tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6126042.post-1096626459766455902004-10-01T14:00:00.000+01:002004-10-02T09:45:27.743+01:00 What does a senior e-editor who is suddenly without a department to run or a page to proof do next? This week, the answer proved to involve making a first visit to the new British Library — and causing unexpected havoc in the process. The library has been open for five years or so now. But we've been working, and this was the first chance we'd had to spend some time there, explore the facilities and organise the coveted Reader's Pass. Like all great public projects these days, the library took many years to build, cost twice what it was supposed to and sparked plenty of criticism and controversy. But we loved it. And it is an extraordinary experience. Simply being able to stand in a room with Magna Carta, Scott's last Antarctic diary, a Gutenberg Bible, Leonardo's notebook, the Shakespeare First Folio, the Beatles' scribbled lyrics for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and the Lindisfarne Gospels is quite something. To find that you are almost alone there, with just a dozen or so other people, and that all this is accessible free of charge, is startling. But the incident that turned this inaugural visit into an e-editor's busman's holiday concerned a huge, blue-ish display panel outside the Graham Greene exhibition. As two of e-editor's cast of thousands stood reading the interesting and rather well written blurb for the exhibition, we suddenly stopped in our tracks. The write-up was describing the population of Greeneland in the usual sort of terms (failed priests, accidental heroes, unhappy lovers, disillusioned spies, pious gangsters and so on), when it suddenly made reference to world-weary "ex-patriots". Now that could have been right. It sounded right, of course. And since almost everyone in Greene's world carries the guilt of some traumatic personal apostasy, they could have meant that all these characters had turned their backs on patriotism. But they didn't. They meant that they were expatriates. The British Library had got it wrong. And e-editor had spotted the mistake. The telephone conversation with the woman in charge of the temporary exhibition was initially frosty. They probably get their share of cranks and loonies at the British Library. Then the penny dropped. "Oh God. You're right, aren't you?" she said. "Expats. Expatriates. That's it. You can tell from the context. I wonder why no-one saw that before. Now I'll have to get on and have the whole display panel remade." It wasn't much. As a contribution to the national culture, it was pretty minor. But this was the British Library. Foreigners go there. Native speakers of the language see it as the repository of standards and excellence. It has to be right. What e-editor's representatives did was just what any alert professional would have done. But there can't be many people who can claim to have corrected the British Library on its English. ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00882602151850785568noreply@blogger.com