An Unlikely Peon

by Kieran Healy on February 17, 2006

Observed in the wild, from a book I was reading this morning:

bq. Adam Smith … opens _The Wealth of Nations_ with an unlikely peon to a pin factory.

Sounds like the first few scenes in a Dickensian novel — the unlikely peon (because, as will be revealed later, he is really the heir to a large fortune) is sent by his bitter guardian to work cutting, drawing and polishing pins. Or, seeing as it’s Smith, doing only one of these things.

{ 18 comments }

1

Steve LaBonne 02.17.06 at 1:09 pm

Have you noticed more and more of this sort of thing in recently published books? Have you, like I, begun to wonder whether publishers- even some academic presses- have trimmed their costs by laying off all the copy editors?

2

eweininger 02.17.06 at 1:52 pm

But doing it very effectively, despite his scionness (scionity? scioninity?).

3

chris y 02.17.06 at 1:58 pm

They must have done. Have you read a general readership magazine like History Today or New Scientist lately? It’s sometimes a real effort to work out what they’re trying to say. Even if they have to use something like a Microsoft spell checker, there’s no excuse for using it incompetently.

4

Barry Freed 02.17.06 at 2:41 pm

Don’t be so coy Kieran, give us what we want most here, author and title are a must.

5

Mr. Bill 02.17.06 at 2:48 pm

I attribute this to automated spell checking. I can’t proof my own writing (simply cannot see the errors, especially transpositon errors) and SpellCheck lets errors that are real words by..
Pity there is no SenseCheck…

6

dr ngo 02.17.06 at 3:06 pm

But doing it very effectively, despite his scionness (scionity? scioninity?).

What are you, an anti-Scionist?

7

des von bladet 02.17.06 at 3:16 pm

Everybody singalong: The peon, Smith cleoms, works meonly on the peins.

8

eweininger 02.17.06 at 4:00 pm

What are you, an anti-Scionist?

I have always perscribed to the scioninistic perspective. The deviationistical tendencies that you compute to me are figmentations.

9

eweininger 02.17.06 at 4:03 pm

Have you, like I, begun to wonder whether publishers- even some academic presses- have trimmed their costs by laying off all the copy editors?

Not to let anybody off the hook or anything, but I envision a scenario in which the haggard copy editor, having just received his pink slip, lets this one slide intentionally…or even makes a quick little notation in the galley margins.

10

david 02.17.06 at 4:06 pm

He’s lazy little shirking peon too, wretched child.

11

bryan 02.17.06 at 4:49 pm

It’s a far, far better thing to be paed off than a peon.

So anyway, after you read this – did you keep reading?

12

C. Schuyler 02.17.06 at 5:29 pm

It’s WHY READ MARX TODAY? by Jonathan Wolff. I was struck by the inappropriate peon, too.

13

Jo Wolff 02.17.06 at 5:56 pm

OK, I admit it, it was me. And it is a very strange experience to see such a thing displayed so publicly. But I’m very gratified to see that I have such distinguished readers. (And I won’t comment on the general standard of the copy-editing this particular booked received.)

14

Barry Freed 02.17.06 at 5:58 pm

t’s WHY READ MARX TODAY? by Jonathan Wolff.

Thanks for the info.

I was struck by the inappropriate peon, too.

That’s the trouble with peons, they don’t know their place.

15

des von bladet 02.17.06 at 6:13 pm

(And I won’t comment on the general standard of the copy-editing this particular booked received.)

Is anybody involved “spending more time with their family”?

16

Shelby 02.17.06 at 6:22 pm

I used to be a copyeditor in the book and magazine industries. Work dried up in the mid-90s, so I gave up and went to law school. Insert wry comment about lawyers’ writing here.

17

Tim Worstall 02.18.06 at 6:06 am

The Telegraph recently laid off a lot of their subs leading to an almost instant increaase in (not quite as amusing, admittedly) errors. News-gents was one from last week. Since I, in an excessively anal fashion, have started noting them on my blog I’ve been getting emails from the same subs desk praising the section.
The triviality of so much blogging, eh?

18

Tad Brennan 02.18.06 at 12:38 pm

In defense of Jo Wolff, it should be said that this is a word that has been spelled variously in English, because
1) there are no fixed rules for transliterating from Greek (aesthetics? aisthetics? esthetics? that special ae ligature that I don’t know the code for? ecology/oecology/oikology?)
2) and the wretched Greeks themselves couldn’t decide how it was to be spelled.

And neither can you. Come on–you knew “peon” was incorrect, but how many of you can rattle off the correct English spelling without hesitation? Without looking down this post?

Okay: the OED gives
“paean”, but with the ligature for the “ae” at the start. It also recognized “pean”.

Before looking it up (e.g. when I first read Kieran’s post) I thought it was “paion”, because that’s the closest transliteration of the Attic spelling (paiôn). But Epic had it as paiêôn, and paian won out (possibly cause it was most familiar in Doricizing lyric passages? I dunno, and can’t figure it out from LSJ).

So the wretched Ancients didn’t know how to spell it, and the wretched English don’t know how to transliterate it. Not too surprising people get it wrong now and then.

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