Today I am editing a book on environmentally conscious building design, and I guess I must be tired this morning because every time I see the phrase refrigerant management, my brain interprets it as refrigerator magnet and I go “Whaaaa?” and have to reread the sentence.

I open up the book and the very first sentence I see is

Passing the PE exam has served as a significant milestone in the career of professional engineers since the exam’s origination.

Frustratingly, I’m here to do a fast readthrough, not a serious copy editing, so I just mark the addition of an s to career and move on. But significant milestone is redundant; passing the exam doesn’t “serve as” a milestone, it is one; and origination for beginning is dreadful. I can see already that this readthrough will be a teethgrinder, but I only have time to fix the out-and-out errors, I only have time to fix the out-and-out errors, I only have time to fix the out-and-out errors ….

The Chicago Manual of Style holds that adjectives that refer to a nationality or a place are usually not capitalized when used in a nonliteral way; thus dutch oven, french windows, and venetian blinds.

I came across French drains in a book I was copy editing today, and I very nearly lowercased it out of habit when I realized I had no idea what a French drain was. Was it possible that a French drain was in some way literally French? I couldn’t imagine a way that it could be, but I stopped to Google it just in case.

Wikipedia asserts that some authorities say the term is “merely a popular corruption” of the term trench drain (which is a real term, though for a slightly different kind of drain), in which case it would certainly be lowercase f. But I decided to keep looking anyway, and a good thing I did, too, because over 100 other websites — including Wiktionary — say that the French drain was invented by Henry French of Concord, Massachusetts, who published the idea in his 1859 book, Farm Drainage.

I haven’t actually searched the Library of Congress database to confirm that such a book exists, because life is short and so are deadlines, so it’s not impossible that the existence of this book is merely an urban legend. But given the specificity of the references, and the fact that a couple of the sites contain some details as to Henry French’s biography and the contents of his book, it seems much more plausible to me that the French drain/trench drain connection is the popular mistake and that Henry French is the correct explanation. So till I learn otherwise, that’s the one I’m going with.

Ergo, capital F.

Later: Dave found copies of the book listed for sale at Bookfinder, so I think that closes the case. Farm Drainage seems to have been very popular: it went through many editions and was still in print in the early 20th century.

Spotted in a Bay Guardian story about green high-rises:

[Building in San Francisco] requires the use of ‘heroic construction techniques’ involving extraenforced foundations to build on ‘Bay Area mud,’ high-tinsel steel, which is packed with carbon and takes loads of energy to produce …

During a discussion on the WELL, a pointer came up to this article from the New Yorker about the Citicorp Building in New York. Seems that the engineer who designed the unusual structure of the Citicorp Building discovered, after it had been completed, that a last-minute change had been made without his being notified, a change that under ordinary circumstances would have made no practical difference, but in the case of this building’s unusual design meant that the whole thing could have toppled over in a severe wind — a level of wind that weather records showed hit Manhattan about every 16 years.

It’s a fascinating article, so it’s petty of me to pick nits, but as a technical editor I’m going to pick one anyway. The writer at one point refers to “the word ‘failure’ being a euphemism for the Citicorp tower’s falling down”. This is quite a bit of overstatement. The word “failure” is standard engineering talk, and not so much a euphemism as a matter of practicality.

For one thing, any time you design anything — say, a bridge — you figure out two numbers: how much weight or other kind of force that it needs to be able to resist at the worst (the plausible worst, not the once-in-a-millenium freak-accident worst), and how much force will cause it to fail.

In a complicated structure like a building, you make this calculation over and over again in countless different ways; since a structure is only as strong as its weakest part, you need to know how strong every last part is in relation to how much force might be put on it.

So you need a couple of short words you can use over and over to label those two ideas. Engineers use “design” and “failure” — the “design load” is how much force we’ve calculated the structure needs to withstand, and the “failure load” is how much force we’ve calculated will cause the structure to fail. You have to know both numbers, and in fact building codes typically set a “safety factor” so that the failure load has to be two or three or five or however many times the design load.

The other thing is that failure does not just mean toppling, it can mean deformation. In the case of the Citicorp Building, since the parts that would fail first would have been bolts, toppling might well be how it would fail; but ordinarily when you’re building something out of steel the point of failure is the point at which the steel bends out of shape, not at which it collapses.

In fact, if your structure is made out of a combination of materials — like concrete with steel reinforcements — it’s required practice to design it so that the steel will fall first. That way the bridge starts sagging noticeably long before it collapses. It seems like it would be the case that the more steel reinforcement, the better, but in fact the result of too much steel is a beam that gives no warning when its weakest part — which is now the concrete — is about to fail. Steel fails by deforming and concrete fails by shattering to pieces, so you don’t put so much steel in the beam that the concrete will fail first.

Just discovered that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, contains the entries primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and senary, but not quinary.

From today’s New York Times:

At his news conference today, President Bush towed a very measured line on the Iraq war debate …

First, you don’t “tow” the line, you “toe” it.

And second, you aren’t toeing the line if you’re the one who drew it in the first place.

According to the Washington Post, the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina “cast a funereal pall” over New Orleans.

(A pall is the dark cloth you drape over a coffin. A funereal coffin, that is. Not a baptismal or nuptial coffin.)