Wonder of blunders
Because of a feline medical emergency, I put the column I was writing for this week on hold; I’d rather not give you something that’s not quite soup yet. I offer instead an updated version of this column, originally published March 26, 2014.
Copy editors are some of the most underappreciated employees at most publications, partially because their job is basically to be unnoticeable. They correct grammar and mistakes in copy so ( hopefully) readers can glide easily through stories without crashing into a wall. They are the reader’s last defense.
They get noticed, though, when there’s a mistake, such as a misspelling in a headline … especially if it happens to be on the front page of a section.
Even though we strive for perfection, we’re human and make mistakes— but have you ever wondered why that happens? At the risk of sounding like I’m defending myself or my colleagues, one explanation is that of the brain filling in gaps.
And when people like me see the boneheaded errors we’ve made, there’s the concussion that follows banging our heads repeatedly on our desks.
It’s one of the reasons someone other than the writer should review what’s been written, as fresh eyes might catch what our own didn’t.
Often the problem will be an extra word dropped into a sentence that no one notices till it’s actually in print. Other times, it may be a missing small but significant word, such as “not,” which is why we use “innocent” rather than “not guilty” in court stories.
It’s best to keep a sense of humor and be able to laugh about those mistakes that don’t really hurt anybody. Somewhere I believe I still have a copy of the edition of my college newspaper that, in a cutline for a picture of Department of Public Safety officers, just happened to have dropped the “l” in the department’s name. Since the office was across the street from the largest men’s dorm on campus, most of us chose to see the humor in that error. After all, we didn’t mess it up.
Some researchers blame technology and innovations like auto- correct for our having become a bit lazy. Of course, it’s things like auto- correct that have spawned so many Internet memes and more than a few websites ( and split up God only knows how many couples). And without auto- correct, many office workers would be at least a little more bored while Web- surfing on the job.
If you’re like me, though, seeing those squiggles underneath a word you know is spelled correctly, or even worse, the word changed to what the program thinks you meant, drives you crazy, and makes you a bit more careful about what you write ( though cursing still ensues if I happen to hit send just as I notice a bad auto- correct).
But all the caution in the world won’t help when your brain decides to have a little fun with you.
Kathryn Schulz explores the wide world of mistakes in her book, Being Wrong, noting that the brain unconsciously fills in gaps for us, and sometimes gets it wrong. That would be one of the reasons we sometimes don’t notice that we’ve repeated a word or used the wrong word, such as “since” rather than “sense.” If we’re lucky, someone else will notice before it gets too far, like, say, all over the state.
But we’re not always lucky, like the Chronicle Herald in Nova Scotia, which spelled its own name wrong in a headline in 2013, or the New Hampshire Valley News, whose misspelled name was on its front page in 2008.
You might have seen the viral email about “typoglycemia,” which says Cambridge researchers have found that most people can still read jumbled- up words as long as the first and last letters are in their proper places. Despite the fact that it’s an urban legend/ Internet meme, it does show how our brains can help or betray us.
Plus, you have to admit that “typoglycemia” is a pretty good name to give to that garble that we type when we’re tired.
Yuka Igarashi, Granta magazine’s managing editor, calls the brain the original auto- corrector, and notes that urban legend in an August 2013 piece on The Guardian’s Mind Your Language blog. She employs that story and Schulz’s work in an effort to show that copy editors have to be abnormal humans in order to do their jobs.
Anyone who knows a copy editor can confirm that we can be a weird lot at times, and that if one of us starts talking about misplaced modifiers, it’s best to smile and back away before breakable objects start flying.
Editors have to constantly battle the brain’s tendency to make us see things that aren’t there or ignore things that are. Sometimes we may use strategies such as reading stories from the end to fool gray matter into reading every word that’s actually there. I tend to use the trick I learned in my radio/ TV days, reading out loud. And if I happen to be having a discussion with myself when someone walks by, I can always say I’m editing.
But still, mistakes happen, not just to us, but to everyone. Even the Vatican.
In Fall 2013, 6,200 commemorative medallions created to celebrate the papacy of Francis were recalled after it was discovered that the Latin inscription on the medals produced by the Italian State Mint talked of “Lesus” rather than “Jesus.”
Which reminds me of something Jesus said about casting the first stone. Or was that Lesus?