Editor's blues

Asia-Pacific is a problematical term.

A commonsense interpretation would surely confine its applicability to those parts of Asia which border on the Pacific; but in the realms of business, politics, and academe, it is commonly extended to include much, if not all, of Asiatic Russia and Central Asia, as well as the whole of South-East Asia (surely most of it should be seen as bordering the Indian Ocean rather than the Pacific?) and Australasia, and even - through conflation, I imagine, with the similar-but-different expression, Pacific Rim - to North (though not South?!) America.

The author of the international relations paper I edited this morning was principally interested in East Asian, and particularly in North-East Asian countries. He excluded Australia and New Zealand as being insufficiently important in geopolitical terms (Hah! Take that, Antipodean irrelevancies!), but - reluctantly - included the USA in his survey of China's foreign relations.

Although the title of his paper used the standard term 'Asia-Pacific', in his abstract he repeatedly referred to 'Pacific Asia'. It began to appear that he was setting up his own definition of the area to be considered, limiting it to Asian countries that bordered the Pacific. So, having replaced 'Pacific Asia' with 'Asia-Pacific' in the first half of his text, I dutifully retraced my steps and restored his original 'Pacific Asia'. Well, except that he had included an unnecessary hyphen, 'Pacific-Asia', which I also had to delete.

Then, rather belatedly, he dropped that bombshell about the inclusion of The Great Satan in the study, and I realised that we did in fact need to go with 'Asia-Pacific' throughout.

It was a laborious process: in the space of about 5,000 words, he must have referred to this geographic region at least 100 times, using his favoured (but ridiculous) 'Pacific-Asia' as well as the following indiscriminate variations - 'Pacific Asia', 'Pacific-Asian', 'Asian-Pacific', 'Asia Pacific', 'Asia-Pacific'. My brain is so mulched with all of this, I scarcely have any confidence any more that I know what the 'correct' term should be.

Why, oh, why can't writers at least be consistent in their core terminology??

Such galling inconsistency (and, to my mind, quite incomprehensible inattentiveness, slovenliness) is not by any means a failing to unique to Asian writers of English - but it is particularly bad amongst them (and I have worked with them far too much in recent years). It seems that mastering our grammar and our alien script is just too much for the poor lambs, it quite befuddles their brains, and they don't have any spare processing capacity left to try to keep alert to the possible significance of variations in spelling, word order, capitalisation, hyphenation, etc.

I do not enjoy this work.