You're probably a copy editor if:

- You've lost sleep over your decision to phrase a headline the way you did.

- You'd know what I was talking about if I shrieked: "CRAP! I moved the cursor too fast in Quark!"

- You can quote selections from the AP Stylebook, the way kids at VBS and church camp can quote entire selections from the Bible.

- The Web site www.apostropheabuse.com makes you laugh. And sometimes cry.

- The Fake AP Stylebook on Twitter has you in stitches.

- You've gazed longingly, covetously at another newspaper's use of a font.

- You feel empowered when you get to use a 100-point headline. Like you're shouting at your readers.

- You get nervous when the redesign consultant tells you to use more white space.

- You settle arguments with a pica pole.

- You have nightmares about missing deadline by hours and hours - and you wake up in a cold sweat, out of breath and with a palpitating heart.

- You are unashamed of your love of the comma and your passion to see it used correctly.

- The phrase "It's not possessive!" totally makes sense to you. It may make you laugh, too.

- You read dictionaries for fun.

- You have no problem spending 20 minutes searching a thesaurus for the right combination of synonyms to get the alliterative headline you want.

- You view having to jump the obituaries to another page as being very near a moral dilemma.

- You've gotten into a shouting match with someone over the correct usage of a word - and you passionately meant everything you yelled.

- You can look at a space and tell whether it's closer to 4 picas or 4½.

- You know the key commands for ½, ¼ and ¾ off the top of your head.

- You've had your intelligence, your patriotism, your humanity and your morality questioned in one anonymous and badly spelled letter to the editor.

- Liberals accuse you of being a Fascist, and conservatives think you must have a shrine to Mao somewhere on your desk; when this happens in the same day, you consider your work to have been extremely well-balanced, and you can only hope for the same outcome tomorrow.

- Complete strangers feel quite comfortable telling you what an idiot you are when it comes to doing your job but are "quite offended" when you return the favor.

- People who haven't read your newspaper in years tell you how you "missed the boat" by "not covering" your front-page story.

- You've considered writing a rant to the fine Quark folk, telling them how much it ticks you off that you can't do ANYTHING while a PDF is printing.

- You view the ellipsis and the em dash as your friends, and you try to use them as often as is reasonably possible.

- People say: "But I've never seen your name in the newspaper" when you tell them what you do for a living.

- You're extremely disappointed that you can't really yell "STOP THE PRESSES!" because that's one of the reasons you wanted to work in editorial in the first place — the way kids want to be train engineers just so they can pull the whistle.

- You can read a story sans byline and know who wrote it and where the mistakes will be.