Restaurant Reviews Are Serious Business
This guy makes the restaurant reviewer in Ratatouille look like Santa Claus. Wait, did I just make a comparison between a Pixar movie and real life? Damn, I gotta get out of the house without the kids more.
Chaps,
I am mightily pissed off. I have addressed this to Owen, Amanda and Ben because I don’t know who i am supposed to be pissed off with (i’m assuming owen, but i filed to amanda and ben so it’s only fair), and also to Tony, who wasn’t here – if he had been I’m guessing it wouldn’t have happened.
I don’t really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn’t going to happen anymore, so I’m really hoping it wasn’t you that fucked up my review on saturday.
It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
I wrote: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”
It appeared as: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh.”
There is no length issue. This is someone thinking “I’ll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best”.
Well, you fucking don’t.
This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons.
1) ‘Nosh’, as I’m sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German ‘naschen’. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, ‘nosh’, means simply ‘food’. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the ‘a’. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, ‘nosh’ means “a session of eating” – in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of ’scoff’. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn’t mean? I don’t know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it’s easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as “sexually-charged”. I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word ‘gaily’ as a gentle nudge. And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. “looking for nosh” does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?
3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you’ve been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think “hey ho, it’s tomorrow’s fish and chips” – well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that’s how it is.
It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i’ve got a review to write this morning and i really don’t feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i’m going to have another weekend ruined for me.
I’ve been writing for The Times for 15 years and i have never asked this before – i have never asked it of anyone i have written for – but I must insist, from now on, that i am sent a proof of every review i do, in pdf format, so i can check it for fuck-ups. and i must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way i can carry on in the job.
And, just out of interest, I’d like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.
Right,
Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles
Submitted By: Joyce L via The Guardian
@crazyemails
Someone please get this man a padded room.
In his defense, “go for nosh” doesn’t make any sense, so someone is an idiot for editing out the article “a.” But he didn’t need to write a whole diatribe to point that out.
Maybe that’s true. But insisting that it’s some kind of artistic flourish is a bit much. He insists that it has some kind of vague comical sexual innuendo, yet insists he’s the high-brow critic?
Even at its highest form, sexual innuendos are base in nature. I enjoy them, but I don’t pretend that even the intellectual ones some how make me sophisticated. At best they only show our primal nature. At worst, they show that all our prim and proper displays are only for show.
Ah, and how silly of me to forget to mention the obvious fact. His so called “gentle nudge” for his jokes are anything but. Gaily looking for a nosh? Even a hobo would be going “WTF?,” at that. Honestly, I can’t believe this dude even still has a job with that kind of drivel.
Although his letter was far too strongly worded for my liking, I can definitely appreciate his position. By removing the article, they did, indeed, change the meaning of his work, thereby removing the subtle wordplay he intended.
Again though, his letter is far to strongly worded, and his reaction far too extreme for me to say he was in the right.
Agreed…reminds me of when we read The Merchant of Venice in my high school English class, but had to read a modern English “translation”, which was appalling. Not only did it completely lose the beauty of Shakespeare’s word choice, but it also RUINED the puns. In particular, I remember there being a joke in the original about “marring a young clerk’s pen” which is clearly a reference to his penis, that in this “translation” was changed around so it literally sounded like he was talking about a pen. What the hell?
I mean, not that this guy is Shakespeare…but I’m sure it’s annoying as a writer to have your work screwed around with, and to have someone completely butcher a joke you put effort into.
well, maybe it was a typo ???
Hm. I for one am pleased that his insinuation that the only reason gay people go out at all is to look for cheap sex. It’s a rather insulting and offensive stereotype.
That it was removed, I mean. Maybe they did see the ‘joke’ and that’s why they changed it.
I agree with you, it would have been a lame low-blow.
The whole sentence is ridiculously verbose. It’s incorrect to use a comma before a conjunction, etc etc. This guy is one of those writers who thinks their work never needs editing – certainly not content editing.
Also, and this is prolly nit-picking on my part, but I dismissed him as a pompous jackass when he couldn’t be bothered to capitialize his possessive pronouns.
PS. I edited this post. Damn me for correcting mah spelling! *grin*
Well, if we’re editing, “prolly” isn’t a word.
I sure would like to see the response! That was quite a tangent, and 99% of it was unneeded. A simple, “Hey, that last line doesn’t make any snese now.” would have been suffice.
I would like to see the response as well.
Me three…
Go Giles! Tell it like it is. Your ire is entirely justified.
I had to carefully read through the two sentences 3 times before i could find what was wrong (I didn’t just skip ahead to find out from him). I don’t think most readers would have caught that and saw it as a subtle fellatio joke.
Agreed. Most people wouldn’t notice. I had to read it twice to see the error.
I completely sympathize with this guy. I probably would have been just as angry. I am also sure that I would have written what he did. I am not sure I would have *sent* it, but I get it. They did fuck up his last line – although the sexual imagery he was going for was crap, removal of the “a” ruined what he clearly spent a lot of time writing. He would have been better off not sending the letter and making a call to the editor or something. He just shot his credibility to hell.
It is a horribly written sentence either way. Who is wondering where to go for this noshing? The subject sipping wine? The boys and girls in the street? The way the sentence is written, it would appear to be the boys and girls in need of a nosh. Can we assume that, since this is a apparently a restaurant review, the subject has noshing items available to him therefore no need to wonder where to go for a nosh? His writing has other problems beyond the missing article.
Actually, that was the point of the paragraph anyway, according to Giles. If you’d actually read the whole thing through, instead of making assumptions and prematurely spouting off half-baked opinions, you would have seen that the sentence was *supposed* to be vague in that way. In other words, he was creating a double-meaning with that particular sentence. The reader might have seen it as either the author — he who is sipping the wine — is wondering where to go for a bite to eat, or as if the “boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other” were wondering where to get a blowjob.
It’s even possible that they noticed the joke and decided to take out the “a” so as to remove it, thinking it was innapropriate.
You maybe wouldn’t get it as a joke because we were only shown the last line of it. If the entire article had been shown I bet it would have been quite easy to spot. I understand where he was coming from, why would you ever want someone to screw around with your stuff, especially if they have no idea what they’re doing. However, diplomacy is always a virtue.
