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	drhenryjekyll 2008-07-27 05:38 pm UTC (link)
	Oh dear sweet baby cyclops. (Reply to this)

	aristaea 2008-07-27 05:47 pm UTC (link)
	Hey, Coren's right! Taking out the "a" doesn't make that sentence any less pretentious or awkward-sounding, so they should have left it in. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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squishycat, 2008-07-27 06:43 pm UTC

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scifantasy, 2008-07-27 07:36 pm UTC

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mireille, 2008-07-27 11:50 pm UTC

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tangentialone, 2008-07-27 07:05 pm UTC

	loopywafflehead 2008-07-27 05:59 pm UTC (link)
	And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy. Don't do it, person who made the change! It's a trap! (Reply to this)

	witty 2008-07-27 06:00 pm UTC (link)
	I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. It's his precious! His very own. It was a present for his birthday!! (Reply to this)

	white_serpent 2008-07-27 06:02 pm UTC (link)
	I am sorry if this looks petty if? (Reply to this)

	alya1989262 2008-07-27 06:04 pm UTC (link)
	It would help if he would correctly punctuate his letter. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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hristaesir, 2008-07-27 08:49 pm UTC

	frequentmouse 2008-07-27 06:04 pm UTC (link)
	Weirdly enough, the nosh-no -a sounds really awkward and artificial to my American ears, since "nosh" as food rather than the act of eating hasn't made it into American usage (at least not on this coast, nor in the 1950s sitcoms and 60s standup routines which were the determinants for my Yiddish vocabulary). On the other hand, what a douche. (Reply to this)

	puipui 2008-07-27 06:15 pm UTC (link)
	He cares deeply about his work... but not enough to capitalize it correctly. Nice. (Reply to this)

	katemonkey 2008-07-27 06:27 pm UTC (link)
	Surprisingly, this has no effect on the full-blown giggling-teenage-girl crush I developed on him during The Supersizers Go.... in fact, it makes it worse (Reply to this)(Thread)

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grapefruitzzz, 2008-07-29 01:24 am UTC

	seiberwing 2008-07-27 06:46 pm UTC (link)
	...hold up, I always understood 'nosh' as a verb, as in 'I'm going to go nosh on something', with the noun coming from the same place as "a bit to eat". And while it looks silly that way anyway, it's not worth the rage. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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txvoodoo, 2008-07-29 07:25 am UTC

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seiberwing, 2008-07-29 04:23 pm UTC

iamnotyourmuse
2008-07-27 06:51 pm UTC (link)

You know, I swear a lot. I've been peppering my daily diatribes with fucks and shits for years. But those two words really are rather lazy when it comes to obscenity and expressing one's ire.

If someone really wants to impress upon me just how much of a pretentious twatball he is, then nine instances of the same common swear in two short paragraphs (15 in the whole letter) isn't going to cut it.

Especially when the rant is over word choice and the effect it has on the overall meaning of a sentence.

Come now, Giles. I'm sure you can do better than "Fuck. fuck, fuck fuck."

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mmanurere
2008-07-27 06:56 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, I think the sentence sounds better with the "a" in there, but not that much better. I'm still parsing "nosh" as stressed anyway...though if he's going to be that pissy about ending on a potentially unstressed syllable, why is he writing for newspapers (where anything he submits is guaranteed to go through multiple overworked editors on ridiculous deadlines) in the first place, instead of...writing poetry, maybe?

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tangentialone, 2008-07-27 07:10 pm UTC

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mmanurere, 2008-07-27 07:37 pm UTC

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breecita, 2008-07-27 07:46 pm UTC

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greenling, 2008-07-29 08:33 am UTC

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bubosquared, 2008-07-29 08:26 pm UTC

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notjo, 2008-07-29 08:29 pm UTC

	the__ivorytower 2008-07-27 07:06 pm UTC (link)
	I didn't know nosh was yiddish, I thought it was brit-slang, and I thought it tended to refer to alcoholic beverages, not food. Wow, I'm going to need to go figure out where I read it first and poke them. That being said, holy crap. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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ellensmithee, 2008-07-27 08:24 pm UTC

	magnolia_mama 2008-07-27 07:15 pm UTC (link)
	Good God a-mighty, he makes Anne Rice look restrained. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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come_love_sleep, 2008-07-27 08:34 pm UTC

