What Does RFA Mean?

RFA is the single most important piece of jargon at the OEDILF: it stands for “ready for approval”, or “ready for final approval” if we take each Workshopping Editor’s RFA as an individual act of approval. I’ve outlined the basic concept when discussing the approval process, so here I’ll focus on some of its nuances. Given the huge number of Tentative limericks at the OEDILF at any one point, it’s something of an act of faith to leave an RFA—faith that you’re helping get a worthy piece to its final destination, no matter how long it will take, and that your opinion as editor will be taken into account.

Asking for complete consistency from everyone involved, though, is a forlorn hope. We’ve gone through many different permutations of editorial and writing teams at the OEDILF, as people come and go and come back again. That will continue, just as our thoughts on our standards and norms will continue to evolve. Even those who joined a few weeks ago will have seen their own standards change in that time; I know mine did in my first weeks and months at the site, and I was no newcomer to limerick-writing.

There’s nothing wrong with expecting the best writing from our writers, but when our own idea of “the best” is that liable to change, it’s wise to consider other factors too. All of us will have slightly different RFA standards—some are more nitpicking about punctuation than others, some want encyclopaedic definitions, some want good punchlines, and so on. We sometimes apply different workshopping standards to different pieces depending on who wrote them and what stage they’re at. What with all of the OEDILF limericks I’ve given my RFA, I’d be surprised if anyone agreed with me on all of them.

Requiring or expecting that a limerick only be RFA’d by anyone once it reaches its Platonic ideal form is to assume that we all agree on what that ideal is. But we aren’t omnipotent; all we have is our own individual judgement about what’s before us at this instant: I think this is ready for approval; or, not. That inevitably means that some editors will RFA before others. Otherwise it becomes the stand-off at the end of Reservoir Dogs, with everyone waiting to see who shoots first—for each and every limerick, thousands of times over.

All one can ask is that, whatever your personal RFA standards may be, try to apply them as consistently and even-handedly as you can at any particular point in time. Those standards almost certainly will change over time, and occasionally you may be a bit too lax or too demanding, but that’s as much as anyone can ask of you. All you have ask yourself is, “Do I think this piece, at this stage, is good enough to join the existing approved pieces?” If yes, click RFA; if no, don’t. If you don’t, it would be nice if you explained why and tried to work through it with the author, but it isn’t compulsory.

We should also try to apply the same standards in de-RFAing as in RFAing, and remove our own RFAs if we think a change has left a piece no longer “good enough”, even if it does make things a little awkward.

Good Enough?

What does “good enough” mean? For me, it isn’t “adequate, okay, it’ll do”—it means “good enough to join the other Approved limericks in its current form”. Sometimes I’ll say that a piece is RFA as is and click the button, but will nonetheless suggest possible changes to it; it’s reasonable to raise an issue at the same time as RFAing if you think that the current version is approvable.

At other times I’ll RFA despite other editors having expressed their misgivings or made suggestions to which the author hasn’t yet responded. Consider here whose idea of “good enough” applies; everyone else could be commenting furiously and I could still be thinking, “I disagree: this version is still RFA in my book,” and allowing my RFA to stand. I’m not going to keep commenting “still RFA” after each and every suggestion anyone else makes; that way lies madness. Just because someone else doesn’t agree with my RFA doesn’t mean that mine isn’t valid: RFAs mean “This WE thinks that this piece is ready for approval in its current form”, not “This limerick has received another objective indication from the OEDILF that it has reached its hypothetical ideal form”.

If the author has made changes that aren’t what you would have done, but have made their preference clear, and yet you still think the piece is good enough to join the other approved limericks, then it’s reasonable to RFA their piece. I do this all the time, because the majority of OEDILF authors are American, and American pronunciations, rhythms and idioms aren’t the same ones I would use in my “ideal forms”—yet I can see how they would work for Americans, and as long as there’s no great potential for confusion I’ll RFA them. I’ll RFA jokes and puns that I don’t think are the funniest ever because I know that senses of humour are highly subjective and have a good sense of where mine differs from the norm. Is that me short-changing the author? No, that’s me trying to be a good fellow-citizen by not implying that their sense of humour sucks.

