Re: lisp/ChangeLog coding system

[Richard Stallman]

    > I just created a record in
    > my own change log and then copy-pasted it to the emacs changelog.
    > All within the same session.

    If you did that in the same Emacs session, X selections should have not 
    been involved: Emacs yanks its own selections directly from the kill 
    ring, IIRC.

And that by itself should not have affected the rest of the file.
But here's an idea for what might have happened.  If the text that
was yanked used some other character set that looks similar
on the screen, that could have affected how the whole file
got saved afterwards.