A VIDEO of a song penned earlier this year – bemoaning the demise of the sub-editor/copy editor – has been posted on YouTube.
Written by Christopher Ave – political editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in the USA – the lyrics are (sing along):
I’m a human safety net
I double-check the facts and vet
assertions before they are set in type.
I can provide punctuation
appropriate for publication
make the capitalization right.
I was there to fix your grammar
when you thought it wouldn’t matter
cut all your extraneous blather down.
AP stylebook is my bible
helped me stop the suit for libel
but nothing ensures my survival now.
And I don’t know what I’ll do
after I am through
killing my last adjective …
