Stet!, the Hot New Language Game (newyorker.com) 24
The game Stet!, a spinoff of the book "Dreyer's English," is an excellent way to prepare for a copy-editing test and pairs well with a gin-and-tonic. Mary Norris, writing for The New Yorker: Nerdsday fell on a Tuesday this year, and I invited a friend over for a doubleheader: a round of Stet!, the new language game based on "Dreyer's English," followed by an episode of Mark Allen's "That Word Chat," a homespun Zoom talk show for editors, lexicographers, linguists, and others of the inky tribe. My friend was Merrill Perlman, who writes the column "Language Corner" for the Columbia Journalism Review, where her biographical note says that she has "managed copy desks across the newsroom at the New York Times." Although retired from full-time journalism, she continues to teach and serves on the board of ACES: The Society for Editing. Nitpickers by profession, we ran into a problem right away. The instructions for Stet! suggest that you "play with three or more players" (is that redundant?), and we had been unable, during the pandemic, to scare up a third nerd. The game of Stet! comprises two packs of cards with sentences on them, fifty of them Grammar cards with indisputable errors (dangling modifiers, stinking apostrophes, and homonyms, like horde/hoard and reign/rein) and fifty of them Style cards, on which the sentences are correct but pedestrian, and the object is to improve the sentence without rewriting it. There are trick cards with no mistakes on them. You might suspect that there is something wrong with (spoiler alert) "Jackson Pollock" or "asafetida" or "farmers market," but these are red herrings.
If you believe that the sentence is perfect just as it is, you shout "Stet!," the proofreading term for "leave it alone" (from the Latin for "let it stand"), which is used by copy editors to protect an author's prose and by authors to protect their prose from copy editors. The game involves some role playing. If you use only the Grammar cards, the dealer is called the Copy Chief, as in "The Copy Chief shuffles the fifty Grammar cards." If you mix in the Style cards, the dealer is the Author, the players are Copy Editors (you can almost hear an author muttering, "Everyone is a copy editor"), and the deck is huge. I got the impression from the size of the cards, which are bigger than those in a tarot pack, that authors and copy editors have large, masculine hands. I personally wear a small-to-medium-sized disposable nitrile glove and could not riffle the deck with any kind of flair (or is it "flare"?). The sporting element in Stet! is slapping your hand on the carefully sanitized table when you spot the mistake or mistakes. Points are awarded based on the number of errors planted in a sentence. Most have just one, some have two, and there are a few three-pointers. Penalties are assessed for missing mistakes, but none for introducing an error, a cardinal sin in copy editing. (Perhaps the instructions could be refined to add a slap on the hand for this.) It takes five points to win a game, and the game goes fast. I won the first round handily, mostly because my opponent, the Copy Chief, kept forgetting to slap.
If you believe that the sentence is perfect just as it is, you shout "Stet!," the proofreading term for "leave it alone" (from the Latin for "let it stand"), which is used by copy editors to protect an author's prose and by authors to protect their prose from copy editors. The game involves some role playing. If you use only the Grammar cards, the dealer is called the Copy Chief, as in "The Copy Chief shuffles the fifty Grammar cards." If you mix in the Style cards, the dealer is the Author, the players are Copy Editors (you can almost hear an author muttering, "Everyone is a copy editor"), and the deck is huge. I got the impression from the size of the cards, which are bigger than those in a tarot pack, that authors and copy editors have large, masculine hands. I personally wear a small-to-medium-sized disposable nitrile glove and could not riffle the deck with any kind of flair (or is it "flare"?). The sporting element in Stet! is slapping your hand on the carefully sanitized table when you spot the mistake or mistakes. Points are awarded based on the number of errors planted in a sentence. Most have just one, some have two, and there are a few three-pointers. Penalties are assessed for missing mistakes, but none for introducing an error, a cardinal sin in copy editing. (Perhaps the instructions could be refined to add a slap on the hand for this.) It takes five points to win a game, and the game goes fast. I won the first round handily, mostly because my opponent, the Copy Chief, kept forgetting to slap.
This sounds like a hell of a party. (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, it'd be easy to see this getting out of control fast. Before you know it they'll be talking font size and kerning. Totally out of control!
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Wait until it turns into strip Stet!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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Indeed. I read it first as a variation of shtetl.
Virginity? (Score:5, Funny)
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I think I retroactively got my virginity back after just reading the summary.
So that's what that popping noise was.....
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I do math problems for fun and even I want to give these people swirlies then shove them into a locker.
ugh linguists (Score:1)
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Armbands with an oddly-angular-looking G.
Re:ugh linguists (Score:4, Funny)
What equipment do linguists use?
Depends on whether they're cunning or not.
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Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
At what fine retailers can this game be found? This is totally not sponsored content or anything.
asafetida? (Score:3)
Short life (Score:3)
A total of 100 cards? And each one has only one sentence? that's going to last about as long as two levels of Donkey Kong.
Compare with just the original set of Trivial Pursuit decks - and each of those cards had questions for each category.
She better be working on expansion packs in a hurry.
Exactly (Score:2)
Yeah, you can play it maybe twice at tops, before a player knows the sentences already.
Even with trivial pursuit some people would learn the questions if played more than a few times so that it becomes pointless(like, say, if you're stuck in the army and you have just a few games to play)..
oh well maybe some kind of brain drilling would help. or you could use it to detect memory problems in patients.
Also it just doesn't sound fun, especially not in English with all the disagreements about what is actually c
News for nerds? (Score:4, Informative)
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Who needs the deck of cards .... (Score:1)
audience size? (Score:2)
Comical advertising for a game that sounds so shit that even copy editors would have too much sense to play it.
Which will be why they couldn't find a third person.
Replayability level: fuck all. It's not that you'll have seen the cards already, it's that you'll have thrown the thing in the bin mid-way through the first play.
gin and tonic (Score:1)
Right, gin and tonic is just the thing to sharpen your mind... if you're a terminal alcoholic.
Cringeworthy (Score:2)
If you read the book, you already know that throughout the author used every opportunity to turn an example of language usage into a shot at the Trump family. It could have been a good, and useful, book. Instead it's stained by the political stance the author chose to take in a book on a topic that should have nothing to do with politics.
The fact that this game is being advertised by the New Yorker should therefore come as no surprise.