As a person who struggles daily with spelling and grammar, I'm hardly one to be throwing stones at that particular glass house. No matter how many times I check these weekly efforts, I (and others) find transgressions galore. It's not like I want to have misspellings, incorrect subjects and verbs that don't agree. It's not that I delight in typos that now seem obvious but which I didn't catch even on the third reading. That said, I welcome it when people point out my errors. One, I learn from them. And two, it proves that at the very least they are reading this space.
My excuse is that I am a one-man band. Once the writer (me) is done, it goes to the copy editor (me again) then to the style editor (yup, me) and finally to the executive editor (that would be me as well). In the wider world, where there are multiple skilled individuals and multiple sets of eyes scrutinizing the product, gaffes should be less common and are less forgivable.
Still, they do happen. Newspapers are particular susceptible to this. While there are multiple steps to insure accuracy, deadline pressures conspire to sometimes throw the train off the track. How else to explain a headline about the debut of the first baseball pitcher to throw with either arm rendered as "Amphibious Pitcher Make Debut." Or the science note "Human Brian Is Still Evolving." Or the continuation of a story about the NY Jets on another page:" Jets Patriots jumphead goes here barllskdjif fkdasd fg asdf."
But the most egregious errors would seem to be ones that go through monumental proofing, and still slip through. The latest example comes courtesy of the Republic of Ireland. More specifically it comes from An Post, which is the state operator of postal services in the Emerald Isle. Along with their responsibility for collecting and delivering the mail, they issue stamps to affix to letters and packages. And when you are creating ones that will be seen and licked by an entire country you would think that they would be proofed into the ground. Then again.
Timed to coincide with the recent 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a series of stamps was issued to commemorate spacepersons with Irish ancestry. The stamps feature images of various spacecraft along with the likeness of astronauts Cady Coleman, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eileen Collins. All good so far. But with Irish (or what we Yankees call Gaelic) being the official language of the country, the stamps bore their commemorative statements in both that and English. So under the "The 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing" was the phrase "Cothrom 50 Bliain na Chead Tuirlingthe ar an nGaelach."
Just one problem. The Irish word for moon is "gealach." But the stamp spelled it "gaelach." That transposition of letters changed the word from that thing orbiting our planet to a word meaning "attached to Irish or Irish culture." So effectively the stamp says in the country's native tongue "The 50th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Irish." The Sea of Tranquility was never so green.
At least it was caught early, and corrected in subsequent printings. Contrast that with what happened in Australia. In May it was revealed that on Australia's' new $50 banknote, which was released last year and bears a picture of Edith Cowan, the first female member of the Australian parliament, there was a misspelling in the background. What looks like a lawn behind Ms. Cowan is in actuality rows of text containing a quotation from her first speech to parliament. "It is a great responsibility to be the only woman here," is repeated numerous times. However each time the fifth word is rendered as "responsibilty" with a missing "i." Not a change in meaning, but an embarrassment to the national treasury, especially since the $50 bill is the most widely circulated denomination. And there are now 46 million copies of that error floating about the country.
Both errors, while embarrassing, aren't deal breakers. Still it is nice to get it right. After all, had Jackie Gleason made the same mistake as they did with the stamps, his famous come back to his wife would have taken on a different meaning: "Bang! Zoom! To the Irish, Alice!"
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to catch errors, but sometimes he Mrs. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
My excuse is that I am a one-man band. Once the writer (me) is done, it goes to the copy editor (me again) then to the style editor (yup, me) and finally to the executive editor (that would be me as well). In the wider world, where there are multiple skilled individuals and multiple sets of eyes scrutinizing the product, gaffes should be less common and are less forgivable.
Still, they do happen. Newspapers are particular susceptible to this. While there are multiple steps to insure accuracy, deadline pressures conspire to sometimes throw the train off the track. How else to explain a headline about the debut of the first baseball pitcher to throw with either arm rendered as "Amphibious Pitcher Make Debut." Or the science note "Human Brian Is Still Evolving." Or the continuation of a story about the NY Jets on another page:" Jets Patriots jumphead goes here barllskdjif fkdasd fg asdf."
But the most egregious errors would seem to be ones that go through monumental proofing, and still slip through. The latest example comes courtesy of the Republic of Ireland. More specifically it comes from An Post, which is the state operator of postal services in the Emerald Isle. Along with their responsibility for collecting and delivering the mail, they issue stamps to affix to letters and packages. And when you are creating ones that will be seen and licked by an entire country you would think that they would be proofed into the ground. Then again.
Timed to coincide with the recent 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a series of stamps was issued to commemorate spacepersons with Irish ancestry. The stamps feature images of various spacecraft along with the likeness of astronauts Cady Coleman, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eileen Collins. All good so far. But with Irish (or what we Yankees call Gaelic) being the official language of the country, the stamps bore their commemorative statements in both that and English. So under the "The 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing" was the phrase "Cothrom 50 Bliain na Chead Tuirlingthe ar an nGaelach."
Just one problem. The Irish word for moon is "gealach." But the stamp spelled it "gaelach." That transposition of letters changed the word from that thing orbiting our planet to a word meaning "attached to Irish or Irish culture." So effectively the stamp says in the country's native tongue "The 50th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Irish." The Sea of Tranquility was never so green.
At least it was caught early, and corrected in subsequent printings. Contrast that with what happened in Australia. In May it was revealed that on Australia's' new $50 banknote, which was released last year and bears a picture of Edith Cowan, the first female member of the Australian parliament, there was a misspelling in the background. What looks like a lawn behind Ms. Cowan is in actuality rows of text containing a quotation from her first speech to parliament. "It is a great responsibility to be the only woman here," is repeated numerous times. However each time the fifth word is rendered as "responsibilty" with a missing "i." Not a change in meaning, but an embarrassment to the national treasury, especially since the $50 bill is the most widely circulated denomination. And there are now 46 million copies of that error floating about the country.
Both errors, while embarrassing, aren't deal breakers. Still it is nice to get it right. After all, had Jackie Gleason made the same mistake as they did with the stamps, his famous come back to his wife would have taken on a different meaning: "Bang! Zoom! To the Irish, Alice!"
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to catch errors, but sometimes he Mrs. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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