She should credit all three sources, then.

A stet is "someone marked this to be deleted/changed, but please don't implement that mark." Hyphens, commas, capitalizations, and nontraditional spellings are all common sites of copyeditor/author/editor disagreements of this type.

(Much moreso in fiction than in nonfiction, I'm happy to say.)

My blindingly-confusing editing vocab example is leading, pronounced "ledding," which is the word that describes how much space goes between one line of text and the next. I even know where it comes from -- the racks that held a line of letters used to be made of lead, so an extra (sized) lead rod provided whitespace between lines -- but it's still irritating and confusing. I am not a fan of homophones.

Tell someone you're anti-homophonic, and watch their brains blank out.

I edit nonfiction, and the arguments I get into over hyphens, commas, and the proper spelling/capitalization/punctuation of field-specific terms are epic and legendary, at least in my department.

Nonfiction is an entirely different animal. I've also edited both, and the difference between the two seems to be using different parts of my brain.

She should credit all three sources, then

No. The source credit isn't the issue. I use the progression of verses from the ballad literally as chapter leads; they aren't in the body of the text. The problem with any version of a Child ballad lyric (or, in fact, of any collection of traditional music that's been largely passed down in the oral tradition, rather than the written) is the high likelihood of there being a multiplicity of versions.

Martin Carthy does the definitive version of Famous Flower of Serving Men. The way he does it, the single guitar sounds like ten guitars, there are virtually no sharps or flats, and the lyric concentrates on the murder, the ghost story, and the magic.

Martin says that when he first came across it, he came across the Scots version. That one is virtually unusable by modern singers singing to an English-speaking audience, and the music was completely pedestrian. He hunted out other versions, a couple in English, and fitted an updated version of a different chart for the music.

So the lyric he uses is from up to eight different versions. I used his version exclusively as chapter leads in the book.

And honestly, if anyone out there is picky or anal enough to want to know all of Martin's sources for the song, they're already likely to be traditional music geeks, because a casual reader is unlikely to even know another version exists.

Speaking as a casual reader, I like the fact that the lyrics are understandable to me. If one were to go with a traditional version in middle English or Gaelic, there would be no ability to tie the verse to the chapter. How you got there is of no importance to me. The novel is based on lyrics, not a historical document. Therefore, you can tweak the lyrics any damn way you want to to suit the plot. Man, I'm willing to bet the ones who squawk are the ones who think Homer was a single person.

Whoops, happy trigger finger.

A car drabble, in under the wire:

Senior year of high school, we drove. Anywhere, everywhere, whenever we could. We were new at it, a bit reckless with the imagined immortality of youth, but it didn’t matter. We were finally free.

Free to cruise to the next town during lunch, go to the movies out on the highway. Free to glide along the deserted streets late at night, our cigarettes lit and the radio blaring, talking. Of boys, school, boys, jobs, boys, the future. It was as indistinct and twisting as those shadowy roads, but that didn’t matter either. We would get there, and we would drive.

Oh Amy, that nails it. Perfectly. Yes, that's exactly how it was.

I wanted to write about my crush's 59 black Caddy we called "The Hearse," but all I would have come up with is your drabble, and you did it better.

Deb's copy editor needs an ectomy of her literal gland., or an imagination infusion.

Amy, that is a good one. That kind of thing and the posturing in loud cars down the main drag on a Friday night. Good times.

A Sunday Drive

“What are you doing?”

I unzipped his pants and settled in his lap. The dress had a tube top; it was a simple matter to shove it down over my breasts. He looked at them with interest, but his eyes kept darting up and away.

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Come on, you like to live dangerously.”

“But I can’t see!”

“Here, let me lean this way a little.” Too late, the car veered into the ditch and just as violently careened back onto the road. We came to a jittering stop.

“Well, that was something different.”

(snerk)

Bev, what my copy editor needs is to try and understand that, if you can trust me to write a publishable novel based on the lyrics in the first place, you can probably trust me to post the right lyrics.

This sort of thing infuriates me, and it has nothing to do with ego. The problem is that it adds time and trouble to an already long editing process, and it isn't necessary.