How's that again?

Was reading along blithely on a technical subject and came across "shrink-wrapped software vendors."

Wow! You can get anything off the shelf these days. Some vendors may need a shrink, but this would be better as "vendors of shrink-wrapped software" or even "shrink-wrapped-software vendors."

While I'm being picky, can we get rid of the phrase "on the planet" (as in "every shrink-wrapped software vendor on the planet." We got by for a long time with "in the world" or "on earth."

Gripe, grumble, complain. But I'm an editor, right? It's in the job description.

Bad news all around

A friend concerned about print newspapers and what appears to be their impending demise sends along the URL for a Columbia Journalism Review article that deals with the firing of copyeditors and the attempt to load their job on others in the newsroom.

The writer notes that accuracy is a problem for all media---it's just a particularly glaring one for print papers as they begin, intentionally or not, to shut down. The article can be found at http://www.cjr.org/regret_the_error/mission_quality_control.php

The problem is endemic. I edit technical articles these days and got an item back from a proofreader today. Camouflaging it slightly, there was a line that originally read: "This is an introduction to the native Whoozits content providers." The author had marked the proof, crossing out Whoozits and adding a note that "Whoozits is redundant." So the proofreader changed the sentence to "This is an introduction to the native redundant content providers."

Sigh.