Shiny Candy Girl of Canada

Someone on a list I belong to wrote a message this morning about blogs. She says that if you throw the words 'shiny', 'candy' and 'girl' into a blog together with the name of a country other than the US, your hit count is going to go up, up, up. So I'll give it till the end of the week and then check my web stats.

Onward, Forward

CEL (CopyEditor's List) has a thread today concerning the misspelling of 'forward' when used to mean that section of a book that comes at the front and provides background or other elucidation to the book itself. I was reading along and guffawing at the thought of all those authors out there who self-publish their memoires or histories of their communities and churches and then misspell Foreword. Teehee.

I sobered up when I realized I didn't know whether the book I'd self-published (a biography of my first husband) contained a Foreword. I rushed to get the box that contains the remaining few copies and, with a good healthy fear of what I might find, begin to leaf through the first few pages.

There's a dedication page ("To Marcus") followed by a Preface. And Glory be, there's no foreword. What a relief. I know the difference between 'forward' and 'foreword' but my fingers don't always obey the inclination of the brain and since the mistake would survive a spell-check, I've been unpleasantly surprised before by errors that creep through to the final draft.

I would have caught it in the final copyedit/proofread. But of course I would. Mon dieu, oui! Don't be absurd.