of eighteenth-century pedants, with their absurd grammatical niceties and fanciful etymologies, tend to be preserved and rigorously enforced by the manuscript editors of rightthinking publishing houses. Of course, editors have always been persnickety fusspots. A cartoonist once grumbled to the New Yorker editor Harold Ross, "Why do you reject my drawings and print stuff by that fifth-rate artist Thurber?" "Third-rate," corrected Ross, no doubt to the immense gratification of Thurber. Nor is meddlesome tampering with words altogether new in publishing . Darwin, in writing and proofing Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle, found himself burdened by all the problems of authorship as he disclosed them in correspondence with his botanist friend John Henslow: I shall always feel respect for everyone who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble, which trying to write common English Adapted with permission of the publisher from the author's "Small World," Renovated Lighthouse, August, 1993. *Address: 915 Exeter Crest, Villanova, Pennsylvania 19085.© 1994 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1 -5982/94/3704-0878$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 37, 4 ¦ Summer 1994 495 could cost one . . . And alas there yet remains the worst part of all, correcting the press . . . During my absence Mr. Colburn [Darwin's publisher] has employed some goose to revise, and he has multiplied instead of diminishing my oversights; but for all that the smooth paper and clear type has a charming appearance, and I sat the other evening gazing in silent admiration at the first page of my volume. The work of redaction is often thoughtful and informed in its correction of orthography, punctuation, and grammar; but it can also be overzealous and rigid. This fastidiousness cannot be explained by the widely held notion that editors are failed writers, for, as T.S. Eliot says, "So are writers." Rather, it is based on the steadfast conviction that a writer rarely knows what he is doing or how to do it. In my own editorial life a skeptical colleague once said to a mutual friend, "What a life John leads. Every day decisions, decisions, decisions of far-reaching importance . And you know something? Every once in a while he's right." So too the author—every once in a while he's right. Language has always been subject not only to growth and decay but to vagaries of taste and to whimsicality. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all." Humpty is telling us that the great secret of good speech and good writing is command of language—something not readily taught or achieved. All editors, like Alice, sometimes miss a sly point. "Once," said the Mock Turtle, with a deep sigh, "I was a real Turtle. When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on, more calmly though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise ..." "Why did you call him Tortoise...