To Cringe Further
By ice rivers
- 215 reads
All of we writers leave behind literary symptoms of our blind spots. One of my recurring problems is with the word "remember" which I continually misspell as "rember" even going so far as to pretend that "rember" is a better word than "remember' because "rember ends with an "ember" whereas "remember" ends with a "member" although admittely an "ember" is contained within the "member" of remember.
Speaking of embers within members, I need to once again reference the shoddy edition of Lolita that I've been enjoying lately. I can only imagine Nabakov's reaction if he ever came across the edition that I'm alluding to.
Let me splain.
While Humbert is lingering above the half awake Lolita as she sleeps in their suspicious double bed at the Enchanted Hunter hotel, he justifies to himself his attraction to the 12 year old.
"I am not, and never was, and never could have been, a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets, not crime's prowling ground."
MMMMKKKKAAAAYYY
If you say so Humbert.
Those exact words, however, are not delivered in my edition. The end of the second sentence in my edition reads...."through which I crept were the patrimonies of poet-snot crime's prowling ground."
That's right
Poet-snot with snot italicized for emphasis.
Poet snot.
Imagine how Nabakav would have felt upon discovering poet snot in his text?
A lovely, insane, romantic, paranoid sentence ruined at conclusion.
Nabakov was pissed off enuff when somebody misspelled his last name which according to his biographers they often did unitentionally as I did intentionally in the question above.
So next time that you cringe at an error in your published piece, an error that you can't take back, something that got by you and your editor and your proofreader or in my case just me, an error that has acheived a life of its own someday to be discovered and revealed by a careful reader think back to this post
and rember.
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