... I should watch 10 hours of sifting through legal issues and evidence when you can't even spell "crime" in the large letters of the banner ad you bought at the top of the New York Times website? Repeated in the sidebar:
How is it even possible not to see that error?
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39 comments:
Typos are invisible in the edit window, usually. You see them right away once it's expanded.
Paris
in the
the Spring
Mias-spellers lives matter. Ok, OK. Just wait until I get my other cataract done next month.
Goodreads has a true cime genre.
I'm seeing an increasing number of typographical and grammatical errors in printed text everywhere.
The reason is cost-cutting.
Faced with competition from the New Media and from self-published eBooks, publishers and advertising companies are getting rid of their copyeditors. These days, authors think that all they need is Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker. Who needs editors anymore?
I should know. I'm a copyeditor, and it's a dying profession.
Yesterday, I bought some body wash at the supermarket, and on the back, it says this:
"Its creamy lather takes away dirt and odor leaving your skin feeling smooth and smell great."
I blame the ADHD generation. No attention to detail. Slow down, kids! And do one thing at a time! Double check your work!
I have a question for Althouse, Madison Man and others who have worked with and around writing for decades. Has it always been this way? I get the impression that seeing errors everywhere is a new thing, but is it? My husband gripes all the time while working that accomplished professionals with advanced degrees write emails full of errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation that should embarrass a middle schooler. My local news stations' reporters post stories in their Facebook feeds with the same kind of juvenile mistakes (you're/your; its/it's; subject/verb disagreement, etc). I saw a statement written by a local charter middle school director that contained the phrase "....will continue to hold down the fort on Tuesday's so I can continue my Council duties...." This woman has a master's degree in education and serves on our city council. Reading the materials produced by student activists at elite colleges makes me cringe-not just at the poor quality of thought and expression, but also at the mechanics of the writing itself. Are we truly getting dumber in our use of language, or is this nothing new?
P.S. Preemptively--blog comments are different than writing produced in a professional or educational capacity. ;)
The bet the reason for most typos is The Need For Speed.
This is (for once) a typo that Spellcheck will catch, so it's especially odd.
Use the hyphen and spellcheck will miss ignore the word.
Goes to show human beings are overrated. Time to bring in AI ad writers.
You're used to working in the legal field where proofreaders are employed in large numbers to read and re-read. This is SOP in the legal field because it is so incredibly wealthy.
Does not happen in artistic fields (and advertising is one) because the bottomless wallet does not exist.
I worked in both fields. Everything is read and re-read in legal. In advertising and in the commercial arts, the text is read once by the guy who produced it and then the product goes out the door.
Customers in the advertising and commercial arts world will not pay for redundant proofreading.
Heh, at least, in the Internet age, we can see by their mistakes how illiterate they are. Before it was all spoken BS and highly edited text.
Pols have to be really careful if doing their own social media. You really need a literate aide for that.
Oh the horror, the grammar police are all over it. Yet, I wonder how many of them will text while driving today and get killed, but their text will be grammatically correct. I'd like to be the one to misspel the phrases on their grave stone.
Yet, I wonder how many of them will text while driving today and get killed, but their text will be grammatically correct.
Hunh? What does one have to do with the other?
Mail gimp.
C-I-L-L kill my landlord!
I often wonder if such editing is done by college sophomore interns.
They hired a graduate of Detroit's school system.
I was taught by nuns. Most 'grammar stuff' leaps out and grabs me by the throat. Obvious typo or not, I find it distracting. And I know I've hit the publish button only to realize I missed something - THAT really strangles me. I also know that I'm slowly losing my edge in the written, grammar-perfect world. Perhaps I do not study, or practice, enough anymore.
Maybe we need more nuns teaching grammar/English? At least employ nuns in the copyeditor and proofreading fields if 'nuns in public schools' infringes on that separation of church/state thing.
How is it even possible not to see that error?
Well, there is a little something to the whole word theory - but that's for experienced readers - phonics is the only method of teaching reading.
In a not so dissimilar way people can miss whole words - not notice that the word "the" has been repeated twice (usually at the end of one line and the beginning of the next.)
rhhardin said...1/21/16, 7:42 AM Typos are invisible in the edit window, usually. You see them right away once it's expanded. They scroll off the bottom of the screen.
Also you notice things differently when lines are wordwrapped differently.
The mistake is i quotes. Perhaps it is accurate. (sic)
One of my Sheet Music books has a song called "Will the Circle Be Unborken." (Actually, its more of a how to play the guitar book.)
Sammy Finkelman said...
"...phonics is the only method of teaching reading."
Nonsense. Phonics would work if English were spelled phonetically, but it ain't. Hukd ohn fonix werkd four mee!
Actually, fluent readers often gloss over mistakes like "cime" that the barely literate and dyslexic, in their slowness and focus on individual letters and words, catch more readily. I'm told there's some study or other that proves this. I'd Google it if I cared enough.
