Quotes by Copy Editors

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.

Mary Norris

Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?

Mary Norris

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

Mary Norris

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Mary Norris

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

Mary Norris

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.

Mary Norris

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

Mary Norris