Sunday Rest: sprue. Word Not To Use Today.

Once written, a book goes first of all to its editor. With any luck the editor will say at once how much she loves the book, but add that there are just a couple of minor things she's slightly unsure about...and basically by means of flattery and reassurance she'll persuade the poor idiot writer to agree to every change she wants.

Well, that's more or less how it works, anyway.

Anyway, once the polite haggling is finished, the book will be published, and then it might be translated and published elsewhere in the world. Now, what the foreign editor/translator does with the manuscript the non-polyglot writer won't be able to discover very easily unless it's in a language very close to English.

The most obvious of these languages is American.

They like things explained, I've found, do the Americans. A simple reference to someone taking biscuits into an office, for instance, is enough to give a US editor the vapours. But we eat doughnuts! she'll say: People will be confused! 

In this instance, as I recall, we compromised on milk.

A lot of the time, of course, a writer doesn't have the time or skill to read through foreign editions, but there was one US edition which swiped me round the face as soon as I saw it. Not only had some editor simplified nearly every sentence (which, as they'd made an exceptionally good job of it, I didn't actually mind very much) but they'd had the insufferable gall to change my name. I write under the name SALLY PRUE. The name on the cover said S PRUE.

Apart from the cheek and illegality of this, sprue is a horrid word. It can mean a particularly smelly form of chronic diarrhoea; it can mean an inferior type of asparagus; or (more respectably) it can mean the channel through which you fill up a mould.

So what did I do about being called S PRUE? Got very cross, of course, both as a champion of equal rights (because it seemed to me that the publisher was trying to conceal the fact that I was female) and as someone who lives by their name. 

It had no effect whatsoever: but it made me feel better.

Word Not To Use Today: sprue. No one knows where the mould or the asparagus words come from, but the diarrhoea word, charmingly, is related to the Middle Low German sprüwe, which means tumour.