"hink that all they need is Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammar checker."
That is awful and I wonder what idiot wrote it back when Word was being composed. I miss-spelled Paul Ehrlich's name in my history of medicine. I notice that the spell checker here doesn't like that spelling. I suspect the typo came from writing the book in Word and I missed it. I actually paid an editor to go through the whole book manuscript and she missed it. Well, it went into pdf and then into print. The book has sold about 30,000 copies and I finally turned it over to Amazon POD and it still sells a few hundred copies a month ten years after I published it. It would cost too much to do a new edition and eliminate the few typo still in the text. Of course some jerk did an Amazon review and gave it only two stars because of that miss spelling.
Oh well. The checks still clear (actually auto-deposit.).
fluent readers often gloss over mistakes like "cime"
Because we are fluent readers. Learning to read phonetically gives you the basis to become a fluent reader. You don't sound out every word once you master the word, but first you need to master the word. In addition, if you know phonetics, you can sound out a unfamiliar word.
As for English not being spelled phonetically, you are claiming that letters and letter combinations don't have associated sounds? Wow! And here I've been thinking that T has a different sound than Th, which has a different sound that a, e, i, o and u and sometimes y.
And yes, I know that C and K can be pronounced the same, and some letters are silent. And that the pronunciation of some vowels can change depending on whether or not the word ends with an e. And some words are borrowed from foreign languages with little to no change in their pronunciation. But English is a language with an alphabet. It is not a pictogram based language like Chinese.
"I worked in both fields. Everything is read and re-read in legal. In advertising and in the commercial arts, the text is read once by the guy who produced it and then the product goes out the door."
I've worked in advertising. I worked at J. Walter Thompson. A lot of money is spent on advertising, and this mistake is beyond egregious.
Oh, Netflix! You spend all this money on an advertisement and make such a conspicuous typo...
It's a quote attributed to The Atlantic. If the error actually appeared in The Atlantic, could Netflix change it in a quote? If it didn't, can The Atlantic sue Netflix? These are the questions that should occur to legal minds.
I can't believe the NYT would allow a mistake to get through!
Perhaps "cime" isn't a typo, and the show is "A gripping true-Center for International Media Ethics tale."
My English-teacher wife told me to read anything I want to spell check backwards. That technique would catch "cime" immediately.
I was also taught by nuns. For all the bad press the pre-Vatican II nun has received, she was a formidable teacher of the three R's.
Michael K,
It might not matter if you did put out a second edition.
I believe that reviews on Amazon don't specify a particular edition.
So if your book gets bad reviews, even if you roll out a new edition, the bad reviews remain, and potential readers won't know those problems were corrected.
Whereas software reviews are usually relative to a particular version.
Don't worry. If enough people start spelling it "cime," the Descriptivists over at language log will eventually call it good English, as they have done with "judgement" for "judgment" and "foregone" for "forgone." Descriptivists have no notion of proper English and insist that acceptable usage is determined by what people actually say.
For that reason, those few of us who still care about the English language need to be diligent in aborting such bad English when first it rears its ugly embryonic head. Kudos Althouse!
Descriptivists have no notion of proper English and insist that acceptable usage is determined by what people actually say.
For that reason, those few of us who still care about the English language need to be diligent in aborting such bad English when first it rears its ugly embryonic head. Kudos Althouse!
Hah! As one of the very few who still care about Proto-Indo-European, I sneer at all of you and your corrupted, bastardized "languages"!
I worked for several years on a project basis for Martin Scorcese's multimedia studio, primarily producing fall lineup promo CDs for ABC TV's national affiliates. Big time money, right?
There was never an established review/proofreading loop in place. It was entirely up to me, the producer, to proofread the final product before it went out the door. SOP in all the shops in which I worked. My project manager would sometimes pitch in if he were so inclined. "Egregious" errors were only discovered when the client sent the work back for repair.
The type in the "Murderer" ad was set in Photoshop, not Word. I've never seen a graphic artist pull up a spell checker for a single line of type in Photoshop.
Pricing is a completely different biz in legal and advertising. Legal prices by the attorney hour with only vague limits on price. Advertising prices by project, with a hard fee for the final outcome and a second round of price bargaining for each add-on.
Finally, while the error might be "eggregious," it is also inconsequential. A single digit error in an M&A document can be extremely costly. The error in the "Murderer" copy turns off a few people who bring the legal obsession with accurate proofreading to the game, but just about nobody else.
I had a professor back in the 60s who claimed that the what we called "Correct English" was simply class prejudice. I now understand that this is a marxist point of view. Back then I just thought he was wrong and stupid.
"I worked for several years on a project basis for Martin Scorcese's multimedia studio, primarily producing fall lineup promo CDs for ABC TV's national affiliates. Big time money, right?..."
You misspelled Scorsese.
Funny!
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