I Swear It's Not Schadenfreude

... But I love it when top publications make typos. I love it because my own typos dog me. Lots of them. Some for years. Some likely forever (like how in the first printing of "Grammar Snobs" I had written "tachometer" when I meant "odometer").

Then there are the typos I should have caught as an editor or copy editor -- flubs that appeared under another writer's byline, making her or him look bad even though it was my job to catch them. Nothing like letting people down ...

So when the big boys make typos, I see it not as a chance to laugh at them but a chance to laugh off my own mistakes. The wilier errors are twice the salve because they prove that I can catch mistakes -- at least sometimes.

With that in mind, here's a passage from an article on the New York Times website today.

The sweeping living room is a reflection of Ms. Robinson’s deep interest in early 20th-century American art; she started her career in the early 1970s at Sotheby’s. Most arresting is a life-size oil portrait by Ron Sherr of Ms. Robinson. It it she wears a strapless black dress, much like the one Madame X wore in John Singer Sargent’s famous 1884 painting, and the same choker worn by the little elephant in the drawing in the study.

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The typo is "it it" in place of "in it." And it got past someone -- several someones -- who get paid a heck of a lot more than I do for their copy-editing and proofreading skills.

Aaaaaah.