A LAMENT IN THE HUMOR UNIVERSE

Dread Pirate Roberts Help Me, I’ve Agreed to Be a Mudditor on the Good Ship MuddyUm

Beyond here there be dragons and Hogan Torah

How did this even happen

I’m now an editor for MuddyUm. I have very little memory of how I fell down that particular rabbit hole. Or, more aptly, how I was impressed to work on the pirate ship, impressment being the taking on of crew members by compulsion.

I suspect it all started with being accepted onto the MuddyUm crew as a writer. Beyond here there be dragons. Nobody warned me. Still, I like being a MuddyUm outlaw. I blame James Knight.

Soon, Captain Susan Brearley and I were occasionally talking via Messenger. Carrier pigeons tended to get lost trying to find their way back to the pirate ship as pirate ships move through the wide, ocean blue.

It was exciting to talk to the Captain of the ship directly. I approached with deference, fear and trembling. I am a profligate in the use of parentheses. Sometimes I even use ellipses. Gasp.

I suspect there was method in the Captain’s madness though. After I broke both my ankles, she reached out to me to offer emotional support, having gone through something similar. What pirate does that?

Again, the details become fuzzy after that. Maybe it’s the hard seltzer pirates drink. I blame it partly on my silly pride. Who doesn’t want to be liked by their crew mates? It beats walking the plank. Plus, I’m a little arrogant about my editing skills. Of course, that means there will be major errors in my next few pieces, because arrogance goes before falling off the ship, or something like that.

Still, I’ve been editing since before the Pirate’s Code was a gleam in the Captain’s eye. Sadly, I’ve forgotten more than I ever knew.

Once upon a time, I memorized AP, APA, Writing Style Guide and MLA for journalism, graduate school, the arts, and good old standard English grammar for teaching senior high school students. That’s after learning the New English version of diagramming of sentences in college myself, which was the most bizarre approach to grammar you can imagine, and has since fallen by the wayside. Thank all English gods.

I’ve written, proofed and edited advertising copy, done journalistic writing for newspapers and actual magazines you held in both hands back when there were such things, taught high school senior English, and taught seniors in college advertising, layout and design, as well as journalism. I’ve been published in odd places, such as New Age Journal, one joke in Reader’s digest, and NewsBreak.

Let’s just say I know enough about writing and editing to break the rules. As Barbossa in “Pirates of the Caribbean” says of the Pirate’s code, “The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

I also know good grammar when I see it, and colloquial and current slang enough to accept it, and when lucky, understand it and even use it.

Mostly I know that no editor can edit themselves adequately, especially when it comes to proofreading. There’s a little fairy in our brains that fills in the blanks and mistakes as we read our own work. Maybe it’s actually a demon, as it delights in letting our mistakes and omissions slip by.

So I’m ecstatic for some capable editors to have my back while checking my work, as long as they aren’t holding a sword to it. Granted one of them will only have my back or read me if I stop using HUMOR as a kicker. Small price to pay for slowly driving him crazy.

As for the rest of you, and Captain Brearley in particular, to quote Dread Pirate Roberts, it shall be “as you wish.”