As a front-door editor, I’ll often be the first to RFA a particular piece. I do so on the understanding that more editors will look at it before it gets to approval stage, and that there will be opportunities to iron out the nuances along the way. That doesn’t mean that anything goes: I look for basic standards of punctuation, grammar, OEDILF formatting, and a passable minimum definition (or some other compensating virtue) before I’ll RFA, and I don’t click that button until I’m satisfied that they’re met. But my RFA doesn’t always mean “Wow! This is the best limerick ever!”—I’ve RFA’d thousands of OEDILF limericks, and they can’t all be the best limericks ever.

What it does mean is that the person who wrote the piece knows from my RFA that I’m in their corner, and will be keeping an eye on it throughout its (often long) journey to final approval. That can be a valuable confidence-boost for newer members; it says to them, “Hey, you’re on the right track here,” at a time when they may be wondering whether the OEDILF is worth pursuing. I know that a similar comment from our Editor-in-Chief in August 2004 made all the difference to me in deciding whether to stick around. They also know that if the debate gets complicated, the editor who has already RFA’d will be helping to support their side of it; and if that editor changes his or her mind, the author might take it less badly, because they’ll know that the editor is at least partially happy with the piece.

There will always be a tension between encouraging the best work and encouraging those who produce, or could potentially produce, that work. It’s important to maintain certain minimum standards in respect of the former, but if we set those standards too high we’ll end up scaring off—or pissing off—everyone who might help us meet them.

Sending a Message

It’s worth thinking about what RFAs mean to us as authors. They’re the main form of concrete, quantifiable approval we get at the OEDILF. Sure, there’s the occasional nice comment, which is great; but most of our experience as authors being workshopped is of having our work picked over, deconstructed and critiqued. That might help produce a body of Approved limericks that are the best we can collectively make them, but it can be hard on authors. So the gradual incrementation of RFAs is an essential element of positive feedback to counterbalance the negative; and the gradually increasing tally of one’s own Approved limericks is more important yet.

This isn’t about reaching Limerick Nirvana, it’s about building up a huge collective body of work one piece at a time, with a rate of progress that provides sufficient incentive for authors to keep writing and editors to keep workshopping. To me, that means accepting that some percentage of my RFAs will apply to work that I wouldn’t have written exactly that way myself. There are countless cases where I’ve RFA’d and STC’d stuff after an author has said they don’t like my suggestion. Sometimes I even end up playing down my own suggestions to boost an author’s sense of confidence in their own judgement.

But if I tell someone they’ve got a grocer’s apostrophe and they refuse to change it, they’ll have to hack into the OEDILF server to get a speedysnail RFA, and it won’t actually be mine. I try not to give RFAs out unless I think something’s in the kind of shape I would set to confirming as an Associate Editor. That means making comments about minor points of detail that would have to be fixed by an AE, and refraining from “RFAing in advance” in all but rare cases. From the author’s point of view, that might feel like they’re being held to ransom; well, okay—in some sense, they are, if it bothers them that they don’t have my personal RFA. But if it makes it to STC stage without those changes, the odds are they’ll have the same discussion with an AE anyway. I see my job as a Workshopping Editor as being to smooth out as many of the lumps as possible before it gets to that stage.

An RFA is a message of approval from the Workshopping Editor to the author, but also to the Associate Editors who set our limericks on the final road to approval. An RFA effectively says that the Workshopping Editor believes this limerick needs no further work to be approved. It may still benefit from further work, but it shouldn’t need it.

This might seem like nitpicking — what does it matter, one might say, when the AEs can edit those minor details at the final stage anyway — but it helps all of us when authors and Workshopping Editors send only finished work up to the AEs. Approving a piece that needs edits takes significantly longer than the single click of the button needed to Set To Confirming an acceptable piece — often because the AE has to ask the author what he or she meant or to check that a change is acceptable, which slows everything down by hours or days and takes up the time of everyone involved in that workshop.

