The ABCs of Editing: Always read at least the first sentence

Granny submitted this boo-boo she found here on ABCNews online.

President Obama took on House GOP Leader John Boehner’s call for repealing financial reform before it’s signed yesterday.

Never thought I'd see a boo-boo that made me long for a "t'were." I wonder if this was an editor-inserted error. (They happen. Take it from an editor who's inserted her fair share.)

Valuable Typos

I always think of typos as bad things. But this AOL News story is a reminder that they can be valuable. The story lists nine published works that, in early typo-laden printings, are worth some money. They include old works like a 1600s Bible and newer stuff like an error-riddled early printing of "The DaVinci Code."

Yikes

From the main page at latimes.com today. Their layoffs are showing.

Okay .... NOW I'm going dark.

Best-named Honeymoon Destination Ever

Nooki Nooki Island
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/contests/livethecover2/nooki-nooki-island-fiji.html

In other news, NYT blogger Anahad O'Connor dedicated today's post to some typos in the menu at a White House dinner. "Willamette Valley" was spelled wrong in a wine description, "chickpeas" was written as two words and elsewhere there was one missing hyphen and one missing accent mark.

The point: "One person the White House apparently neglected to hire was a spell checker."

Too bad the wine wasn't from Molehill Winery. Then O'Connor could have bemoaned how no one changed it to Mountain Winery.

They're Finding Me, I Swear

Honest, I'm not looking for typos and other flubs. In fact, in the last few weeks I've been consciously ignoring AOL News and Yahoo! News boo-boos that jump out at me.

But not 20 minutes after I posted that last bad call by Yahoo! News, I saw this Kanye headline.

It's "led," Yahoo. Unless, of course, Kanye had been drinking from a Roman aqueduct. Surely one of your editors would tell you that -- if only you'd staff enough of them to cover the workload there.

From the front page of Los Angeles Times' Business section today

Oops.

Spellings Sew Sneeky

I get why people type "sneak peak" instead of "sneak peek." None of us are immune. (I, for one, make a ton of typos.)

What I don't get is why professional wordsmiths, like the writer and editor behind this AOL News link, haven't learned to double check the spelling before publishing it to a

professional site. It's like "lead" in place of "led" -- an issue proofreaders know to watch out for.

Moments in Copy Editing

"The student body here is very diverse," said John Doe, the school's director of academic programs and outreach. "The student body is a clear reflection of the Los Angeles populous — a testament to our commitment to diversity."

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I changed "populous" to "populace." Now, I realize this may have been obvious to many of you. But bear in mind that the passage appeared near the end of a very long and tedious story and it slipped by at least one editor before it got to me.

Aaah, sassifyin' ...

(As always, the excerpt was disguised to keep me outta trouble.)

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.

And I Thought Writers Just Found Copy Editors Annoying ...

The Washington Post had a good piece a few days ago about an increasing number of typos in their paper -- a trend that corresponds with a decrease in the number of copy editors there.

The article cites a decade-old study that emphasizes how messy copy can hurt a newspaper's bottom line (that means money, to all you publisher types). The idea is that "each misspelled word, bad apostrophe, garbled grammatical construction, weird cutline and mislabeled map erodes public confidence in a newspaper's ability to get anything right."

In times of extreme austerity, I tend to think of quality control as a luxury. I figure it's better to have good reporting with a few typos than to have pristinely edited fluff -- or worse. So it never occurred to me that copy editing is so integral to a news agency's money-making ability.

Maybe if this idea catches on I could someday be emboldened to ask for help paying for health insurance.

Nah.

'Fine' Works by 'Excellent' Sign Makers

Sign makers get a lot of grief for their typos. So I try not to add to their woes. But a blog I came across recently is just too fun not to pass along.

It calls itself The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotes and has pictures of some doozies like:

Please "No" Men Inside Ladies Room

(I love the "You know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink" quality of that one.) And:

Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people. "Dr. Martin Luther King Junior"

(Kind of long for a nickname. I'd have just opted for "Marty.")

Anyway, enjoy!

Oy

This was in my e-mail in-box today:

Dear Subscriber,

Coming soon, you can expect a little more out of your Los Angeles Times subscription. That’s because in addition to the award-winning content you already get, you’ll receive our exclusive monthly newsletter, “Above the Fold,” in your email.

Each month you’ll receive premium articles, reviews and exclusive sneak peaks of upcoming features. And look for exclusive perks in each issue designed especially for you.

Yup. They wrote "sneak peaks."

Great Moments in Copy Editing

" ... enjoy an appetizer of Shrimp Louis or Lump Crap Cocktail ..."

