You have to keep your eye on the job because words are very sly, the rubbishy ones go into hiding and you have to dig them out—repetition, synonyms, things that simply don’t mean anything.
[Isaak Babel]

My friend Lauren Greenspan may just have improved on Chesterton. She quoted to me, earlier tonight, a line from his essay “A Piece of Chalk” inTremendous Trifles, which, when I looked it up, ran like this:

“Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”

But when Lauren quoted it, she said, “Chastity is not something tepid; is something burning, like Joan of Arc.” I think I’d keep “flaming.” But other than that I think Lauren’s version is not only an improvement, but an improvement precisely in the spirit of what G. K. meant.