Words and Stuff
Grumblers, like the poor, are always with us, and I try not to let the frustrations of modern life make me join their chorus too audibly. In one matter, though, fings really ain’t wot they used t’be: misprints.
Time was when you could open a newspaper and be sure of finding a misprint, sometimes several, often an amusing one among them. I suppose it’s bad taste but it can be cheering to read that ‘debris from the collapse of the Harbor Freeway bride caused a huge traffic jam south of Los Angeles’. In the 1960s the Guardian had so many misprints that it became known as the Grauniad. It still is in Private Eye.
Those were the days of bolshie compositors. Nowadays their work is done by computers that alert authors and sub-editors to bad spelling, though they don’t always catch a misprint that produces another word, correctly spelt but not intended, which may result in an embarrassing correction: ‘Our report in yesterday’s edition should have said that Joe Bloggs was on drums, not on drugs.’ Sometimes computers autocorrect, which can elicit a smile. I enjoyed the amazing comeback of the small tortoiseshell butterfly that delighted ‘conversationists’, according to the Times, and the same paper’s reference to the Institute of Police Sciences in Paris, which was surely Sciences Po, the Paris Institute of Political Studies. But neither brought forth a guffaw.
Conformity in spelling is a fairly new concern. Shakespeare signed his surname in five different ways. Yet misprints are far from new. The sensible injunction ‘First catch your hare’ in Mrs Glasse’s cookery book, published in 1747, should have read ‘First case your hare’, ‘case’ here meaning ‘skin’. Some would have us believe that the right to ‘bear arms’ enshrined in the American constitution was a misprint for the right to ‘bare arms’, a provision needed to protect real Americans from Puritan views on immodesty, though the National Rifle Association is unconvinced.
Misprints can certainly have lasting effects. The painters Alberto Morrocco and his son, Leon, would have been Marroccos but for the work of a signwriter over 100 years ago. When Alberto’s father came from Italy to Aberdeen to set up an ice-cream shop, the signwriter spelt his name ‘Morrocco’ in letters a foot high. No one could be bothered to correct it.
A similar tale lies behind the name of Lands’ End, the clothing company. It was meant to be Land’s End, but it was considered cheaper to change the name than the misprinted version in the first catalogue. Google too was born of a mistake. Its intended name was Googol, the word for 10100 or ten followed by 100 zeros, but that was misspelt, leading to the choice of Google.
Misprints also make their way into fiction and thence, occasionally, into the real world. ‘Imogen’ is a case in point: the name probably derives from a misprinted ‘Innogen’ in the folio of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. The story of Lieutenant Kijé – pure fiction – is more elaborate, most memorably told in a 1934 film with music by Prokofiev. Kijé was created by a clerk’s slip of the pen. He proves useful as a fall guy to take the blame for an offence against the tsar. Flogging, banishment, a pardon, marriage to a princess, promotion to general, death and disgrace follow. The tsar never discovers the truth.
Will the slip of the tongue that created Nambia last year produce a similarly vivid story for this African country? President Trump mentioned it twice at the UN General Assembly, and was full of praise for its health system. In the age of fake news, anything is possible. And we should remember that misprinted stamps tend to be much more valuable than the genuine article.