Sue Butler was the founding editor of Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. But instead of wallowing in her potentially limitless powers of pedantry, she spent almost 40 years walking a linguistically generous middle path | Amanda Hooton GoodWeekendMag
Life as a dictionary editor is an exercise in heroic self-restraint. Sue Butler was the founding editor of Australia’s. But instead of wallowing in her potentially limitless powers of pedantry, she spent almost 40 years walking a linguistically generous middle path., there should be no smiting people for being “bored of” rather than “bored with”. No righteous violence against those “in agreeance” instead of “in agreement”.
Former dictionary editor Sue Butler is a shining example of tolerance, even suggesting we do away with “its” and “it’s” in order to resolve the great “apostrophe muddle”.“Being the dictionary editor certainly gives you a very broad view,” she says. “And it’s quite humbling to realise that sometimes you’ve got it wrong. You’ve misheard the word; misspelt the word; haven’t quite understood the word – and you’ve sailed on, thinking the way you use the word is right.
Surely, this has never happened to Butler? “Well, there are always a couple of little spelling things,” she admits. “Recommend – for some reason I always do a double c and a single m. I always have to check that. It teaches humility.”So how can existing pedants redeem themselves? By carefully considering “when to care and when not to care”. The test is this: if there is no confusion created by the variation, and no loss of clarity in the text, then there are, alas, no grounds for outrage.
And as such, she has this to say about the evil exponents of stream-of-consciousness writing. “I HATE it!” she cries. “People who simply write as if they were talking to you, with absolutely no care for any kind of punctuation!” Such people, she writes, should be “tormented in the punctuation chamber of Hell, seared by full stops and flayed by commas, with colons and semicolons crashing down like thunderbolts and the voice of God booming, ‘New paragraph!’ ”
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