I've had my share of unpleasant experiences with ignorant and overzealous editors. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic in his editing that he recast a good many of the direct quotations I had included from congressional debates. When I pointed this out, his senior editor was so chagrined that he gave me back most of my own sentences as well. Then there was the journal that reprinted an essay on radical historians that I had published in Commentary . Anyone reading the article who had not seen the original essay in Commentary could only have concluded that I was a subliterate idiot.
All editors have idiosyncratic preferences and antipathies.
I know, because he struck that word from the article I wrote for him on my experiences at Valparaiso University. I admire Mr. Epstein as both writer and editor, but I find it intriguing that he should have such an irrational prejudice against a perfectly good English word. My own career as editor began relatively late. In 1981, after I had been teaching in Canada for seventeen years, my undergraduate institution Valparaiso University invited me back to edit the Cresset , its monthly review of literature, the arts, and public affairs. I wasn't, to tell the truth, all that interested in editing, but I did want to return to the U.S. and alma mater, so I jumped at the chance.