Steve Kleinedler, a lexicographer, is supervising editor for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). Since 1997, he has worked on dozens of additional titles at HMH, including the recent 100 Words Almost Everyone Mispronounces.
Q: What is your preferred environment for editing?
A: My desk in my office. This desk is piled with papers, books, coffee . . . well, let me start over. On the left side of my desk there are twenty-seven books lined against the wall, with two others lying on top of them. Sandwiched in between those books is a CD of a band that a former editor played in, the membership directory for the Dictionary Society of North America, a "Grammar Girl" CD, and a printed out list of entries in the American Heritage Dictionary of run-ons that have hyphens. There's a canister of red pens and a variety of highlighters. There are seven open books, stacked on top of each other. A coffee cup, two lids, a ruler, my pink bunny mug that I got as a gift in 1984, spoons, more pens, paper, rubber bands, paper clips, and a stack of index cards with comments, suggestions, and corrigenda. And that's just about three square feet of space. I work well in clutter. I know exactly where everything is. If I'm editing on paper, I have a table that has a slanted surface so I don't throw my back out. About seven years ago, my neck froze up. I never want to go through that again.
Q: What punctuation mark are you fondest of?
A: The semicolon is what shot through my mind first. Actually, I like adding semicolons when proofreading. When you add the semicolon to the margin, you embellish it with the upside-down caret above the dot and the caret below the comma, and the combined effect looks really cool. The punctuation mark I most like to write is the delete symbol. When I doodle, it's often a cascade of these.
Q: What punctuation, spelling, grammar, style, or usage error annoys you the most?
A: I'm pretty laid back in that I don't go around correcting people. That said, hypercorrections set my teeth on edge, especially the use of "I" instead of "me" after prepositions and as direct and indirect objects. Sometimes, I yell at the television. I yelled at American's Most Smartest Model a lot. Mary Alice Stephenson did this all the time and I kept waiting for Ben Stein to yell "with you and ME!" -- but he never did. (Tim Gunn, on the other hand, is my hero.)
Q: If you weren't in your current line of work, what would you be doing instead?
A: I transferred into Northwestern as a junior, and I had to make a snap decision about a major, and I was torn between linguistics and geography. I'd always had a fascination with language and maps. I would like to think that had I chosen geography, I would be a cartographer. I find it interesting that both cartographers and lexicographers have been equally affected by the phased disintegration of the former Yugoslavia over the past 18 years. If not cartography, I would probably be pursuing a career in directing for the stage -- currently in the evenings I direct sketch comedy at ImprovBoston.
Q: What drove you to become an editor?
A: So many random things. After I graduated from Northwestern, one of my professors began providing me with lexicographic freelance work. For my nine-to-five job, however, I was a word processor for a mortgage banker in Chicago. The word processors transcribed letters that officers had dictated into a Dictaphone. The company president hated long-windedness and insisted that the letters be edited thoroughly. At first, he edited everything that I transcribed to show me how to do it. After a couple months, I was expected to edit everything I transcribed (including his letters). This is where I learned how to express ideas concisely and slash overblown verbiage. I don't think I realized at first how crucial editing skills would be in lexicography, but you need to know how to edit to be a lexicographer -- in addition to creating content, you have to know how to edit.
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