Sub-editors have the noblest profession

SOME breeds of human rank higher. For Kurt Vonnegut, that was the volunteer fireman, the model contributor, apotheosis of human development.

For me, the field is broader. It has always featured librarians good and high. For the meaning of “awe-inspiring”, check the thought, knowledge, and effort that a librarian puts into digging granite to find info, for any for random Joe who cares to ask.

That must change with cyberspace turning up answers in points of a second, but I can’t imagine librarians not being welcoming, dedicated, and lovely.

Hardware shops are where everything costs less. They’re unique to start with and then the chap will ransack the store to find you 12cm of right-sized wire, or a 2¼-inch left-hand wing-nut. And read the price tag affixed in 1984 and say “that’ll be 18c, please”.

Pharmacies? Last time every price had just gone up, and this time it just went up again.

But when we look at the B Pharms behind the counters, rather than the B Coms in the counting house, we see angel persons.

They know more about every drug we can’t pronounce than we’ll find deciphering the insert’s tiny Greek words.

They remember which foot was sprained, which finger stung. They talk you down to an affordable generic rather than up to an unneeded big-ticket. And you exit feeling befriended.

Now we come to sub-editors, and tricky terrain. Insofar as readers make a painless way from start to finish, and get the point, they probably owe sub-editors more than is ever admitted. But what they owe is as nought, next to what the writer-person with the name under the headline can owe.

Big names have been made at the desk of the sub, anonymous catcher in the rye, modest rescuer of glamour- ista Correspondents from their glitches, solecisms, braggadocio and unfinished sentences.

I’ve known this equation from both sides (always best). I’ve known the drivel that can issue from esteemed pens, relying on someone they’d scarcely acknowledge on the cocktail circuit to panel beat them into literacy.

I have also known waking in shivers of relief at the acres of my bacon that have been saved by a smart saintly sub – the name Elana rides high – ringing to raise the dangerous question “are you sure you mean to say…?”

The good side of subs puts them into strong contention for world’s noblest profession. Sad to say the other side delivers times you can’t wait to strangle them, ideally with rusty barbed wire.

One cause is the trade tradition that unless everything is done in an absurd rush, you are harming your adrenalin. A pointed perusing of almost any publication discloses that half the content might as well be in tomorrow’s edition, or last week’s or next month’s, but that wouldn’t be sporting.

You must be too late to check ambivalences or incomprehensibilities, forcing you to take a guess that may shrivel the reporter’s soul to a golf ball when she reads what she is being said to have said, in the printed version currently also adorning the city’s breakfast tables.

That’s not even touching on SatanSub, the one who swallowed that drivel about the greatest urge being to change the next guy’s copy.

As a rule, the sub/writer relationship continues to wrestle over Checking versus Changing, but not with much blood on the floor nowadays. The current incarnation of the Stoep has seldom needed barbed wire, never rusty. But recently a sub was simply smart, in a low-key way…

… that I ‘ve left no room to tell you about. A luta continua, on Friday. Cheers.