Being picky takes time

To twist a phrase a little harder than is probably wise: If it's true that "children say the darndest things" — and it is — there's no reason to doubt me when I tell you "editors learn the darndest things."
That's what hit me a few weeks ago while editing a memoir for a new client.
I got the assignment around dinnertime Tuesday and the deadline was noon Saturday.
I found myself looking up words I'd never given a second thought. Usually, it was for how they're written, not what they mean. Particularly odd to me was looking up "god-damn," one of many sailor-esque phrases the author's mom was fond of. (His comparison, not mine.)
Sorry, but I don't even say it, it came as no surprise that how to write it eluded me.
Capitalization and hyphenation were up for grabs, but tense turned out to be the bigger question. Think about it. Wouldn't it make sense that it would be past tense, if it's literal and someone were meaning that something was damned by God? With that logic, I changed the guy's present tense to past.
But, I added it to a list of things to run through the Chicago Manual of Style before I sent the manuscript back.
Hmmm ... Seems present tense was correct. Or might be.
I was surprised to discover that Chicago style is more wishywashy than others I've used. So I switched to another rule of editing: Don't change it if you don't have to.
As I was going along, through 86,000 words, I also learned about awhile and a while. What's the difference? Well, it seems that the one-word version is never preceded by a preposition; and the two-word version can be.
Why?
No time to find out. I had a deadline.
I also found myself on a word search, of sorts; 86,000 words seemed like a lot, so I checked to see how many are in "War and Peace." Okay, not so bad. Tolstoy took more than 560,000 to get the job done. And the Bible? 181,253.
Then there was shut-eye. My sense that it needed a hyphen sent me online and landed me in wiki-land.
Looking for the shut-eye that means "nap,"I found its other meaning: "In the lingo of stage magicians, illusionists, and mentalists, a shut eye is a performer who becomes so adept at the illusion of mind reading that the performer comes to believe that he or she actua... " I read no further. I had a deadline to meet.
And that I did, by several hours.
Maybe now I should go back and really learn some new things.