That’s Not Funny

We’ve never claimed that the measure of each and every verse at the OEDILF is how funny it is. There are many different measures.

My own principle is that “Ready For Approval” means approval by the OEDILF, not by yours truly. Does it meet the formatting standards, the various concerns of rhyme, rhythm and metre, punctuation and so on, and is it sufficiently understandable? For me, that means not insisting on an Author’s Note just because something more could be explained; not insisting on a pronunciation guide unless the metre or rhymes are truly baffling without one; and not requiring that the joke or its phrasing are the same as I would have written. There’s nothing more subjective than humour. Sure, sometimes I’ll suggest ways to improve a punchline or other humorous or poetic aspects of a piece—in other words, to help make it the best it can be within the parameters set by the author—but my RFA doesn’t hinge on it, because authors’ senses of humour are their own, and it’s not my place to turn their voices into mine. If that starts to happen, we’re entering co-author territory, where I tread carefully nowadays.

Plenty of editors do pass by limericks for no other reason than that the joke isn’t their favourite, but I find that slightly perplexing, just as when people pass by an unfamiliar rhyme that doesn’t work in their accent without bothering to pop in to ask what’s going on. Authors might not even know there’s an issue, and the piece can end up stuck in the backlog when it needn’t be.

Saying that any joke “doesn’t work” is obviously a subjective judgement, quite different from the objective ways we can say that the formatting or punctuation or grammar don’t work. When I’m faced with such pieces, I’ll sometimes suggest alternatives, but usually only ones that develop the author’s own ideas; I don’t suggest a whole new limerick that shares only their first line. If they don’t like my subjective suggestions and there’s nothing objectively wrong with the piece, I’ll RFA it, because I don’t see the OEDILF’s standards for approval as being predicated on how I would have written any specific limerick. If I think something shouldn’t be approved by the OEDILF, I don’t RFA it, but if I think it should, I feel obliged to.

Refraining from judging other people’s senses of humour does mean that I end up RFAing limericks I don’t personally find hilarious, but that’s an unavoidable aspect of our collaborative mission. We take all comers as writers and try to help them write the best work that they can. That they can. If this were my own personal playground, I might be much more choosy, but we would lose a lot of limericks that I don’t find hilarious but lots of other people love. The OEDILF isn’t “Speedysnail Presents the Funniest Definitional Limericks Ever”.

All of this is far from reducing everything to the lowest common denominator. We can all point to pieces that get through with fairly pedestrian gags, but those often aren’t the ones that only the contributor finds funny. An inherent part of our mission of defining every word is that we’ll have many, many limericks on the most obscure subjects imaginable. A particular limerick might be so obscure that it will only ever seem funny to three people. Does that mean it isn’t worth submitting? Far from it, I’d say, because the OEDILF (if it’s ever complete) will be the only place on the web where someone can type in any word under the sun and find a limerick written just for them, even if they’re one of only three people in the world who would enjoy it. If our system stands in the way of that because our random batch of editors don’t find the piece as hilarious as those three people, we’ve failed those three people and the writer, and ultimately we’re the poorer for it.

I’ve written on lots of Australian words here, even though we only have a couple of other Australian editors. I can’t rely on them to see my pieces, so I need non-Australians to RFA them, even though they might not find them as funny as Aussies would. (In one particular case I can be sure that at least half the WEs who RFA’d it only got half of the pun, because not many Americans know what Aussies mean by roots.)

If everyone took an “I have to find this hilarious to RFA” line, we might only have 4600 approved limericks rather than 46000. But we wouldn’t have that many, I’ll bet, because most people would have got sick of the whole thing long ago. We don’t do this for money; we do it in the hope that each particular limerick will find its audience. But by the project’s very nature, that audience will often be vanishingly small. If we as gatekeepers had insisted that we were the only audience that mattered, who as writers would have kept going for this long?

Reworked from forum and workshop comments from January 2005–August 2008.