While his grammar wasn’t perfect in this stinging rebuke, his point is absolutely sound. Good on him.
Hell’s bells… õ_Ø
I agree with the email writer. This isn’t an email from a crazy person, it’s an email from someone who’s apparently an established writer/reviewer and having their piece f’d up by someone who thinks they know better.
In agreement here. Hienlen actually wrote from a writer chacter’s perspective that it is a good idea to leave errors for editors to correct. If they “get to pee in it they like the favor better” I imagine editors can be pricks at times. They COULD have consulted him BEFORE printing their changes. I would think that would be called mannerly.
I agree as well. And this was obviously not a first offense.
The rhythm created by the lack of an “a” is especially frustrating. What’s worse than a weak final sentence? Bleh.
So he had a real go at these sub-editors. Pity he’s not so good at picking up on his own lack of capitalisation “i” and “joe and hugo”.
Yeah, the editors normally catch that for him, and I am quite sure this arrogant fucktard has never once thanked them for the work that they do right. However, someone makes a single mistake and he acts like it’s the end of the motherfucking world. I’ve been an editor for 20+ years and asshats like this make me furious. If I make a mistake, I will own up to it, but if someone wants to go on a rant and lecture me about it, they can shove it up their ass.
If this writer turned in reviews that were banged out as quickly and carelessly as this little “what the fuck were you thinking” then editors would have every right to change everything. Some writers—particularly those on deadline—need a lot of help. This writer does not.
If you’ve spent twenty years receiving flawless writing from an author and making changes purely to suit your own tastes then I certainly hope you retire soon.
To be fair, this is a letter not meant for print. Therefore not writing ‘i’ in a capital ‘I’ or names with capital initials doesn’t strike me as bad form. So the guy writes for a newspaper… I bet he doesn’t write his shopping list in perfect prose, or notes for his milkman with spellchecked, grammatically correct words.
And as for the issue of the missing ‘a’, whether or not it was a mistake is kind of irrelevant. If you’re being paid to do a job, and then someone else decides what’s best for it, you’re going to wonder why you were hired in the first place. In my line of work, every frame of film is put there for a reason, by me. If someone comes along afterwards and picks one of them out, I’ll noticed it guaranteed and the fact that the rest of the population “probably wont” is besides the point. I will notice it and that’s enough. It isn’t the way I intended it to be and the same can be said for this guys article. Removing one word or ten or fifty is the same thing. The end result is an article that doesn’t appear the way it was intended.
From reading the other posts, this guy might actually be a bit of an idiot anyway, but it’s still a pain in the arse to have your work fiddled with!
I think you mean “{…} shove it up his/her ass.”
Nah, I meant what I wrote. I abhor the his/her convention and, more importantly, I am writing in the comments section of a blog — I feel no need to double or triple check my grammar, word choice or sentence structure here. It’s not like I’m writing a restaurant review for chirsts sake.
I here {sic} ya!
Ugh, this wasn’t a ’simple mistake’, removing the word “a” entirely changed the meaning of the sentence as written by the author. You may be an editor but I’ve been a writer for 20+ years and I’ve had asshat editors fuck shit up that I’ve written with their ‘edits’ without having a CLUE what they were doing to the piece. And when they do so it comes back on me, not them, because it’s MY name on the story. Giles had every right to call them on it, quite frankly.
I second Chuck’s comment that it was hard to spot the difference between the two lines, but I don’t think that a writer’s concern about the subtleties of his work constitutes “crazy”.
It doesn’t in an of itself, but all it would have taken is a “hey, please don’t do that, I had a specific structure I was going for.” It’s like if someone accidentally cuts you off an traffic and you follow them for 3 miles screaming and yelling rather than honking your horn and going on your way.
I dunno, this sounds to me like the culmination of many, many messages that already tried a nice, “Please don’t do that.” Now he’s so fed up with being ignored and having things changed anyway, that he wrote this. Not crazy, just frustrated.
Heck, EmmBee. Whose side are you on anyway?
Giles Coren isn’t Crazy. He is just a total dick.
His last sentence doesn’t even make sense, with or without the revision. Good writing doesn’t make the reader search through the sentence trying to pick out which prepositional phrases go where.
“I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”
God that is just a horrible sentence.
-’over a glass of rosé’ looks like it’s modifying ’spring’ -’smiling gaily to each other’ looks like it’s modifying ‘the street outside’
-the last phrase….ew. Let me show you: “I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring [...] and wondering where to go for a nosh.” Come on. Parallelism is one of the basics I teach my SAT students. And if he meant it to be parallel with ’smiling gaily [...]‘, as I suspect, then there should be no fucking comma. Punctuation 101.
I’m mad at the editors for letting an arrogant imbecile like this publish his work at all, not for removing a random article that ruins a “joke” no one would have gotten anyway.
Just so you know, I would revise that terrible, terrible sentence as:
“I can’t think of a nicer place to sit during the springtime while sipping a glass of rosé and watching the boys and girls smile gaily at each other in the street outside as they wonder where to go for a nosh.”
or…something. God, it’s still a terrible sentence. Painful to read. But at least it’s grammatically correct.
I’ll stop now.
The comma splice is something, for which I have no tolerance.
Amen, Tiffani. That sentence, with or without the ‘a’, was one of the most painful things I’ve read in a while. Your attempt to edit it was noble, but I think it’s beyond repair.
Here–a better editing of the sentence, in my opinion (changes in bold):
“I can’t think of a nicer place to sit this spring than over a glass of rosé, watching the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.”
Now, the comma before “and” makes sense, as the big about ….watching the boys and girls….. is a separate clause of the sentence, and the “going for a nosh” pertains to the author. Plus, the way the sentence read, it was screaming for the addition of “than”.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Eh, he’s a writer. He’s supposed to have great grammar and spelling and now he has an article, with his name on it, that doesn’t read correctly. I’d be pissed too. If he ever wants to switch jobs, he can’t submit this as a sample because it looks sloppy.
Yeah, he went overboard and on tangents, but it’s a pretty big – and wholly unnecessary – mistake to make that change on the part of the editor.
