[AlexBell]

It looks as though I need to stop and think, doesn't it. Let's see if there's any possibility of finding some common ground.

When I go to the opera and when I read a book I like to sink into the music and action on the one hand, and the text on the other, and be entranced. I do not like to be jarred out of that that state by something that breaks the spell. For example, I walked out of a production of Tosca some years ago because the stage director had Scarpia do a simulated sexual assault on Tosca in the scene where she kills him. The threat of violence is certainly heard in the music, but the actual violence was not in the libretto or in the opera that Verdi saw.

That's an extreme example of course, but I think the same thing applies in books; I get jarred out of my involvement in the book by words which just don't fit - like gayety, when I'm expecting gaity.

Some of this is because I also do proof reading from time to time. In one of grannyGrump's excellent ebooks Mark Twain (to the best of my memory) described how he and his mule train walked up a canon. This was in the original text. I hope you would agree that it was perfectly appropriate to change Mark Twain's word to canyon, which was what he obviously meant. There was no possibility whatever of making any sense of canon in the original text, and I think it does Mark Twain no honour to leave the word unchanged.

Similarly in Little Novels by Wilkie Collins which I'm working on now there is a story in which one of the protagonists is falsely accused of stealing a diamond bracelet from the wife of a rich nobleman. She had sold it to cover her debts without telling her husband. The original text describes the protagonist as 'the man who had innocently bought the jewel of her agent'. In the nineteenth century it might have been quite clear to readers that the man had bought the jewel off (or from) her agent, but I think that in the 21st century the reader would have to stop and think firstly whether it was the Lady's jewel or the agent's jewel, and secondly who the protagonist had bought the jewel from. It is this having to stop and think which I want to avoid; I think spoils one's enjoyment of the story. Is it really so disgraceful to change Wilkie Collins' word from of to off?

We could also go on for a while about whether it is appropriate to ask a 21st century reader to plow through the amount of hyphenation that Wilkie Collins used in the 19th century; but I'll leave that for another time.