‘MR FRED’S MISTEAKS’ AND OTHER ENTRIES IN JOSH FREED CONTEST
Our readers rose to the challenge when asked to find spelling errors in a column
On Feb. 25, humour writer Josh Freed threw himself on his sword — and the spelling equivalent of a wood chipper — in his regular Saturday Gazette column.
Earlier that month, he had used the word “stair” instead of “stare,” and ended up on the receiving end of considerable sniping, carping and yes, joshing, from faithful fans.
His response: a column headlined “When it comes to misteaks, four give and forget” that deliberately misspelled a legion of words. Our editing team promised a Montreal Gazette Hockey Inside/Out mug to whoever found the most mistakes.
The results are in. And the correct number is seven. Or 14. Or even 40, depending on how you quantify the errors, according to the readers who contacted us.
There were even more suggested figures among the couple of dozen letters and emails we received about the column. There were also some of the funniest missives I have received as a newspaper editor.
The headline on the column you are reading, “Mr Fred’s misteaks,” comes from one of those emails. It was written by Robert Filler of St-Laurent, who tallied seven spelling errors.
Gordon Hogg of St-Bruno (he found six misspelled words and two grammatical errors) sent us an email we had to run through a decoder ring to decipher. Part of it appears below.
Eye red yore peace in Saturday’s Gazette, and confess two being in ore! While I’m never shore weather ewe no watt to right or why sometimes, please take hart that yore spelling is always grate and the stile seams ok. Sum folks may want content as well, butt knot me. Love yaw column, can’t weight to sea watt ewe come up with next week.
Michael Fortin emailed an exhaustive commentary that made me reread the original Josh Freed column line by line. My favourite sentence in his email. “That ... paragraph felt like one big run-on sentence. I once wrote a program that only spit out run-on sentences, and that sounded like something it would write.” Ouch, on behalf of Josh and his editors.
We also heard from Phyllis Amber (13 errors), who described herself as one of Josh’s faithful “ghastly readers,” and Michael Sin of Ville LaSalle. He began his letter: “The motto is normally ‘forgive, forget, forge ahead.’ Riding your coattails, I would change it to: ‘fourgive, fourget, fourage ahead.” He did not tally the mistakes.
A couple of conclusions we came to after reading all the entries. No. 1: There was no real right answer. No. 2: Gazette readers are witty, inventive and care passionately about the English language.
So in lieu of picking a “winner,” we threw the names of the people who contacted us into a hat and pulled one out. Then because we were so delighted by the missives, we pulled another one out. Veronica Sangster of Pointe-Claire and the aforementioned Gordon Hogg will receive a Hockey Inside/Out mug. Gordon, please email me your civic address, since we neglected to ask readers to include that kind of practical information with their submissions.
Thank you all for an extremely pleasant two weeks of reading.
As for Josh, his column will be back in next Saturday’s print edition. We’ll run it through a spellchecker before we publish it.
There were also some of the funniest missives I have received as a newspaper editor.