I completely agree with this so-called “crazy” writer. You do *not* fuck with someone’s writing and publish it in his/her name. Ever! If you, as an editor, spot mechanical problems with the author’s work, you should mark up the draft and send it back to him/her for revision. When the piece goes to print, it’s indelibly attached to the author’s name. It must therefore be a perfectly faithful copy of what the author actually took the time to write, not a bastardized version tweaked by some arrogant “editor”.
Giles Coren is not a writer. He is a reviewer. Big difference.
He writes texts in exchange for money. That constitutes him as a writer. Sorry.
Understanding posts intended to be funny — FAIL.
I understood the post. I did not find it funny.
That’s what she said.
Read English at Oxford…writes several different columns for newspapers and magazines, only one of which involves food…ghostwritten at least one biography…published novelist…
Yeah, this guy is clearly nothing but a fry chef taking a stab at writing down his opinions of food. Not a professional writer in the slightest.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article3653140.ece
Yeah, he’s the next Cormac McCarthy.
(thanks Baggy for the link)
A writer has his work butchered by a sub-editor and somehow this makes him crazy?
And it was a butchering. Good writers care about their words as much as painters care about their paint. You may not see much difference if someone changes all the red in a Jackson Pollock to black; that’s your problem. Any curator who fucked with a piece of art like that would deserve far more than a nasty email from the artist.
Many sub-editors are used to working with journalists working to a deadline. Journalists tend to care little for the music of language—they just need to get the message across quickly and clearly. Their spelling, grammar, and language often needs a lot of editing. Restaurant reviewers are generally not primarily food connoisseurs—they are writers whose job is to craft essays that happen to involve restaurants. Particularly restaurant reviewers for widely-circulated magazines. Particularly this specific reviewer. An editor who doesn’t know the difference between the two types of writers doesn’t know their job, and a magazine that consistently treats wordsmiths like journalists should expect to drive them all away.
PROTIP: Reviews for fish ‘n’ chips eateries on West End are in an entirely different league from works by the likes of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, e.e. cummings, et al.
And because of that it is alright for works published under his name to appear illiterate? It may not bother you whether you appear illiterate or not, but people who make a living through their writings do care, regardless of whether they write bestseller novels or restaurant reviews.
Meh…
meh? Seriously? Would you be perfectly happy to have your name on something that was changed by someone else to be incorrect and subsequently released to the public, even though you had done it properly originally?
I don’t think this guy is one bit crazy. As someone who has written professionally–and who now teaches others how to do so–I have had more than my fair share of pissant rookie editors who have mangled my original work so badly that I have literally demanded to have my name removed, because it’s no longer the piece I wrote.
This guy has been with the magazine for 15 years. You don’t stick around that long at any publication by being a half-ass. You stay because people read your work and like it. I picture him, with his 15 years, and some editor who has been there for maybe two or three and got the job by tickling someone’s gonads.
Editing can be maddening. I’ve been tasked with it myself. But a sloppy editor can take the heart and soul out of a great piece with just the smallest of edits.
This writer is not crazy. He’s just protecting the integrity of his work. If that’s crazy, then sign me up for the crazy list.
Yes, a writer should protect the integrity of their work, but I believe there are right ways to do this and wrong ways to do this. Giles is clearly in the camp of doing it the wrong way. I’m not arguing that he was incorrect — it was a fuck-up — but the way he presents it? Pure egotistical fucktard rant. He needs to get over himself and figure out a decent way to interact in a civilized way.
And the fact that his entire weekend was ruined by the omission of “a”? He woke up at three and fumed about it? Seriously? It is a fucking restaurant review! Yeah, life and death stuff, I’m sure. Also, it looks like he’s ranted like this before and gotten in trouble for it, so I think that is he’s got some serious, recurring anger issues. Perhaps some anger management classes would do Giles, god’s fucking gift to restaurant reviewers, some good.
Tell me about it! Whew! :O
Ugh, your attitude towards writers is clearly evident in this post. Your dismissiveness because it’s “just” a restaurant review is entirely unwarranted. Regardless of subject matter (and let me tell you, a bad review can KILL a restaurant so they are, in fact, important) it’s a written piece and the meaning of it was changed by an idiot that clearly didn’t have a CLUE what they were doing.
You sound just like an editor or two I’ve run across who think they know everything when really they’re little more than a windbag with a monstrous ego.
Thank you for the phrase “tickling someone’s gonads”. It’s going in my file of phrases for later use, since it made me chuckle.
Actually this writer *is* crazy, J.D. He is intentionally rude and abusive to people because he believes such abuse will increase his notoriety. For example, he wrote:
“Rudeness has been good to me over the years. And while I, like most people on the threshold of middle age, deplore our society’s ongoing descent into vulgarity, and believe that politeness is, and must remain, the grease that keeps the wheels of the nation turning, I am here to tell you that being very, very rude to the right people, at the right time, can be extraordinarily satisfying, not to mention spiritually elevating, professionally effective and lucrative beyond imagining.”
A real-life troll. Compensating for his needle dick, I’m sure.
Something tells me UGH’s removed a few indefinite articles in his day.
I’ve done far worse than that, johnnyboy.
*snicker*
This guy needs to pull that huge stick out of his “G.A.Y.” ass, and get a nosh, or someting. Jeez dude, calm the fuck down…
My favorite sentence – “I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me.” Spot on, dude, spot on! LOL
Wanting to preserve the subtle nuances in your work: cool.
Ripping some editor a new asshole because they changed a single word most readers won’t even NOTICE: batshit, rude, and egotistical.
Besides, you do have the option of not writing for the magazine. Editors are free to rewrite your whole piece if they see fit. It would be stupid to do that, but my point is that some writers are unwilling to work *with* the editor to create copy they are both happy with. Instead, they go off on a rant like this over the word “a” and make themselves look like a 3 year old having a tantrum. A simple “hey that ‘a’ was actually important as I was going for a joke with it. Please talk to me before making changes next time” would have been more effective at achieving his actual goal. But it wouldn’t have been as melodramatic and we can’t have that!
Hear, hear!
If you’d like to see more of Giles, just put ’supersizers eat’ into you tube. That’s right, he’s on TV in the UK. Enjoy.
Arrogant asshole, yes. Crazy? I don’t think so. He has a valid point, just should have been less of a dickhead in pointing it out.
