Interwoven: The Etymology of Editing Vocabulary

• People describing how carefully they have reviewed their writing will say that they have "gone over it with a fine-toothed comb."

• People describing how carefully someone else has flagged the errors in their writing will say that the editor has been "nit-picky."

• And when looking for something specific, people might "comb through" a document. 

• Early French and Flemish textile factory workers would throw their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the looms, causing property damage and a halt to the work.  

• You can fact-check this statement easily by looking at the word origin section for the word sabotage in a good hard copy dictionary.

• A hard copy dictionary is an essential tool for good editing. 

AS Byatt wrote a very thoughtful essay exploring the "tangled threads between text and textiles" (The Guardian, 2008). Most of the essay's examples are drawn from the Western European canon, with some examples from the Greek and Roman. Well worth a read.

This tutorial does not provide instruction on how to edit. Rather, it invites you to see the language arts, including the invisible art of editing, in a broader context. 

• It's fun to pick up literary allusions and word origins.

• The first computer was a weaving loom.

• The etymological link between text and textile appears in several languages.