Silly Brit notation

Friday night and I'm reviewing proofs from a paper I will soon have published. Mostly sucks to be me, but it's already past deadline. I am remiss in many duties, including blogging. The blog suffers because my life is busy with minutae. Egro, expect posts to reflect that.

Tonight I write about the British editing of scientific papers. Brit editors have changed a number of subtle aspects of the paper. For the most part, the edits are invisible, even to me (and I wrote the 7,500 word monster). Some, like the conversion of 100,000 to 100 000 were expected. And yet, I'm unclear on why the 7 instances of the word "since" were pared down to only two. A pattern emerges wherein any use of "since" at the beginning of a sentence resulted in it’s replacement with the word “as”. Use of "since" in the middle of a sentence apparently passes editing. Clearly this is a grammatical rule! I had no idea! One particularly robust sentence includes two semi-colons and an "and/or" conjunction. This is a fine edit of a brutal passage. Yes, it's a monster of a sentence, but it's just how I would have liked to have written it- except that I lack the knowledge and confidence to use semi-colons myself. (I mean in real writing; I'm happy to misuse them at will here)

As I have been busy of late (and specifically not "Since I have been busy") this is what you get to read. One hopes for all our sakes, that we can return to the normal status quo soon.