As a slave to print media, I’ve had more experiences than I care to think about committing the foulest of fouls: typos.
Just last Tuesday, our front page was missing its sports header and instead went to print with a row of three neat capital “X”s, mocking me with their infinite irreversibility, where instead I should have typed a phrase hinting at what’s in the sports section.
Sure, sending placeholder text to print isn’t the worst mistake one can make in the print world, but it sure does stink when it happens — especially given how much time and effort we spend on the little details.
The sheer quantity of information from which we build a story is sometimes astounding.
Then there’s the process of actually weighing what can go in, and what must go on the chopping block. That’s a process everyone and their dog has an opinion on.
All that information must be sorted quickly as we are always on deadline. With only a handful of people at the helm of this twice-weekly paper, it’s simply inevitable that some mistakes will make it to print.
Several months ago, the Merritt Herald (OK, OK, it was I) mistakenly called the city’s Directional Signage Committee the “sinage” committee, which is extremely misleading.
Contrary to what the misnomer may suggest, the committee does not direct people on matters of sin.
Last week, I discovered I am the victim of a typo in a Merritt Herald publication. In the Connector phone directory, my name appears on the very first page as Wessle. The horror!
Many of us have been victims or inflictors of typos, and it’s not particularly fun on either side of the keyboard.
It could be worse, though, and sometimes sourcing helpful examples of exactly how it could be worse is reassuring.
From Australia’s Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, a correction ran that clarified the number of pigs floating in the Dawson River.
As it turns out, the reporter must have misheard her or his source as saying “30,000 pigs” when really the person said “30 sows and pigs.” Sure enough, the mistaken number of pigs floating in the river was the version that made it to print.
How about this example from the Australian, which learned the power of punctuation the hard way: there’s a difference between quoting someone as saying “It’s not like 25 years ago. I was killing everybody” and “It’s not like 25 years ago I was killing everybody.”
It’s subtle, but it’s important.
Sometimes, even banal corrections could use some clarification.
The New York Times must have been having a rough week in March, because it had to print a correction for its correction. The original correction mistakenly attributed the incorrect information to a story which ran in the March 10 edition of that paper. However, in the next edition, it was corrected again to apologize for the mistake in the original story that ran on March 11.
As much as they torture me, typos are a necessary evil.
After all, without them, this space would be blank.
