As I wistfully recall bygone aspirations

This would be even funnier if it weren't so frighteningly accurate (courtesy of the redoubtable Onion):

Someday I Will Copyedit the Great American Novel

Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"?

All very good questions.

Copyediting is a craft. A good copy editor knows the rules of punctuation, usage, and style, but a truly great copy editor knows when to break them. Macaulay's copy editor let him begin sentences with "but." JFK's copy editor knew when to let a split infinitive work its magic. You need only look at Thackeray to see the damage that overzealous elegant variation can do. Right now, there's a writer out there with a vision as vast as Mark Twain's or F. Scott Fitzgerald's. He is laboring in obscurity, working with deliberate patience. He isn't using tricks of language or pyrotechnic plot turns. He is doing the hardest work of all, the work of Melville, of Cather: He is capturing life on the page. And when the time comes, I'll be here—green pencil in hand—to remove the excess commas from that page.

With clear eyes and an unquenchable thirst for syntactical truth, I will distinguish between defining and non-defining relative clauses and use "that" and "which" appropriately. I will locate and remove the hyphen from any mention of "sky blue" the color and insert the hyphen into any place where the adjective "blue" is qualified by "sky." I will distinguish between "theism" and "deism," between "evangelism" and "evangelicalism," between "therefor" and "therefore." I will use the correct "duct tape," and not the oft-seen apocope "duck tape." The Great American Novel's editor will expect no less of me, for his house will be paying me upwards of $15 an hour, more than it paid the author himself.

Because, you know,

Some people edit copy because they choose to. I copyedit because I must. It isn't merely a matter of making a living. If it were that, I would have been line editing years ago.

Truer than true.

(Grayites unite!)