And here's what's not so great about this moment in copy editing: I didn't catch the typo. One of my colleagues did -- after yours truly had read the document.

Yikes.

Every Time a Major News Website Makes a Typo, an Angel Gets Her Wings

I love it when the big boys of the journalism world make little typos — not because the typos are egregious or even funny, but because they help me put my own skills in perspective. So here's a headline from the main page at today's LATimes.com:

A Boston University medical student charged in the hotel slaying of a masseuse and the robbery of a another preyed on women he found through Craigslist and investigators are looking for other possible victims, authorities said.

When I was city editor at a community newspaper, I assumed I stunk. Little typos like "a another" would get past me all the time. I was always apologizing to reporters for letting those boo-boos appear under their names.

I had no idea.

The place I worked at was very low-budget (think: full-time, work-their-butts-off reporters making $425 a week). So there weren't many layers of editors — usually just me and a lone overworked copy editor. Sometimes just me.

Now I freelance at a better-funded place. And now I know. Every piece that goes to print is edited in the computer twice then proofread on the page by at least two different people. No fewer than four people read each story. And this is marketing copy — not even the serious editorial stuff in which typos are most taboo.

I don't know how many layers of proofing/editing the Los Angeles Times now applies to its Web headlines. (Hell, these days they're lucky they can afford those little pads and pens for their remaining reporters.) But I'm sure they still have a decent number of people trolling for these types of boo-boos.

Yet some still get through.

Ipso facto: Maybe I didn't stink so bad after all.

Typo du Jour

As I've said, I don't like picking on typos except when they're really funny or when I'm hard up for material.

SO, here's a little something I read on a travel forum.

"Don't be afraid to use lots of sunscream."

But, you know, now that we're on the subject ... I really have been seeing a lot of pretty bad typos online lately. Maybe it's the travel forums I'm reading, but it seems it's getting worse in my corner of the world. A whole lot of apostrophes shoved into plurals ("beach's") and conjugated verbs ("want's").

Eeek! What's happening to me? Am I in danger of becoming one of "those" people. (You know, the ones with the markers and sour expressions.)

I'm Not One to Pick On Typos, But ...

One I came across recently on a Frommers.com message board was just too good:

The place is run by Rasta's, and if you take the time to talk you'll learn they are non-violent and dolt on children.

Regarding yesterday's "the outdoors is"/"the outdoors are" conundrum: Neither "Garner's" nor "Fowler's" says whether "outdoors" takes a singular or a plural verb. Yesterday when I was running on too little sleep, this seemed baffling. Today, running on my full eleven hours (kidding), I'm having trouble remembering what was so perplexing. Seems there are few instances in which "outdoors" would seem to call for a plural verb like "are" and even fewer instances when "the great outdoors" would.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

All who doubt the word-conspiracy theory I wrote of yesterday, behold: Not 24 hours after I blogged that the word "Columbia" was out to get me by trying to pass itself off as "Colombia," I found this in a story I was editing:

(The restaurant) Botero, features ... original paintings by the Columbian artist along the walls.

Diabolical.

So I thought I'd do a Google search see whether this spelling is spreading its poison across the Web. Yup.

Bogota, Columbia -Colombia = 72,800 hits

Doozy of a Mistake in 'NBC Nightly News' Graphic

A weather graphic in last night's NBC Nightly News showed not one but three instances of:

Sundays' High

They were referring to the previous day's temperatures. So they meant Sunday's High.

Here's the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#28354137. The graphic is 1 minute, 23 seconds into the story. (Sorry I couldn't embed. Something was wrong with the embed code on their site.)

Cute Pun, But Only If Intended

Saw this headline on a Barron's blog:

Equities Rally As Fed Shows Its Meddle

That could be one of two things: a deliberate play on "mettle" -- or not. A pair of single quotation marks in that headline could have gone a long way.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

“has lead him” = 58,100 hits
“has led him” = 453,000 hits

I gotta say, I find this kind of encouraging. It's so easy to accidentally replace "led" with "lead" (that is, to replace the past tense of the verb with the homophone that means a type of metal) that I would have expected even more boo-boos. (Just don't get me started on "metal"/"medal." Ah, what the heck ... ).

"he won the gold medal" = 37,700
"he won the gold metal" = 98

Again, pretty encouraging. Between that, a some encouraging news on the economic front, and the chance that today will bring an end to all this Joe the Plumber crap, we may be on a good-news roll! (Just don't get me started on "roll" / "role." ... Ah, what the heck ...)

"I'm on a roll" = 82,900
"I'm on a role" = 2,120

Yup, not a bad day at all.