If only Giles Coren had given his email to a good subeditor before sending it, he might have got his point across effectively without revealing himself to be arrogant, petulant, pompous and, frankly, the last person you'd want to be stuck in a restaurant with.
As a sub by trade, it pains me to say it, but the foul-mouthed food critic was actually in the right: the hapless Times sub who removed a harmless sounding "a" from the last sentence of his column did subtly change the meaning and remove a joke (although one so obscure that it must be said Coren poses no immediate threat to the writers of, say, Peep Show).
What the email lacks is a sense of proportion. After ranting at length about his knowledge of Yiddish, laboriously explaining the aforementioned joke ("looking for a nosh has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob" – hilarious!), and comparing the sub to "a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance [sic] fresco and thinking jesus [sic] looks shit with a bear so plastering over it", our tortured artist turns his attention to metre: "Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on 'nosh' is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable." This, apparently, is "pre-GCSE scansion" (what kind of advanced academy of linguistics was Coren attending at 15?).
Then comes the eloquent clincher: "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." Well, to be fair, it scans perfectly.
Putting to one side the thought that being a sub at the Times right now must be about as rewarding an occupation as trying to sell Mother's Day cards to a Canoe Wife's sons, I'm struck by the fact that Coren's onanistic outburst is the latest in a series of recent attacks on subeditors.
From Dr Raj Persaud's ingenious defence against plagiarism charges (the subs stole bits from other people's articles!), to former sub David Montgomery's latest moneymaking wheeze to abolish the job altogether, some subeditors feel under threat – a new Facebook group, Save our subs, has joined the longer-established horny-handed subs of toil in voicing such fears.
Even those we regard as friends can damn with (very) faint praise. Lauding Coren because "you've taken one for the [writing] team," one of my colleagues describes in today's Guardian how she sees a sub's job: "A subeditor sets [an article] out on the page, cuts the words to fit, checks for spelling and grammatical errors, wanton cursing and factual inaccuracies." Perhaps she didn't have space to mention the coruscating headline-writing skills, visual flair, compendious knowledge and ability to turn sows' ears into silk purses on a daily basis that makes the subeditors who put together the very section that she writes for one of the most brilliant journalistic teams in the business.
This was all summed up in the London Evening Standard by media commentator Roy Greenslade in a sadly misconceived piece headlined "Destined for the spike – subeditors will struggle to survive in digital age" which, like my colleague's effort, served only to display a failure to appreciate how the way the media are changing makes the subeditor's role more important than ever.
Today's subs design, lay out and publish pages (in print and on the web), write headlines, standfirsts and captions, edit, cut and make sense of copy (from whatever source and no matter how dubious its quality), check facts, grammar and house style, ensure stories are legally safe, select and crop photographs, edit picture galleries, handle audio and video …
In short, they are the people who know what "coruscating" means. And they can write, too.