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magnolia_mama, 2008-07-27 08:38 pm UTC

	shaysdays 2008-07-27 07:27 pm UTC (link)
	If I was his editor I'd totally send back the entire piece translated in LOLcat. You could use the resulting explosive force to take over other newspapers. You'd just send him in, text him messages like, "LOL UR IN LOBBY SAY DAT TODAY," and wait for the smoke and screaming. (Reply to this)(Thread)

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wook77, 2008-07-27 08:29 pm UTC

	yhallothar 2008-07-27 07:40 pm UTC (link)
	I'm trying to decide which is my favorite bit: "Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn't mean?" OR "And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it." [emphasis mine] (Reply to this)(Thread)

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breecita, 2008-07-27 07:47 pm UTC

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yhallothar, 2008-07-27 07:49 pm UTC

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empy, 2008-07-27 08:34 pm UTC

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shaysdays, 2008-07-27 09:07 pm UTC

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shaysdays, 2008-07-27 09:09 pm UTC

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vzg, 2008-07-28 03:05 am UTC

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magnolia_mama, 2008-07-27 08:41 pm UTC

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pantsgolem, 2008-07-27 09:12 pm UTC

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magnolia_mama, 2008-07-27 09:23 pm UTC

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pantsgolem, 2008-07-29 12:44 am UTC

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empy, 2008-07-27 09:26 pm UTC

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cmdr_zoom, 2008-07-28 04:19 am UTC

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lirazel, 2008-07-28 05:14 pm UTC

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lysana, 2008-07-31 09:09 pm UTC

	also_not_a_pipe 2008-07-27 08:06 pm UTC (link)
	you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff ...you can? Is scoff what he was smoking when he wrote this letter? (Reply to this)

miss_eponine
2008-07-27 08:30 pm UTC (link)

Last summer, I had to write a short article on library programming for our local newspaper, and they edited what I wrote. It wouldn't have annoyed me that much except they took a compound sentence and turned it into two fragments instead. You know what I did? Complained to my husband, and then I let it go. Now I think I should have written a letter to the editor to properly express my outrage.

Also, since when has nosh meant blowjob?

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empy, 2008-07-27 08:40 pm UTC

	tangentialone 2008-07-27 08:45 pm UTC (link)
	Whoever made the edit should just stick the missing "a" into the last sentence of his next review. :D (Reply to this)

	themadmermaid 2008-07-27 09:18 pm UTC (link)
	Thanks, Giles Coren, for putting the petty trials and tribulations of my life in perspective. I'm not up on newspapers, but is it possible that "a" was accidentally deleted, since it was a tiny one letter word? I think that would be even more hilarious than if somebody did it purposefully. (Reply to this)

doomsday
2008-07-27 09:58 pm UTC (link)

I've been writing for The Times for 15 years and i have never asked this before - i have never asked it of anyone i have written for - but I must insist, from now on, that i am sent a proof of every review i do, in pdf format, so i can check it for fuck-ups. and i must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way i can carry on in the job.

If he's been writing for the The Times for 15 years, you'd think he'd know that magazine editing does not work this way. I love ~~egotistical~~ writers.[Edited to remove redundancy.]

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tangentialone, 2008-07-28 02:04 am UTC

	caoilte 2008-07-27 10:41 pm UTC (link)
	but I must insist, from now on, that i am sent a proof of every review i do, in pdf format, so i can check it for fuck-ups. and i must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. But then he'd be the editor, not the writer.... rolls eyes It's the editor's job to do that, not the writer's, tho one has to wonder these days about editors. Online AND off. (Reply to this)

demonbean
2008-07-27 11:40 pm UTC (link)

2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?

I am laughing so hard I can't speak properly. He's mad that they removed his innuendo! I just ... can't get over that ...

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mireille, 2008-07-28 12:05 am UTC

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mmanurere, 2008-07-28 02:50 am UTC

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mireille, 2008-07-28 07:25 am UTC

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mmanurere, 2008-07-28 07:42 am UTC

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mireille, 2008-07-28 08:44 am UTC

	kenovay 2008-07-27 11:55 pm UTC (link)
	THAT LETTER IS AMAZING. I think I love Giles Coren now. Someone who cares about whether his prose ends on a stressed or unstressed syllable, that's an awesome kind of person, in the way where I don't ever want to be involved with him in a professional capacity but admire him from a distance. (Reply to this)