Proofreading Course Weekly Roundup: Jentacular.

Welcome to this week's Proofreading Course Roundup, in a week when Space X's Falcon 9 rocket endured "a rather spicy landing"; Samsung revealed their new foldable phone will cost "just" $1,980; and the first mammal, the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, was made extinct due to climate change.

This week’s weird words.

A proofreader without a vast vocabulary is at a considerable disadvantage. So, every week we’ll be introducing you to some of the more unusual words to grace the English language.

1. Deipnophobia: a morbid fear of dinner parties.
2. Jentacular: pertaining to breakfast.
3. Obrogate: to alter the law by passing a new law.

This week’s tricky words.

Even exemplary proofreaders have their little blind spots. The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course provides a comprehensive list of the tricky words that can trip up even the most experienced proofreader. Here are just three of them:

1. Receipt – reciept.
2. Supersede – supercede.
3. Occasion – occassion.

This week’s proofreading exercise.

From The Earth Quarter by Damon Knight.

The sun had set half an hour before. Now, from the window of Laszlo Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frost-blue against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have built, glowing with their own light.

Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the geometry of squallor.

Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of the other—a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten; that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the galaxy between him and what he had lost.

And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the city seemed to press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter: sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than Capella.

Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with it’s hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany.

Errors:

1. In the second paragraph,”squalor” should only have one ‘l’.
2. In the final paragraph, “it’s” should be “its”

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I hope to see you back here, next week, for another Proofreading Course Weekly Roundup.

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