During a recent visit to the Florida island where our parents live, my brother and I had dinner with them at a fancy restaurant. As we bent our heads over our menus—all of us, that is, except my father, who can’t see—I realized that our identically rapt expressions had nothing to do with deciding what we wanted to eat.

“They’ve transposed the e and the i in Madeira sauce,” commented my brother.

“They’ve made Bel Paese into one word,” I said, “and it’s lowercase.”

“At least they spell better than the place where we had dinner last Tuesday,” said my mother. “They serve P-E-A-K-I-N-G duck.”

We stared at one another. You’d think that after all these decades, we Fadimans would have mapped every corner of our deviant tribal identity, but apparently there was one pan-familial gene we had never before diagnosed: we were all compulsive proofreaders.

Our confessions tumbled onto the tablecloth like so much spilled Madeira sauce. My brother revealed that in a 364-page computer software manual he had consulted the previous month, he had found several hundred errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax. His favorite was the oft-repeated command to “insert a carrot.” He had written the company, offering to trade a complete list of corrections for an upgraded version of the software, but had not received a reply. …

Our mother confided that for several years she had been filling a large envelope with mistakes she had clipped from her local paper, the Fort Myers News-Press ….

My father, who at age twenty-four had been a proofreader—indeed, the entire proofreading department—at Simon & Schuster, admitted that in the full flush of his youthful vanity he had routinely corrected menus at posh Manhattan restaurants and handed them to the maître d’s on his way out. He’d even corrected library books, embellishing their margins with [corrections], which he viewed not as defacements but as “improvements.” …

I know what you may be thinking: What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging little busybodies! It is true—and I realize this is damning evidence—that once, when I ordered a chocolate cake to commemorate the closely proximate birthdays of my three co-Fadimans, I grabbed the order form from the bakery clerk, who had noted that it was to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S,” and corrected it. …

Of course, if you are a compulsive proofreader yourself—and if you are, you know it, since for the afflicted it is a reflex no more avoidable than a sneeze—you are thinking something quite different: What a fine, public-spirited family are the Fadimans! How generous, in these slipshod times, to share their perspicacity with the unenlightened!

—Anne Fadiman in “Insert a Carrot”

Transcribed by me from pages 79–80, 82, of my personal hardcover copy of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, © 1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Tweet: If you are a compulsive proofreader, you know it is a reflex no more avoidable than a sneeze.

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