[Vwoolf] Pllural of "Woolf"?

[Mary Ellen Foley]

>From a little quick Googling, it looks like the US edition, at least, is
from Bloomsbury (appropriately enough). Their style guide says to follow
the Chicago Manual of Style in such matters; CMOS online says that plurals
of proper names take *-s *or *-es *in the normal fashion and that
exceptions are generally to be found in the M-W dictionary. Said dictionary
online doesn't list poor Leonard at all, much less both of them, but does
list VW, with no indication that the plural of her surname is nonstandard.

So I'd say somebody should have caught it!

(If we're dealing with the UK edition, the they should have followed New
Hart's, and while I'm virtually certain that my beloved old DTB edition
specifies the same plural, I am one land mass and two seas away from it at
the moment. And I couldn't find the info in their online version before I
lost patience with searching.)

Having said that, I know authors who have published books with noted
academic presses, who have been given *no* editorial support at all. They
were required to arrange for all of the editing themselves, and to pay for
it.  With publishers pushing these expenses off on the authors, it's no
surprise that mistakes occur; makes you wonder why they have style guides
at all, if nobody bothers to ensure quality.

Mary Ellen


On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 11:43 PM, Mark Hussey <mhussey at verizon.net> wrote:

> I think it was quite common in Bloomsbury. Clive Bell, for example, often
> notes "Woolves to tea" for example.  Whether it belongs in a scholarly work
> is, or could be, I suppose, another issue...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces+mhussey=verizon.net at lists.osu.edu] On
> Behalf Of Jean Mallinson
> Sent: Friday, November 03, 2017 7:21 PM
> To: Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
> Subject: [Vwoolf] Pllural of "Woolf"?
>
> Reading Bill Goldstein's The Wold Broke in Two, his recent book about
> Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and E.M Forster and the "Year
> that changed Literature, I find my  interest engaged by new or forgotten
> information and fresh insights into the writing lives of these loved and
> familiar figures but I am disturbed by a small detail: he uses "Woolves",
> not "Woolfs",  as the plural of "Woolf"    -- not in jest but seriously. Am
> I right in wincing every time I read this? How could an attentive editor
> not have noticed and corrected this?
>
> Jean  M.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
>
> _______________________________________________
> Vwoolf mailing list
> Vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
> https://lists.osu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwoolf
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20171104/0f44417b/attachment-0001.html>