Curse Versus Kill etc. (was Re: Harry Potter and God - GOF)

[Carol]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Lee Storm \(God Is The Healing Force\)" <n2fgc at ...> wrote:
>
> [Carol]:
> | Thanks. Wonder who changed it and why? If it was the American 
> | copyeditor, he or she was stepping outside the bounds of 
> | acceptable changes.
> | 
> | Carol, hoping that the revised American edition, if any, will 
> | go back to the original reading
> 
> [Lee]:
> Personally, I resent that there has to be an "American" edition and a
> "British" edition.  It would be, IMHO, a wonderful challenge for young
> people to learn the vernacular of other English-speaking people.  Maybe it
> sounds stupid, but it really does annoy me!
> 
> Cheers,
> Lee (Pout, Grumble)

Carol responds:

It's standard procedure for American editions of British books to Americanize at least the punctuation (e.g., double quotes and periods inside the end quotation marks), spelling (no "u" in color, for example), and grammar ("the Ministry is" rather than "the Ministry are"). But the vocabulary, I agree, ought to be left alone.

OTOH, any author, even a famous one, needs a copyeditor. Someone (if not the copyeditor then the proofreader) should have caught r-i-t-e for r-i-g-h-t in HBP, for example, and JKR also has a lot of (to me) annoying misplaced modifiers (for example, in GoF, "a pretty girl in a blue dress that Harry didn't know," which sounds as if he didn't know her blue dress).

But changing "curse" to "kill" is an unwarranted liberty by the copyeditor. I can see possibly querying it, but actually changing it is too much. However, it *is* the author's responsibility to examine the edited manuscript and accept or reject all the edits, as well as respond to the queries.

And in a few cases, where American idiom and British idiom differ radically and the wording might seem innocuous to a British reader but off-color to an American reader, I see no reason not to change it so that the meaning is clear. That's obviously not what was happening in this instance, however.

Carol, who quite frequently has to convert American punctuation and spelling to British and vice versa as a routine part of her job