Thanks for Speaking at Church by Andy Scheer

This past Sunday, a writer I've known for years spoke to all the people in the church my wife and I attend.

She didn't come in person. But the elder who presented the communion message quoted an article of hers that appeared awhile ago in another denomination's magazine.

When she wrote the piece, whether on assignment or on spec, I suspect she never have looked past the magazine's immediate circulation, or maybe its usual pass-along readership.

But the pass-along for any published writing can be far larger and widespread than you suspect. When you offer your words in print, you never know. But God does.

Potentially Tense Canaries by Andy Scheer

Perhaps their experience with spell-check had made the canaries tense. They flew at me off the page, daring me to discover their sentence’s original meaning, before spell-check and its minion, “suggest word replacement,” had their way.

The sentence taunted me; what could it mean? Nothing in the manuscript I’d been editing hinted at the problems posed by Question 5:

5. What potential tensions canaries from a transition in mower, authority, responsibility and promise as we see with Abraham and Isaac?

I poured over the sentence, my curiosity peaked.* What had spell-check wrought?

I started with the easier word, “mower.” My mind recalled, then rejected the old joke:

Q: What do you get if you run over a canary with a mower?

A: Shredded tweet.

The context suggested the author had meant “power.” But canaries? What potentially could make them tense? I noted the problem in my “questions for author” document and moved on, hoping my subconscious would solve a problem that could only be computer induced.

Spell-check is wonderful. I use it—but I don’t trust it, especially if I’ve not given the document a line-by-line, word-by-word reading. Otherwise you end up with a paragraph like this, from a nonfiction proposal that once came my way:

I remember at the age of twenty-one thinking surly marriage was eminent and my prince charming was right around the corner. With each passing birthday I would try to quite the ache in my heart with the thought “maybe this year.”

Perhaps if she didn’t want a marriage that stood out so much, she wouldn’t be feeling surly. But I decided to quite my objections. Maybe I was the one being surly, condemning a writer for three correctly spelled typos in one short paragraph, not counting the lack of capitalization.

Then I turned the page and saw this:

I was like many eighteen year old girls when I graduated from high school. When I walked down the isle with my diploma in hand, my sights were set on the next exciting chapter of my life, college.

Aisle not be reading further, I thought. It’s no good atoll.

A half-hour later, my subconscious did its job and I returned to the canaries. With my editing knife, I cut them in two, then switched the order of two letters. Canaries = can arise.

5. What potential tensions can arise from a transition in power, authority, responsibility, and promise, as we see with Abraham and Isaac?

The sentence made sense, even if spell-check didn’t care.

* Yes, they’re intentional.