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I've spent the past 38 years
trying to be invisible.
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I'm a copyeditor.
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I work at The New Yorker,
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and copyediting at The New Yorker
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is like playing shortstop
for a major league baseball team;
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every little movement gets picked over
by the critics,
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god forbid you should commit an errot.
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Just to clarify, copyeditors don't choose
what goes into the magazine.
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We work at the level of the sentence,
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maybe the paragraph,
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the words, the punctuation.
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Our business is in the details.
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We put the diaeresis,
the double dot
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over the "i" in "naive".
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We impose house style.
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Every publication has a hosue style.
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The New Yorker's is particularly
distinctive.
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We sometimes get teased
for our style.
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Imagine, we still spell
"teen-ager" with a hyphen,
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as if that word had just been coined.
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But, you see that hyphen
in "teenage"?
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And that diaeresis over
"coöperate",
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and you know you're reading
The New Yorker.
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Copyediting at The New Yorker
is a mechainical process.
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There is a related role called
quarry proofreading,
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or page-okaying.
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Whereas copyediting is mechainical,
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quarry proofreading
is interpretive.
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We make suggestions to the author
through the editor
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to improve the emphasis
of a sentence
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or point out unintentional repititions
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and supply compelling alternatives.
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Our purpose is to make
the author look good.
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Note that we give our proofs
not directly to the author,
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but to the editor.
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This often creates a Good Cop,
Bad Cop dynamic,
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in which the copyeditor,
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I'll use that as an umbrella term,
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is in invariably the bad cop.
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If we do our job well, we're invisible,
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but as soon as we make a mistake,
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we copyeditors become
glaringly visible.
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Here is the most recent mistake
that was laid at my door.
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"Last Tuesday, Sarah Palin,
the pre-Trump embodiment
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of populist no-nothingism in
the Republican Party, endorsed Trump."
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"Where were The New Yorker's
fabled copyeditors?",
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a reader wrote.
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Didn't the writer mean
"know-nothingism"?
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Ouch.
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There's no excuse for this mistake.
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But I like it: no-nothingism.
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It might be American vernacular
for nihilism.
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(Laughter)
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Here, another read quotes
a passage from the magzine:
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"Ruby was seventy-six, but she retained
her authoritative bearing;
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only her unsteady gaint belied her age."
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He added, "Surely someone at
The New Yorker
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knows the meaning of "belied"
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and that it is the opposite
of how it is used in this sentence.
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Come on! Get it together."
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Belie: to give a false impression.
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It should have been "betrayed".
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E.B. White once wrote
of comms in The New Yorker,
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"They fall with the precision of knives
outlining a body."
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(Laughter)
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And it's true, we get a lot
of complaints about commas.
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Are there really two commas in
Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard?
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There may not be on the sign,
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but yes, that is New Yorker-style
for jr.
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One wag wrote, "Please, could you expel,
or, at lease, restrain,
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the comma-maniac, on your
editorial staff?"
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(Laughter)
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In his case, those commas
are well-placed,
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except that there should not
be one
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between "maniac" and "on".
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(Laughter)
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Also, if we must has commas
around "at least",
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we might change it up
by using dashes aroudn that phrase,
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or at least restraining.
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Perfect.
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(Applause)
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Then, there's this:
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"Love you, love your magzine,
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but can you please stop writing
massive numbers as text?"
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No.
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(Laughter)
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One last ? from a spelling-stickler:
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"Those long stringy things are vocal cords,
not chords."
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The outraged reader added,
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"I'm sure I'm not the first to write
regarding
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this egregious
proof-reading error.
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But I'm equally sure I won't
be the last."
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?
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I used to like getting mail.
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There is a pact between
writers adn editors.
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The editor never sells out
the writer,
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never goes public about
bad jokes that had to be cut,
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or stories that went on
too long.
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A great editor saves a writer
from her excessiveness.
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Copyeditors, too, have a code;
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we don't advertise our oversights.
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I feel disloyal divulging them here,
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so let's have look at what we do right.
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Somehow, I've gotten a reputation
for sterness,
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but I work with writers who know
how to have their way with me.
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I've known Ian Frazier,
or Sandy,
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since the early 80s
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and he's one of my favorites,
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even though he sometimes
writes a sentence
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that gives a copyeditor pause.
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Here is one from a story about
Staten Island
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after Hurrican Sandy:
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"A dock that had been broken in the middel
and lost its other half
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sloped down towards the water,
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its support popes and wires
leaning forward
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like when you open a box
of linguine and it slides out."
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This would never have gotten past
the grammarian in the dayes of yore.
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But what could I do?
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Technically, the "like"
should be an "as",
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but it sounds ridiculous,
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as if the author were to embrak
on an extended Homeric simile.
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"As when you open a box of linguine."
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I decided that the hurricane
conferred poetic justice on Sandy
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and let the sentence stand.
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(Laughter)
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Generally, if I think something is wrong,
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I quarry it three times.
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I told Sandy that not long ago
in a moment of indiscretion he said,
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"Only three?"
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So, he has learned to hold out.
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Recently, he wrote a story
for "Talk of the Town",
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that's a section for the magazine
with stories on short subjects
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ranging from Ricky Jay's exhibit
at the Metropolitan Museum,
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to the introduction of doggy bgs
in France.
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Sandy's story was about the return
to the Bronx
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of Supreme Court Justice
Sonia Sotomayor.
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There were three things
in it that I had to challenge.
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First, a grammar quarry.
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The justice ws wearing black
and Sandy wrote,
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"Her face and hands stood out
like in an old, mostly dark painting."
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Now, unlike with the hurricane,
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with this "like" the author didn't have
the excuse of having hurricn damage.
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"Like" in this sense is a preposition
and a preposition takes an object,
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which is a noun.
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This "like" had to be an "as".
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"As in an old, mostly dark painting."
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Second, the spelling issue.
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The author was quoting someone
who was assisting the justice,
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"It will be just a minute,
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we are getting the justice mic'ed."
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Mic'ed?
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The music industry spells it "mic"
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because that's how it's spelled
on the equipment.
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I've never seen it used as a verb
with this spelling
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and I was distrught
to think that "mic'ed"
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would get into the magazine
on my watch.
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(Laughter)
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New Yorker style for microphone
in its abbrevaited form is "mike".
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Finally, there was sticky grammar
and usage issue
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in which the pronoun has to have
the same grmmatical number
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as its antecedent.
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"everyone in the vacinity
held their breath."
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"Their" is plural and "everyone",
its antecedent, is singular.
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You would never say,
"everyone were there."
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"Everyone was there,
everyone is here."
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But people say things like,
"Everyone held their breath" all the time.
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To give it legitimacy,
copyeditors call it "the singular 'their'",
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as if calling it singular
makes it no longer plural.
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(Laughter)
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It is my job when I see it in print
to do my best to eliminate it.
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I couldn't make it, "everyone held
her breath"
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or "everyone held his breath",
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or "everyone held his or her breath".
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Whatever I suggested had
to blend in.
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I asked the editor if the author
would consider
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changing it to "all in the vacinity
held their breath"
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because "all is plural".
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Nope.
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I tried again.
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"All those present held their breath"?
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I thought this sounded
vaguely judicial.
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But the editor pointed out
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that we could not have "present"
and "presence"
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in the same sentence.
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When the final proof came back,
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the author had accepted "as" for "like"
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and "miked" for "mic'ed".
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But on "everyone held their breath",
he stood his ground.
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Two out of three isn't bad.
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In that same issue
on that piece on doggy bags in France,
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there was the gratuitous use
of the "F" world by a frenchman.