Thursday, December 9, 2010

Must edit!

Audrey likes riddles. She got a lot of reading practice telling us the jokes from Laffy Taffy wrappers from her Halloween loot. So, last night I printed out a list of Christmas riddles that came in an e-mail from a spelling program publisher. I left it in the printer, and when I came downstairs to check my e-mail this morning, I found that the riddles had been marked up by our resident author/editor-to-be, Mary. She bracketed one of the riddles with the comment "takes longer to get" and reworded another riddle so the punchline wasn't in the question.

Original version:
Q. What do you call an Eskimo cow?
A. An Eskimoo.

Mary's version:
Q. What do you call an Alaskan cow?
A. An Eskimoo.

I just thought it was very funny that Mary, seeing a page of riddles, would assume they were there for her to comment on and improve. She's also been having lots of fun with Google Translator lately, translating Girl Scout songs into Latin. And of course, editing the result if she disagrees with Google's choice of phrasing.