Here are a few late-arriving comments on the part of the draft my rabbi had time to read (through p20). (I'd only asked for permission to distribute, but he started marking things while he was reading.)
p4: he circled "Rama" and asked if we meant "Rema". If this is just a transliteration difference then I assume we'll punt, but just in case...
p4 last line: "wine represents gevurah (severity)" -- he questioned this translation, saying gevurah means strength (like in the g'vurot section of the amidah). Is this a different word but a homophone? If so, including the Hebrew would help. (I wondered about gevurah in a different question for the same reason -- I know that word as "strength", not "severity". But we only have translit here.)
He questioned one of the gematria pairs but I checked the math and he's mistaken. (I'm lousy at gematria and I still sometimes have to count Hebrew on my fingers, so I'm only mentioning this because I'd mentioned a possible gematria issue before.)
p11 in the question, in the bullet point describing teruah: "A rapid series of nine or more very short blasts" -- he added "in sets of three". Since it's in the question this is arguably not important, but it might be reasonable to add this little bit of additional info (and it shouldn't change the layout).
p15 last paragraph ("Alex pointed out"): "five stitches of four words each" - he corrected "stitches" to "stychs". This took some Google fu, but it looks like he's right that scholars use that word when talking about poetic structure in the biblical texts. (Whether it's a general scholarly term I don't know.)
What the above has to do with "guild wars" I do not know. :-)
@MonicaCellio I'm unfamiliar with considering them as sets of three. They certainly sound to my untrained ears as nine+ in succession and not split into sets.
@MonicaCellio there isn't going to be a single word in English that's a perfect translation of gevura. We generally do translate it as "strength," "power," or "might," but perhaps "severity would work better in some contexts. The context here is the Zohar, where (I suspect, never having studied it, but having seen its concepts referred to) many words are used as terms of art, referring to esoteric concepts that are related, but not identical to the familiar concepts that the words refer to ...
... in more usual contexts. Without reading and understanding the Zohar passage referred to to see how gevura is used in context, I'd be disinclined to second-guess the OP.
@MonicaCellio yes. Gratitude, too.
@MonicaCellio my experience is like @msh210's. I can't recall hearing teru-a as bursts of three. It's reasonable to assume that the OP's experience was similar.
@MonicaCellio having trouble finding a dictionary entry for "stych," but I found them for "stich", as a poetry structure. That's more likely correct than "stitch," here, I think
@IsaacMoses I do. It has "stich" and the definition matches. It does not have "stych". If the poster here had written "stich" it's possible that spell-check suggested "fixing" it, as this is an uncommon word.
With thanks to my husband, who (a) brought the OED to the marriage and (b) kindly looked this up for me because, wow, tiny print.
@IsaacMoses yes, given what you and msh210 have said, I'll assume that my rabbi's (and my) experiences are insufficiently broad here. Never mind.
@IsaacMoses understood. I don't want to second-guess the author either, and I sure don't know much of anything about the zohar. It's not clear in the text here that this use of the word is the zohar's rather than the Mi Yodeya author's (or editor's), which may be he source of the confusion. But I'm not sure how to address it, either.
The QR codes are too small. I tried scanning them with my phone, and it couldn't not recognize it at normal size (what it will be printed at). It only read it when i zoomed in on the page.
OK, so we have about 1000 copies requested so far. Is everyone cool with printing 1200 copies of the 47-page version on white paper with color-printed cover?
I will be making final doc edits and then ordering prints at some point between 2100 and 0100 EDT, unless someone hits the Andon button between now and then.
@Scimonster oh, in the left column only. Yeah, I see that now -- it looks like the first few lines are "lighter". But it's fine in the PDF, including on paper.
@IsaacMoses I mentioned earlier that the phrasing about the funding credits seemed a little off to me. I think it's because we start off with great thanks to SE, then drop down to the lower-level contributions (with an intro that implies we're going to thank all of them), and then ends with the bigger contributors. How do you feel about making that a smoother progression, like this:
"We are tremendously grateful to...challenge grant. The following project sponsors and partners provided extra funding support: (names) In addition, the following rose to the challenge and helped us collect the match and distribute books as widely as possible: (names)"
I'm not thrilled with that last bit ('helped us collect..."), but I couldn't come up with anything better. Maybe somebody else can?
Or maybe there's some way to adjust the wording of the current intro (the "rose to the challenge" part) to imply that these are only some of our donors and keep reading for more.
I might have mentioned it before, but anyways, i don't really like the colon after "You can answer:". It feels wrong. We don't introduce a quote here. Maybe use a period or ellipsis. (p4 in b)
@IsaacMoses the calendar reminder I set some weeks ago for "set up stamps.com account" just went off. So, just checking that you've done that or are going to soon so we can collect the coupon and you'll have the scale in time?
@IsaacMoses ok, thanks. If you've found something better (easier, more convenient, less expensive, whatever) then go for it! Stamps.com was the last one we talked about but that was never binding on us. :-)
@MonicaCellio maybe inverted? Thanks to these people for supporting. Thanks to these sponsors for offering extra support. Finally, super-thanks to SE for the challenge grant that helped everyone...
p14 - should the slashes in Hebrew be going forward or backward? I think, but i'm not sure, that i've seen ltr forward slashes (rtl backslashes) (/) in Hebrew. Again, i think so, but i'm not sure.
p14 -- maybe instead of "jake added", use "elucidated". I feel like we've used "added" a bunch, and could use a bit more variation. :) It also feels like an appropriate place, as jake is elucidating Isaac's answer, as opposed to just agreeing, and "btw there's also..."
p16 -- the i in Shemoneh Esrei in the big paragraph of yEz's answer is not italicized.
p17, Danny's point 2 -- i keep accidentally reading it as "Don’t plan on saying it at all." Maybe rearrange the sentence to avoid people stumbling on that.
Also, i've never seen "Pizmun". Google also doesn't have any relevant results for it. It should probably be changed to "Pizmon".
p18 - "For Sephardim, the Orot Sephardic Selihot (by R. Eliezer Toledano) writes the following:" -- "Orot ..." is clearly being used as a noun here, being the book name, but then it uses the verb "writes", with the book as it's subject. It sounds more grammatical to rearrange the sentence as "For Sephardim, R. Eliezer Toledano, in the Orot Sephardic Selihot, writes the following:"
pp21-22 -- the line separating the Q and A got pushed off onto a new line. I don't know if there's any way to fix that, or if it's even a problem...
p25 - do we need a link to Wikipedia's article on Kol Nidre (WP's spelling)?
It's midnight here and i can't concentrate any more, and it's too sad to listen to baseball (at least i'm not an Oakland fan!), so i'm leaving off at YK Maariv. Hopefully i'll finish proofreading tomorrow.
I will be making final doc edits and then ordering prints at some point between 2100 and 0100 EDT, unless someone hits the Andon button between now and then.
@Scimonster ^^^ this is not meant to apply pressure; just a heads-up on timing. Thank you very much for all your work on this!
