"One of my colleagues in Florida who has been a semi-auto guy probably from day one admits he’s not that adept with a wheelgun, which is fine, because I’ll take his share of revolvers … and the ones with five, seven or eight chambers in the cylinder as well."Did you catch what happened there?
I absolutely guaran-damn-tee you that his original text read "...I'll take his share of sixguns..." but whoever copyedited the piece was like "Nope, only one clichéd synonym for 'revolver' per sentence" and proceeded to remove the one that made the rest of the paragraph make any sense at all.
It's at times like this that I understand why the compilation of Florence King's NR columns was titled "STET, Damnit!"
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| Left unexamined are Mr. Workman's opinions of nineguns and tenguns. |
If the editor did their part, the correct way to have pruned the piece to an acceptable cliché accuracy level would have been "One of my colleagues in Florida who has been a semi-auto guy probably from day one admits he’s not that adept with a revolver, which is fine, because I’ll take his share of sixguns … and the ones with five, seven or eight chambers in the cylinder as well."
That would have kept things brisk but manageable.