Parents: you might call us grinches for this, but when your kids win prizes at high school, we subeditors do not celebrate with you. Go on, call us grinches. We already have a reputation for being sour and dour and draconic; what do we care?
Probably, the typists at Otago schools who must hammer the annual prize lists into electronic existence and then send them to the newspaper do not celebrate, either. But I cannot speak for them.
I can only speak for the wretched subs who, every November and December, must face the unenviable task of editing screeds of names and prizes. Miriama Anonym, excellence fabric technology, geography, merit alternative English; Jingfei Bloggs, excellence chemistry, merit physics, life skills; Charidie Notaname, diligence forward thinking.
Life skills, alternative English and forward thinking are relatively new subjects to appear in schools. I hope life skills teaches how to boil water and make toast, maybe change a fuse. Some people come from homes where those things are not taught.
I am curious to know what alternative English teaches, and I hope the teaching of forward thinking will lead ultimately to the demise of market capitalism.
But no matter whether the children have excelled in traditionally fangled or newfangled subjects, subeditors do not applaud them. No. We grinch at them, and their accomplishments.
At this time of year, the "find and replace" function on a sub's computer is regarded as favourably as if it were bulging in Lycra and could fly. Sexy find and replace. Heroic find and replace. Find and replace rescues us from manually making the same changes hundreds of times.
Some schools, for example, have ambitions for all subject names to begin with capital letters. Jingfei Bloggs, excellence Chemistry, merit Physics, Life Skills.
The ODT, however, regards capital letters at the start of common nouns as unseemly, so the subeditors must find all the Chemistries and Life Skillses and cast down their initials. O, merciful find and replace!
This function can be dangerous, though. Many of these documents could rival a Saudi rich-list for length, so we try to condense them where possible. Find and replace is used to remove various words that go without saying.
One year, a subeditor used find and replace to remove all the "ins" from a prize list (excellence in chemistry, merit in life skills) but he forgot to put spaces before and after the word "in". The dutiful computer found and removed all instances of "in", without exception.
Nina became Na, Tina became Ta, Mina became Ma. Hine became He, Benjamin became Benjam, and Jingfei became Jgfei. The poor subeditor had to start over, once he realised his mistake.
Running the spellchecker through the prize lists is considered necessary to pick up any misspellings not already spotted by the subeditor, but it can be hazardous when so many names are present.
Spellchecker may recognise Benjamin, but it does not recognise Charidie or Jingfei. Accidentally accepting its suggestions for those names would produce, "Jingle Bloggs, excellence chemistry, merit physics, life skills; Charade Notaname, diligence forward thinking." Jingle Bloggs, Jingle Bloggs, Jingle all the way . . .
So many names, so many prizes. Perhaps the main reason they sour us is they make for tedious reading. A perk of our work is that the bulk of what we edit happens to inform and/or entertain us at the same time. Prize lists fall outside that bulk. They reduce our job from one of joyfully applying linguistic skills to one of grumpily running algorithms.
Still, we are assured names are news. You like to see the names of your children and their mates in print, and that is good. Just please spare a thought, this Christmas, for the grinches at the ODT.