Heck Of A Guy

The Proofreading Vexdex Hex

Proofreading has always held a prominent position in my personal vexation index, (AKA The DrHGuy Vexdex), but since I have begun producing daily posts for this blog plus posts every weekday for AlignMap, my business blog, its ascension in the rankings has accelerated sufficiently to warrant the formidable with a bullet status. The primary difficulty, however, lies less in the quantity of content to be corrected than in the velocity required to competently execute what is typically same-day proofing.

The Friday Fiasco

The proofing problem reached crisis proportions this past Friday with the publication of More Found Art. The post itself seemed to present no unique or particularly worrisome editing challenges; much of it was, in fact, a cut and paste affair with a few ostensible segues sprinkled haphazardly throughout. Nonetheless, I ferreted out an especially large number of typos and careless grammatical errors before punching the “Publish” button.

Yesterday (Saturday), I happened to notice another error in the same post when my glance serendipitously fell on a phrase which was obviously missing a word or two. Being the perpetual good, if petulant, student, I corrected the gaffe, even though I suspected most folks who were going to read that paragraph had already done so. During the repair process, I found and fixed another double handful of mistakes.¹ I’m not confident that even now the composition is completely cleansed; I am convinced that continuing to proof the piece is less likely to result in improvements in my writing than it is to produce permanent neurological damage in my body.

In any case, I made another batch of corrections, especially in the Santa Imposter Proposes section, and you are certainly welcome to re-read as much of the entire post as you can stand, just to assure yourselves that you have been and continue to be placing yourself at the mercies of a writer who has a grasp of at least the basic grammatical rules of English.

But, today’s post officially consists of the preceding extended apologia, a promise to do better in the future, and the rewrite of Section 5 of Friday’s post, pasted below for your convenience.

The remediated Santa Imposter Proposes still doesn’t rise to the level of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or even The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, but the dissonant jangling of once-garbled sentences has been eliminated along with flow-interrupting misspellings and, if I do say so myself (and I do), it’s worth a quick re-read.

The Corrections²

5. Santa Imposter Proposes, Newspaper Discloses: I include this newspaper story from 2001 because it combines in one tidy package my fascinations with mall Santa surrogates, the trend of odd wedding proposals, and the weirdness that is McHenry County. Because the newspaper account of this epic saga has, inexplicably, not been archived on the net, the link is to a copy of the story I made for myself (which explains the poor quality). I’ve posted this because - [dramatic pause] - this is a story that must be told.

And, this is, as you will note in the headline of the newspaper article, the story of “a Huntley man.” Now, the males comprising the population of Huntley, a neighboring burg, which is best known, at least around here, as the place that is sometimes confused with (also nearby) Harvard, Illinois, may be, for all I know, universally recognized as zany romantics – or perhaps this guy is the exception to a town full of somber ascetics. Clearly, however, the fact that he is from Huntley has some fundamental significance; if not, why would that information be in the headline? Would it still be a story worthy of publication in a journal of record if, for example, the protagonist hailed from Joplin, Missouri or San Antonio, Texas or New York or Barcelona?

In any case, the story is that this guy from Huntley posed as a mall Santa to ambush his girlfriend with a marriage proposal. That, of course, happens every day; it’s the details that make this a worthwhile read.

I’m most taken with the preparation required to pull off these hilarious high jinks:³

• Huntley Guy enlisted various co-conspirators
• He procured a Santa suit and disguised himself as a mall Santa
• He purchased and wore contacts to change his eye color
• He somehow got rid of the real mall Santa.⁴

And, my cynical hunch is that it was not a miracle on East Main Street⁵ that the press happened onto this story; I suspect, with no proof whatsoever other than my embittered perspective on and opinion of the hearts of men, that an item on Mattel’s Proposing Santa’s to-do list was “Alert the press.”

And that doesn’t include the time and effort I surmise may have been necessary for him to learn the spelling and pronunciation of not only his own name (Ciesielczyk) but also those of his now-fiancé’s friend (various written as Aram-bura and Arambura) and the manager of the Santa photography concession (Passalacqua). By comparison, the moniker of bride-to-be is the relatively straightforward Prymek; of course, she may well be losing her last name as the result of the upcoming nuptials.

I am also intrigued by the anatomical dexterity described in the paragraph, “Passalacqua asked Prymek to sit on Santa’s lap. Before she knew it, Santa was on bended knee.” If one assumes Ms Prymek was a good sport (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that St. Charles women – and certainly all women who accept proposals from those wacky guys from Huntley – are known for being good sports) and plopped herself onto Santa’s lap, wouldn’t the pseudo-Santa’s immediate transition to a kneeling position unceremoniously dump Ms Prymek to the floor?

And there is this dark aspect – how was it that Ms Prymek was, to use the news story’s ominous phrasing, “lured to the mall by Arambura and her three-month old daughter?”

Finally, why was there all this to-do accomplished at this point when the wedding is set for fall 2003? What kind of stunt is Mr. Ciesielczyk planning for that occasion that requires almost two years of preparation — the wedding march played by 600 naked bagpipers? — the ceremony itself being held on a platform suspended over an active volcano? The mind reels.

Footnotes

1. I have chosen to believe my readers are too kind to point out such flaws rather than believe they didn’t notice them or, horrors, that nobody read the thing. If you know the case to be otherwise, keep it to yourself.↩
2. With apologies to Jonathan Franzen↩
3. “High jinks” doesn’t quite fit since it is a plural noun and the Huntley episode is actually a single incident, but one apparently cannot have a “high jink” without hypothesizing an abrupt turn taken, say, atop Mount Everest, in hopes of evading a pursuer although a plain old everyday “jink” can occasionally be found↩
4. While I certainly have no evidence of foul play, anyone who has watched a few episodes of Colombo or 24 must suspect that the wedding proposal was only an elaborate ruse by person or persons unknown to cover the actual objective of the operation, the abduction of the real Santa. That the reporter cavalierly accepted the testimony of one of the co-conspirators that “[The real] St. Nick went home early because he did not feel well” can only mean that, obviously, the reporter was in on the caper. Did the allegedly ill Santa show up for work the next day? Is he now locked away in a cell in Guantanamo? Did he show up but look somehow different – as though he were replaced by an android? By the time we find out the real story, it may be too late.↩
5. The proposal, you see, took place at the Charlestowne Mall, the address of which is 3810 East Main. The allusion is thus to the 1947 Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, the title of which is extracted from the address of Macy’s in New York, where the Santa in that film was employed. In the UK, in fact, the movie is known as The Big Heart . Of course, the fact that I feel the need to include an explanatory footnote this lengthy and this convoluted indicates that this was, from the start, an inanely chosen, counterproductive allusion, but now that I have invested this much time and effort constructing the original figure of speech and composing this elucidative annotation, I’m not going to resort to using sound editorial practice as a cowardly rationalization to excise this disordered linguistic device and its metastases, a rhetorical complex that has, it seems, taken on a life of its own and may soon overwhelm not only this post, but this blog as well, placing the North American Blogosphere in jeopardy. Should those defenses fall, the internet itself would be at risk. My god. I’ve created a monster. Run! Run! Save yourselves. I’ll stay here and fight to the last semicolon and ellipsis to try to hold off this catastrophe. Tell Mom I loved her. Now go.↩

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