Bloggasm

I enjoyed this passage from Checkpoints, a piece about The New Yorker‘s fact-checking department:

Perhaps I am giving the fact-checkers too much credit. After all, I do what they do before they do. I don’t leave a mountain of work to them, and this is especially true if The New Yorker has rejected the piece and I am forging ahead to include it in a book, as happened in 2002, when the magazine turned a cold eye — for some inexplicable reason — on twelve thousand words about the American history of fish. So I checked the virginal parts of the book myself, risking analogy with the attorney who defends himself and has a fool for a client. The task took me three months — trying to retrace the facts in the manuscript by as many alternate routes as I could think of, as fact-checkers routinely do. There were a couple of passages that slowed things down almost to a halt, when, for one reason or another, it took eons on the Internet and more time in libraries to determine what to do or not to do.

Penn’s daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to “buy for me a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines…”

The problem was not with the rod or the real but with William Penn’s offspring. Should there be commas around Margaret or no commas around Margaret? The presence or absence of commas would, in effect, say whether Penn had one daughter or more than one. The commas — there or missing there — were not just commas; they were facts, neither more nor less factual than the kegs of Bud or the color of Santa’s suit. Margaret, one of Penn’s several daughters, went into the book without commas.