No one else — not the author, not the editor, not the fact checker — caught it, but to Mary Norris, the offending word might as well have been wearing leather hot pants and doing the cancan right there on the page. And so she rescued a colleague from the special circle of mortification reserved for writers for The New Yorker who confuse “flour” with “flower.”
It was her first catch. “I was thrilled to have found such a flagrant error,” Ms. Norris, one of a breed of super copy editors known as O.K.’ers at the magazine, writes in “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” (W. W. Norton), which is being released on Monday. “I celebrated by going across the street to the Blue Bar at the Algonquin and having beer and peanuts for lunch.”
via Mary Norris Muses on a Lifetime of Literary Vigilance in ‘Between You & Me’ – NYTimes.com.