Well, folks, it's time for another edition of #TIHLU-Things I Had to Look Up while copyediting.
This month covers all manner of projects, from freelance work on novels to editing book proposals.
The first one, "pailettes," I looked up for a book proposal project at my day job. It's part of a great chapter in a memoir that touches on visiting the glamorous shop where the author's mother worked. (I'm definitely still fuzzy on how they're different from sequins, though I found one site that advised they're a slightly different, shape!)
"Sheetrock" is a new one for me--I hadn't realized it was still a trademarked term. I was checking a different term against a list of genericized trademarks, and "Sheetrock" was on the list. I checked trusty Merriam-Webster online and discovered that it's still considered to be a specific, trademarked term for dry wall. This is important for a copyeditor to note, because trademarked terms, such as Kleenex and Dumpster, must be capitalized, while their generic counterparts are lowercased, such as tissue and...what the heck is the generic Dumpster? "Big-ass trash bin"?
So onto my sacred master copyediting checklist Sheetrock went, under the section marked "Capitalized Trademarked Terms." I run a global search for every word on that list before submitting a final cleaned-up project to ensure they're all properly capitalized.
Here's what I had to look up this month:
This month covers all manner of projects, from freelance work on novels to editing book proposals.
The first one, "pailettes," I looked up for a book proposal project at my day job. It's part of a great chapter in a memoir that touches on visiting the glamorous shop where the author's mother worked. (I'm definitely still fuzzy on how they're different from sequins, though I found one site that advised they're a slightly different, shape!)
"Sheetrock" is a new one for me--I hadn't realized it was still a trademarked term. I was checking a different term against a list of genericized trademarks, and "Sheetrock" was on the list. I checked trusty Merriam-Webster online and discovered that it's still considered to be a specific, trademarked term for dry wall. This is important for a copyeditor to note, because trademarked terms, such as Kleenex and Dumpster, must be capitalized, while their generic counterparts are lowercased, such as tissue and...what the heck is the generic Dumpster? "Big-ass trash bin"?
So onto my sacred master copyediting checklist Sheetrock went, under the section marked "Capitalized Trademarked Terms." I run a global search for every word on that list before submitting a final cleaned-up project to ensure they're all properly capitalized.
Here's what I had to look up this month:
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