Ass-ass-I-nation of English

The Editor would meticulously mark each and every editing error and send it to the desk

"Boss wants to meet all of you," the peon informed us as he entered the newsroom of a prominent English daily, and left quickly.

In the early 90s, when there were no computers and the editing was done manually, the Editor would meticulously mark each and every editing or spelling mistake with the black sketch-pen and send it to the desk, with a note to the Chief Sub-Editor.

"If you are working for an English newspaper and don’t know the spelling of ‘harassment’ and ‘embarrassment’, then you should start looking for some other job," the furious Editor gave a piece of his mind to the sub-editors.

“Always remember, there is single 'r' and double 's' in harassment and double 'r' and double 's' in embarrassment," he added after calming down a bit. Before we could leave, he pointed towards the third colleague, “And you, next time consult the dictionary before writing ‘lensman’. There is no 'e' after 's'."

"We are constantly under the ‘lens’, no matter how careful we are. I was quite ‘embarrassed’,” said one of the colleagues after coming out of the Editor’s room. “And I feel ‘harassed’ after being constantly admonished,” the other colleague added, in a lighter vein.

After some time, the Editor walked into the newsroom and told a colleague. “From tomorrow, you come in the morning shift at 11 am. Remember two things: Since the agency news in the morning carries one-day-old news, change ‘today’ as ‘yesterday’. And don’t use ‘Sri’. Write Mr Vajpayee, instead of Sri Vajpayee. Or, Mr Rao, instead of Sri PV Narasimha Rao.”

The colleague, however, was quite lax, despite three decades of experience. He continued to make blunders. He changed ‘India Today’ to ‘India Yesterday’, because, remember, the Editor had asked him to change ‘today’ to ‘yesterday’. In yet another instance, he changed ‘Sri Lanka’ to ‘Mr Lanka’.

"You foolish guys have no sense... Neither common sense nor editing... And you people do nothing other than dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s,” the Bengali Editor, in his mid-40s, went on lambasting the sub-editor.

But not all bosses were so aggressive. The News Editor was also a Bengali, but he was a gentleman. An intellectual, he had a good command of English and was a benevolent team leader for those working on the desk. “When in doubt, cut it out,” he would often say to those who would often look for the dictionary to find out the correct usage of a phrase.

So, one day when someone misspelt ‘assassination’, he said in Bengali how to rectify it: “Gadha upar gadha, tad pore aami. Aamar upar nation”, which translated to “Ass on ass. Then I. And then nation... Ass-ass-i-nation.”

Nobody, thereafter, misspelt ‘assassination’.