This guy is not only rude and vulgar, but he is also a sick freak. “…watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh.” ” And “looking for a nosh” has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob” So this sick freak is watching “boys and girls” imagining them to all be homosexual and it makes him think about going to get a blowjob? WTF? Maybe by “boys and girls” he really means “men and women” but that’s not what he wrote. Since he has pointed out he specifically writes every word for a reason I think it’s safe to assume that he really did mean “boys and girls”. So gay children get him all excited for a blowjob. What a great guy who deserves our respect. *rolleyes* .
Wow – that was quite the assumption laden post JD. You’ve managed to turn a pompous writer into a seething gay pedophile with no evidence but a nattily written restaurant review. Holy supposition, Batman!
I get every point the guy is making, I understand completely, but his reaction is overblown. First off, if he’s a professional, he shouldn’t be cursing in a work-related letter/e-mail. Second, if he’s an author, he should be able to express his ire without the use of expletives.
Also, could this not have been a typo? Papers / magazines have typos all the time, I don’t see why he jumps to the conclusion that it was intentional, especially since I have never, ever heard some say ‘go for nosh’ — I can’t imagine any editor would actually remove the ‘a’ intentionally.
This isn’t crazy. This is a writer demanding the respect that writers are so often denied without a second thought. Is it too much for him to ask that changes to his work be checked with him before they’re printed as if he made them? I don’t think so.
Some writers are so often denied respect because they act like arrogant children and think they’ve the greatest thing to ever sit in front of a keyboard.
For example… referring to a restaurant review as prose. It’s not epic poetry. It’s a column that most people won’t bother to read and absolutely nobody will be reading for it’s metric brilliance. Reviews are about the subject not the writer. People read them to find out if the food is any good, not to be bored to death by some halfwit’s attempt to be a literary genius. I mean come on, the most crucial portion of a paragraph is the blowjob joke? the fairly stereotypical and potentially offensive blowjob joke at that?
I’m with James here.
Your opinion would’ve had some merit if you hadn’t called epic poetry prose.
You lie — I don’t think you would respect that opinion no matter what or how it was written.
Wrong. I would’ve disagreed with it, but I would’ve respected it. The two things aren’t the same.
To quote the asshat that is Rep. Wilson from South Carolina — YOU LIE.
Prove that.
Anyway. I see that something’s crawled up your dick and died there, and in turn it makes you irrational and incapable to carry on an intelligent, civil discussion. I have better things to do than argue with a dick-scratching troll, so bye bye.
A piece of advice from me: find something more productive to do with your ample free time than flaming people on a satire blog. Cause, you know, you’re quite pathetic at the moment. *yawn*
Don’t fuck with Gia, UGH! Lest s/he scratch you and infect YOU with incurable desipience!!! O_O
May I just say, I vastly prefer the lurking satire of UGH to the random self-righteousness of GIA. o_o
Oh man, the Times totally fucked up that gay -sex joke at the end of his review of Yiddish food. And he ended the article with an unstressed syllable? I’m calling to cancel my subscription; this paper is garbage!
I can’t imagine this was anything other than a simple TYPOGRAPHICAL ERROR. Jesus Christ, dude, I know it ruined your whole bit, there, but you need to calm the fuck down and quit crying over spilled milk.
Also, I had to read both sentences twice to even notice the difference. I bet maybe 1% of the readers even noticed, and 1% of those who noticed didn’t think, “Oh, they left out the article, must be a typo.”
Honestly, I kinda see where’s he’s coming from. He’s a dick about it, no question, but sometime it is that big of a deal to an author. However, that in no way justifies his rant.
I agree that the editor was pretty dumb. I’d be pissed too! but did anyone else think the sentence sucked to begin with? Especially after finding out it was a dirty metaphor??
Yeah that joke was insanely bad. I don’t think anyone would have gotten that.
Well, maybe the sort of folks who do scansion of restaurant reviews would have gotten it. You can’t fill a restaurant with them though.
I thought the sentence sucked too. It was a little redundant… Unless of course there actually is a street inside the restaurant and it was vital to specify that he meant the “street outside”.
Also, now that I think about it for a few minutes… the fact that his dirty joke amounted to saying “come out and watch the homos and hookers troll for BJs!” might be why it got changed. Better to piss off one writer than a whole slew of readers.
The guy was an asshole, but apparently this wasn’t the first time he’d been edited insensitively. And he’s right–sometimes being rude pays off. I bet his editors will consult with him next time, so mission accomplished.
He does lose points for the poorly constructed email, but his argument is sound. Too many editors aren’t writers themselves. I’d wager that those of you who think Giles is out of his mind aren’t writers, either.
If someone treated me like that, I’d be less inclined to help them, not more.
Actually, I would be way more inclined to do a half-assed job for this douchebag. Feel free to throw a tantrum like a 3-year old, but you sure as fuck better understand that your actions will have consequences.
And you are correct — many, many editors are not writers; however, many, many writers are not editors — there is a reason that editors exist.
Thank you, UGH! You win Over 9000 Internets! (no sarcasm here)
Maybe. On the other hand this email sounds like the last of a long line of more polite requests. When you’re repeatedly asking someone nicely about something and they repeatedly refuse to listen to you they deserve to get their asses kicked, figuratively speaking.
We’re reading this letter out of context, as the one who sent it (I assume, the slighted editor) did not send their previous exchanges. That is certainly not fair and it is also very manipulative thing to do. I dislike being manipulated.
Giles, this that you?
“We’re reading this letter out of context, as the one who sent it (I assume, the slighted editor) did not send their previous exchanges.” Perhaps they did not have access to previous exchanges. Perhaps this was the best example of a douchebag rant. Perhaps you are simply being a whining little bitch.
“That is certainly not fair and it is also very manipulative thing to do.” Whoever told you that life is (or should be) fair was a complete fucktard. It ain’t fair and it will never be fair. Deal with it.
” I dislike being manipulated.” Yes, this was posted just to manipulate YOU. Into being a douchebag just like Giles.
Gia brought up legitimate points. Context is very important for determining just how “crazy” someone is. For example, taken out of context, your reply makes you sound like a self-righteous twat.
