The New Yorker arrives late here, so I am only now on the November 24 Food Issue. In it is a piece by Todd Oppenheimer about a man who makes knives, and in that piece is this sentence:
Al Pendray is a farrier (a horseshoer) in Williston, Florida; in the course of a fifty-year career, he has shod, by his estimation, as many as two hundred and fifty thousand horses.
No matter how many times I reread it, "(a horseshoer)" leaves me agog. Is this detritus from an editorial query that accidentally made it into print? Or did someone intentionally write it into the piece? I'll set aside the fact that "farrier" is the standard English word for a person who puts horseshoes on horses, as complete and sufficient as "carpenter" or "cable installer"--even if you happen not to know that, even if the space where "farrier" would be in your vocabulary is occupied by something more appropriate to your particular modern lifestyle, such as "pedicurist": wouldn't the rest of the sentence itself have given you a reasonably clear idea of what "farrier" might mean, without the interruption of "(a horseshoer)"? How dense does the New Yorker want its readers to think it thinks they are?