*eyeroll* You’re being deliberately asshat today just for the sake of an asshat. I am talking about myself specifically because I am not arrogant enough to talk about what YOU like or dislike or anyone else who reads this. On the other hand, you are being manipulated too, but unlike myself, you’re falling for it. Sad.
*eyeroll* You’re being deliberately asshat today just for the sake of an asshat. I am talking about myself specifically because I am not arrogant enough to talk about what YOU like or dislike or anyone else who reads this. On the other hand, you are being manipulated too, but unlike myself, you’re falling for it. Sad.
So, Gia, you want context? How do you suppose that is going to be achieved on a website like this? You see, I believe that most everyone here responds to the posted material, but not you. No, you want context. So what more do you want? Perhaps other emails? Anything else? Phone records? Personal interviews? Seriously, are you just whining or is there something specific you want to see?
And about this phantom manipulation, WTF? Do you thing that the person who submitted this e-mail has some ulterior motives? How do you think you are being manipulated? Do you know something we don’t? Are you some Giles whore who cannot imagine Giles being a douchebag? Are the voices in your head telling you this? Just wondering…..
BTW, love *eyeroll*. *Shakes head up and down* *Laughs out loud* *Cries at being called pathetic and sad* *Smiles at being able to get under Gia’s skin*
And just to beat you to the punchline — I know, my opinion would’ve had some merit if I had written Do you think…” instead of “Do you thing…” However, your opinion does not count (see my post below).
Ugh, you are unreal. Your comments are condescending, arrogant and rude and your penchant for personal attacks on others indicate that you are, perhaps, a bigger asshat than most. You really think a lot of yourself don’t you?
Correct? Yes.
Crazy? Maybe, because what with the typos I think maybe Giles was DWE (drunk while emailing). I read that was a thing.
I totally agree with the guy. And think his crazy e-mail was totally justified (but crazy nonetheless.) Don’t editors know better than to upset the writers? Or that their job is to make a piece better, not worse?
by the way, if my editor hadn’t fucked up my comment, you would have seen the “gay,” “sexually charged,” joke that I intended.
I don’t think that Giles was out of line in questioning the editing of his work at all. It’s his work, let it be his. What is weird and ridiculous and borderline crazy/frightening, however, is his use of “nosh” in the first place. One, he uses it like it’s standard English, which it’s not; and Two, to that end, he’s making references/cracks to something being G.A.Y. and children playing “gaily” while he Third, looks on and drinks Rose and makes allusions to “looking for a nosh.”
Creeper.
I’d let him go on sub-par work pre-rant-style email.
I don’t usually like people tinkering with what I’ve written, because I must (reluctantly) admit that he has a point: If you’re going for a very specific, perhaps subtly nuanced meaning, someone “cleaning it up” can ruin the entire thing.
However, this guy is completely over-the-top guanophrenic in love with his own words, which are simply… not that good. And I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the REASONS people are still editing his work 15 years later despite his histrionic protests is because of things like this:
“And you’ve fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don’t you read the copy?”
Jesus looks shit with a bear, indeed… he’d look much more personable with a giraffe or perhaps a couple of wolves.
If you want to have a hissy fit in 17 different directions about people “changing your meaning” then you need to be EXTREMELY CAREFUL that you never, ever, EVER make a mistake. Not one. Ever.
Giles Coren has always seemed a bit up himself to be honest, loved his dad though. Giles looks like an evil woodland creature btw (not unattractive though).
And one more thing:
“It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i’ve got a review to write this morning and i really don’t feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i’m going to have another weekend ruined for me.”
I think he’s being a drama queen (in all senses of the phrase) and I think he’s over-reacting to a hilarious extent over something that probably 95% of “his readers” would (a) never have noticed, (b) not have understood, or (c) found at least slightly offensive. However, that is his prerogative as a writer.
As a writer. NOT as an employee, and NOT as a freelancer. If his words are that precious and delicate that they cannot withstand being edited, he needs to go independent and negotiate a contract which stipulates that none of his copy can be edited without prior written consent. And if he can secure enough of those contracts to make a living, then it’s safe to assume that he IS, in fact, the caliber of writer who never needs to be edited.
Just glad he’s a Brit. If he were an American, we’d be reading about the tragic workplace shooting which claimed the lives of Owen, Amanda, and Ben, and seriously injured Hugo and Joe.
And I’m glad you’re glad he’s a Brit…
P.S.—Not all Americans have guns and/or go postal in the event of irreconcilable typographical differences. Just so you know.
The rest of what you said was spot on, mate.
I think it’s hysterical that he wrote alllll those paragraphs because of a single word. What a stupid way to waste time.
But who was phone?
THEN WHO WAS NOSH?
The blue shoe that blipped the thing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/giles_coren/article3653140.ece
In all its glory.
What a stroker.
OMG, I take back everything I said, mostly because this guy’s writing sucks. It’s awful. They’ve been paying him to write like that for 15 years? The editors are probably just trying to piss him off by taking out random words in the hope that he’ll quit and they won’t have to read this crap anymore. Wow, I mean, I’ve read worse, but not by someone who was paid for their writing.
As a writer myself, I definitely agree with this guy’s point. It’s obvious this isn’t the first time that someone has changed something that didn’t need to be changed, and it seems the rhythm of his writing is very important to him, so I feel he’s justified in his crazy rant, crazy rant though it is.
I’ll concede the writer is overreacting about the loss of his joke. However, many of the commenters here are failing, I think, to grasp the issue that obviously, and in my view quite reasonably, tipped him over the edge: his review ended on an unstressed syllable! O the horror! Did the English language spend a millenium evolving an iambic prose meter so that some guy with a j-school degree could perpetrate a trochaic substitution in an end-stopped line? If you let this kind of thing go by, what lies in wait? Headlines trailing off into pyrrhic feet?
Does anyone else think the original sentence is unnecessarily long and full of awkward clauses? If someone had turned that in to me to grade, I would have circled each clause in red.
Also, dude has worked for the magazine for 15 years. I have to assume he’s at least 40. Sitting at a cafe window, watching the girls and boys and wondering who’s giving who a blowjob is not necessarily a past-time I’d wanna publish at that age, IMHO.
“Does anyone else think the original sentence is unnecessarily long and full of awkward clauses?”
Sorry, I meant to cancel reply, not submit. I fail.
Anyway, what I was going to say is that this is one of the reasons that editors even exist in the first place, but then I thought that I was just being redundant, and then I hit submit instead of cancel, and then….. ah, fuck it. Nevermind.
Oh noes! The perils of posting a comment while other people are still posting comments! PRE-EMPTION!
I feel like a sad little echo of greater minds.
So…if this guy is just being rude to get the editors to do what he wants, and believes that it is “mission accomplished,” then how did his e-mail end up on this site for all to ridicule? I think “senor golden palate, above-average writer” just lost a few readers by being a complete asshole (and a dick with a poor sense of humor).
Someone made a parody youtube movie that goes along with the situation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNTaH_QxNVQ&feature=player_embedded
what a pretentious twat. i think giles needs to be on either end of “a nosh” before he ends up dropping a chainsaw several stories into a hooker. i have to side with the editor here. it’s a restaurant review for fuck’s sake. it’s not art. nor apparently is it comedy. that “ruined” sentence is definitely a joke but it was an unintentional one. and how do we know that his version of the story is correct? maybe he left out the missing article on accident himself? that type of behavior would be appropriate for this type of person. this type seems to like to blame their fuck ups on other people to cover for who really fucked up.
and not being british maybe i’m wrong, but giles sounds like a rich kid name to me. unless it’s not so in england.
Now that I think of it, HE could’ve been the one who left out the “a”. True. I also agree that that type of humor is not the kind I would want to be reading while swallowing food or drink…! Yechhh! :S
Given how many articles he left out in his email, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that he is, indeed, the one at fault. He may think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if he was someone who was as good as he thinks he is, his email would be more polished. Hell, my REPLY is more polished than his email, and I’ve never published anything but a few letters to the editor!
I think he’s right!
I’ve been a copyeditor (what the Brits call a sub-editor) for 15 years. I work not for a newspaper but for a science publisher. For the most part, the authors are clueless about grammar or anything else that isn’t a protein, so they’re happy for whatever help they get.
Occasionally I come across somebody who really fancies himself a writer or grammarian: “I’m sure you’ll agree with me that the placement of commas is matter not of grammar but of style and personal preference.” (I did not agree.)
It’s really a matter of finding the time to respond and explaining why you did what you did. The explanation, complete with photocopies from 42 grammar/style books, usually does the trick. But if I’ve done my job correctly, the author doesn’t even notice the changes and congratulates himself on an article well written. And that’s fine by me.
I have been trolling for a while, I have done some editing myself and when I have 200 some articles to look over by a deadline I type as fast as my little fingers take me. And this some times leads to things being left out. Like many of the readers I had to read that line four or five times to find the problem, once found it seemed to me that this was a common mistake not something done intentionally at all. Definitely not worth that rant when all he had to say was umm excuse me there was an word missing in a rather important part.
a* word. :p
I’d have felt like he was more justified if he had proved that he was a good writer by not having as many other typos in his letter as he did. He does good at sounding like a classically peevish Brit, not much more.
Actually, restaurant reviewing is, indeed, a very serious business. The guy does have a point, even if to us it seems like ridiculous nitpicking. These reviews are often read by a very snotty, snobbish crowd, but said crowd is also very well-educated. A missing indefinite article is indeed a glaring grammar mistake and the kind of readers who are interested in that sort of reviews would notice it. In turn, it’d make the reviewer look bad. Reputation is everything to these guys.
I do agree that the letter was way too long for such an issue, and that is probably because of the snobbish, nitpicky personality of the guy who wrote it, but it is not without merit.
It’s not a grammar mistake. To most of the population it makes more sense with the ‘a’ because most people consider ‘nosh’ to just means food as in “fancy some nosh” or “I could go for a bit of nosh.” I know the ‘a’ jumped out at me when I read it because it didn’t look right at all having never heard it used as to mean ‘a session of eating’ as Giles intended it. I would have read that sentence like “…wondering where to go for a food” which quite clearly makes no sense at all. I am quite sure that the Times would have received several letters and emails pointing out that error.
I think he’s just upset that they removed his blow job joke and his dig at the homosexual citizens of Soho. Frankly I don’t think that that sort of content belongs in a restaurant review anyway. Who wants to think about oral sex while eating dinner, particularly the expensive sort of meal that they tend to review in the Times.
I agree about the tackiness of the sexual innuendo, but that’s not really what the problem is. As for the “a”, I disagree. “Food” is an uncoutable noun and doesn’t need “a” in front of it. “Nosh”, on the other hand, IS a countable noun, therefore it needs an indefinite article. And where to put definite and indefinite articles is, last I checked, part of the English grammar.
Your opinion would’ve had some merit if you hadn’t misspelled “uncountable”.
No, wait. Your opinion has no merit, regardless of spelling. My bad.
Anyway, thanks for checking on the grammar! I was on the edge of my seat waiting for some douchebag to give us the old grammar lecture, and for some reason, I just knew you would come through for all of us!
Give it to ‘em, UGH!
Clearly being more of a douchebag than GIA. The “misspelling” was obviously a typo – he spelled it correctly the second time around. “Waiting on the edge of your seat” doesn’t seem to have done you any good here, and probably hasn’t in the past either.
Instead of making open statements, like your second line, why don’t you try backing up your opinions with a little reason?
Fuck off Dfrtbx. If you go back and read the other posts between Gia and me, you might get a clue. Nevermind, though — I’m sure that reading through older posts will far exceed your limited mental capacities.
wtf? do you live here or something? you’ve gotta be the biggest douchebag that replies to EVERY SINGLE post on this site. get a life and why don’t YOU fuck off for a change.
Hyperbole win for K! As a matter of fact, I do live here — right here, on the internets, on this very board. Yep, sure do. And I do fuck off every day, but thanks for the idea anyway.
If you don’t like my posts, perhaps I can offer a brilliant suggestion — don’t fucking read them. What, does someone have a gun to your fucking head forcing you to read my comments? Do they? I have no plans to stop posting comments, so I look forward to pissing you off in the very near future!
One more thing K — I haven’t yet replied to the “Being Helpful Hurts” post, so, not surprisingly, you fail at basic facts.
Have a great day!
Wow, Ugh, I am not even sure what to say. This is my first visit to this website and on pretty much every piece there’s some obnoxious comment from you slamming someone else. Newsflash, sweetie, you aren’t King Shit you know, and, quite frankly your condescending attitude is tiresome. No need to tell other posters to fuck off or shut up – they’re just as entitled to post their opinions as you are – or to demonstrate your so-called superiority to anyone who disagrees with you.
As for this comment thread, guess what? It IS about a grammatical mistake made by a sub-editor that completely changed the meaning of a sentence and a comment on the correct grammatical sentence structure is entirely relevant.
To me, as soon as I read “wondering to go for a nosh”, my first thought was that the subs had taken out the “a” PRECISELY because it sounded like the writer had been contemplating where he should go for a spot of fellatio, as opposed to a spot of dinner. It quickly became clear that that was the writer’s intended meaning, and that he was mightily upset that such incredible wit was apparently lost on the plebians editing his work for publication.
Doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that the phrase “a nosh” means “blowjob” to the majority of his fellow brits, and that his final sentence is not the cleverly-constructed, subtle, nuanced piece of artistry he believes it to be, but would just make him look like, well… a total knob.
And that’s what sub-editors are there to look out for, frankly. Giles Coren… oh dear. He’s a well-enough known writer in the UK, and with this hysterical little outburst is going to expose himself as a complete tit to even the most “peevish” of Brits.
To me any point is lost in the field of obscenities he’s used to prove the point that he’s upset his inappropriate joke was removed from a restaurant review.
I’ve been reading GC in The Times for a few years now, and while I don’t like him as a person (if I met him I think I’d have to stop myself giving him a whack round the ear) I do admire his work. And yes, I am a secret Supersizers fan. Yes, this is an over-the-top response, but hey, Coren is an over-the-top guy- just check out any of his work- and it certainly gets the point across.
As for the typos, I imagine that the entire piece was written in one go, and while he was still fuming. Spell check before send might have been an idea, but it goes to show how angry he was. Haven’t we all at some stage managed to send an e-mail without first proofreading?
Crazy, probably, but I’d still side with him- provided we never actually have to meet!
I’m a writer AND editor, so I see two sides of this. Actually, three.
As an editor, I’ve always been annoyed with fellow editors who change things for the sake of changing them. We fix obvious mistakes, typos, etc. We call the reporter if one of those changes necessitates a bit of rewriting.
As a writer, I’m also annoyed by overly aggressive editing. You get a lot of people who think what they learned in J-school amounts to crap, and they need to show it off every 5 minutes. Blech.
But as a writer, editor and reader, I think this guy is indeed crazy. “Unstressed syllable” was one of his concerns? First of all, who cares? Second of all, he’s wrong. How else do you read that sentence?
And if I were in a position of hiring and firing, this guy would be gone. This response would be over the top even if the editors had really messed things up. But he’s apoplectic because the editors messed up his gay joke? Buh-bye.
I see The Times disagreed — he had a review published this week.
I think it’s clear that his reaction was out of line, but he makes it sound like this is a recurring problem. If that’s true, I understand his frustration, and while I would not advocate sending an email like this, I can see why someone (especially a writer who is passionate about his work) could feel driven to do so. Even if it is about a blowjob joke.
Were I editor-in-chief, I would be disinclined to continue working with this fellow.
I think the recurring problem is that fact that he has the emotional maturity of a child who has just had his block tower knocked over by his big brother.
I’m guessing that the majority of readers of this site are American, and so it’s worth pointing out that Giles Coren is quite a famous critic and pompous tosser in the UK.
He’s famously a complete wanker. You only have to see how he tries to deal with an issue at work above, you’d think he was a prima ballerina or something.
OJ
PS. I’m dreadfully sorry, but I believe I may have ended a sentence or two on an unstressed syllable. How ignorant of me.
Wow, it’s a bit worrying if this really is Giles – a) because he’s obviously an anal nutcase, and b) it was submitted by someone through ‘The Guardian’.
If it’s not him he’s got a good case for a slander accusation…
Also, does anyone else think that had the original copy been printed, the ‘joke’ in reference to the proximity of Soho would have been pretty offensive…?
Either way, I shall be reading his reveiws with a more careful eye from now on!
Re-reading the comments above, I realise my Soho point was already made.
I aree with Giles that the metre is now thrown by the removal of the ‘a’, but – perhaps I am an uneducated moron – it certainly makes more sense as a sentence without it. I always thought as ‘nosh’ as a noun, not a verb…
Sounds like someone never took copy-editing in J-School.
What a toolbag. He should learn how take some gorram criticism and editing. And shame on his superiors for taking this bullshite.
Okay when he said boys and girls I thought he meant children. And then when he explained that his last sentence was meant as a sex joke made me think of him as a pedophile.
To be specific, a pedped—a pedantic pedophile.
A pedped? HAHA I just learn something new.
More letters and a brilliant response by sub-editors found here:
http://community.livejournal.com/copy_editors/54621.html
“This guy makes the restaurant reviewer in Ratatouille look like Santa Claus. Wait, did I just make a comparison between a Pixar movie and real life?”
I hate to break it to you, but Santa Claus is not real.
Hint: was “the restaurant reviewer in Ratatouille” compared to anyone else besides Santa Claus? Think carefully now; wouldn’t want to strain yourself!
He’s right, he’s just being a dick about it. What bothers me, at least from an American English perspective (I know very little about the differences between American and British English), is that super-ambiguous parallel structure.
Oh my god that’s Giles Coren from the supersizers! I loved him but this has ruined it. For those of you who haven’t seen go watch the supersizers – he does not sound like this!
What an absolute knob. If anything they should’ve taken out the part about watching boys and girls…
Everyone knows Santa is not real Right ?
Wait a sec, correct me if I’m wrong – but am I the only one who doesn’t see a difference between the before and after subedit?
Those two sentences are identical in every way.
Please can someone tell me why he’s so upset?
Um… I’m guessing you are more the writer type than the proofer type? Anyway…. it was easy to skip over. The end of the sentence:
His version “… go for a nosh.”
Edit version “….go for nosh.”
I missed it on first glance and thought this guy was being a moron for no reason.
Nope, just being a moron for a retarded reason.
this guy isn’t crazy, HE’S FUCKING AWESOME!!!
The food critic is completely right. The end of the sentence minus the “a” falls like lead. How that that *clunk* not drive you out of your mind? With the “a” the sentence is light and trips along. And “for a nosh” has a completely different meaning to “nosh”. This guy’s upset because 99.9% of people don’t know how to write, and yet his work, the words he crafts with care and thought, is at their mercy. I’d be pissed off too.
Okay, speaking as a Jewish person with a little bit of Yiddish knowledge – a very little bit – I have to say that the letter-writer is correct. “Go for nosh” is an English change to the Yiddish usage, which is properly “go for a nosh.” Never in all my life have I heard anyone say “go for nosh”- if it does, in fact, mean food, then this is a corruption of the original Yiddish meaning. The correct phrase is “go for a nosh” if one is actually using Yiddish.
The writer has every right to be furious. The copy editor who did this should personally apologize to the writer at minimum and, in reality, should be fired.
Yes, under normal circumstances, the editor should apologize, but after a rant like this, the only response Giles would get out of me would be to suck it. Probably far worse than that, actually…. and fired? Seriously? You’re an idiot.
Ugh, if your response to someone launching a completely valid criticism of your work is to tell them to “suck it” you’re a bigger idiot than Mr. Coren. Weren’t you the one who earlier posted that you take responsibility for your mistakes? Wouldn’t taking responsibility for your mistakes also include acknowledging them and apologizing, rather than telling someone to “suck it” because they didn’t speak politely to you when they pointed it out? Remind me never to hire you if that’s your attitude towards criticism when you screw up.
“This guy makes the restaurant reviewer in Ratatouille look like Santa Claus. Wait, did I just make a comparison between a Pixar movie and real life?”
Sorry to break it to you but Santa isn’t real either.
A or no a, am I the only one who thinks this “writer” is a terrible writer in the first place? I could get into specifics here, but I feel like it is pretty evident that he can’t write for shit anyway.
Have any of you ever heard of the phenomenon in which a person entering text via keyboard either
a) presses the wrong key at the wrong time, or
b) neglects to press a particular key when said key is requested?
It’s called a “typo,” and while I can’t give a detailed account of the word’s etymology, I think that’s what happened here. Giles, apparently, has a sense of personhood similar to that of a toddler; he truly believes that the world revolves around him. (Forgive the platitude, but I think that it’s applicable here.)
Most importantly, this fellow thinks he’s way more clever than he is. His wordplay is stupid and far too obscure to be noticed by the casual reader. Sorry, Giles–while you may believe that your work is worthy of the reverence and attention to detail with which one reads canonical texts, the rest of the world sees you as a pretentious, egomaniacal douchebag that happens to get free food at restaurants.
Entirely unlikely that this is a mere ‘typo’ by someone entering copy into a computer, given that most writers submit their pieces digitally. Did you think they hand-wrote their pieces and handed them in?
OK, insofar as they changed his entire meaning by removing the indefinite article, he’s correct. However, they did not make his statement nonsensical (well, it was somewhat rubbishing anyway), since nosh can be either used with an article or without, as he..er…”said” (shouted? raged?). Frankly, it was an awful sentence, that, if you are not in the elite snobhat class that would actually have picked up the pun to titter over, would have made him look bad whichever way it was written. It was dumb, unnecessary, ran on too long, and looked stupid. And if he signed a contract saying that subeditors could correct his work, then he has no right to act like an asshat.
He lost the moral high ground by acting in his Cowellian persona.
Team Writer!
This was fucking magic.
I don’t think there’s a journalist in the world that hasn’t wanted to write this letter at least once. Thank you, Giles Coren, for both a) doing it, and thereby letting me live vicariously through you, and b) showing me what a tool I would look like if I ever did this.
Giles Coren is a fucking master. I know he received a lot of shit for this, but it made me respect him all the more. He’s brilliant. He actually has some good reason behind his anger and he expresses it well. Yes, it sounds petty, fussing over the omission of a letter. But that letter really does make a huge difference. Kudos to Coren for trying to make a little resaurant review a little more layered and subtly jabbing and for calling out the editors who obviously didn’t understand his nuanced writing.
He is sort of right but I can’t help but find how the poorly written letter takes away his credibility. If that guy is such a genius writer he should be able to write correctly, even in his anger.
Anyone who has, perhaps once – or maybe even twice – read something published in a magazine or newspaper, will know that they are *filled to the brim* with horrifying errors of grammar, spelling, and fact. The only reason it isn’t worse is the thankless work that copy-editors put in. Any publisher will tell you that journalists are a dime-a-dozen, but good editors are irreplaceable. This ass needs a reality check. He writes restaurant reviews. Probably the reason they’ve kept him for 15 years is not so much that his writing elicits waves of adulatory correspondence – but that they don’t give a fuck who writes their restaurant reviews – because, hey, no one else does either.
I actually like it. I like this guy.
He’s right about the unstressed syllable, and the pun, and everything else he said. You can just imagine how his frustration’s been gradually building up over the years- if you’re an artist, you have a REASON for why your art (be it painting, writing, music) is the way it is, and people who don’t understand that art adjusting it in even minor ways makes it less than the final product with which the artist was happy enough to put out for others to view. It’s better for it to not go out at all than for it to go out tampered with and make you look (to others who understand the artform) like it’s YOU who didn’t know what you were doing, not the assholes who messed with it.
God bless you, Giles Coren, and may your writing go un-fucked-with from here on out.
Dude, I used to be a copy editor, and this guy is a prime example of the kinds of people who make the job a nightmare. Also, that sentence sucked. It was pretentious and too long.
I read it twice to catch the error, totally missed his supposed joke, and I wonder what kind of article would such offensive humor be allowed. On that note the guy is over reacting to such a degree he should be fired. In the flavor of his letter I call him a cunt-fag and a douche noozel. What an ass.
Sorry if this has already been posted but in case it hasn’t: The Guardian has a whole section devoted to Mr Coren’s various correspondence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/series/coren
funny. i read this thinking a woman was the author.