Yeah, I know I’ve been kind of silent, but that’s because those of us who are still in the office have been working our steely buns off just trying to get editorial pages out every day.
But I just had to share this typo, on a proof I’m reading of our Saturday page. It’s in a letter to the editor:
It is beginning to look a lot like 1938.
Last week the Iraq Study (AKA surrender) Group issued its report. The report writers believe that Iran and Syria can be good partners shaping a new Iraq. History has left a message for us about dealing with rouge governments…
The same transposition is repeated later in the same epistle, as "rouge states," which the writer suggests are not trustworthy.
Well, I certainly don’t trust them. They may not be as obviously wicked as those "excessive mascara states," but they’re pretty bad. And don’t even get me started on those "Lipstick Vogue governments."
By the way, I have no idea whether the errors mentioned here are those of the writer, or our fault. I do know it’s our responsibility to fix it. I just thought I’d share it with y’all, since mere newspaper readers will miss out.
There is, of course, the possibility that this is not a typo. It could be a reference to the cultural decadence of Germany in the early ’30s, as symbolized by Joel Gray‘s makeup in "Cabaret." But I’m sort of doubting it.
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You said you were going to go “light” during the holiday season. This post is proof that you intend to keep your word. Although this is mildly amusing it probably doesn’t warrant a blog posting.
Why is it your job to “correct” the letters sent to you for publication?
How do you “know” what the letter writer meant?
And, why shouldn’t the reader be allowed to draw their own conclusions about someone who isn’t educated or careful enough to know the difference between “rouge” and “rogue?”
Peace in Our Time
Elvis Costello
Out of the aeroplane stepped Chamberlain with a condemned man’s stare
But we all cheered wildly, a photograph was taken,
as he waved a piece of paper in the air
Now the Disco Machine lives in Munich and we are all friends
And I slip on my Italian dancing shoes as the evening descends
[Chorus:]
And the bells take their toll once again in a victory chime
And we can thank God that we’ve finally got
Peace in our time
There’s a man going round taking names no
matter who you claim to be
As innocent as babies, a mad dog with rabies,
you’re still a part of some conspiracy
Meanwhile there’s a light over the ocean
burning brighter than the sun
And a man sits alone in a bar and says “Oh God,
what have we done?”
[Chorus]
They’re lighting a bonfire upon every hilltop in the land
Just another tiny island invaded when he’s got
the whole world in his hands
And the Heavyweight Champion fights in the
International Propaganda Star Wars
There’s already one spaceman in the White
House what do you want another one for?
Yesterday’s Charlotte Observer sports pages reported that the NC School for the “Death” and the Blind had beaten another team in basketball.
Where were you when they needed you, SuperEditor? 🙂 Even more intriguing, why the repetition?
Aren’t corpses blind by their very nature?
Those who want us to surrender to the terrorists in Iraq have no answer to the question, “Where and when do you intend to stand up and fight the terrorists?”
Death to redundancy.
Seriously, though, Ready to Hurl raises a question that is one of the first ones you deal with when you run an editorial page: To what extent do you edit for accuracy, clarity, grammar, spelling etc.?
(And it’s one that you deal with again in the case of every single word that passes by you on its way into the paper.)
You quickly realize that few people write well, clearly and without multiple mistakes. And no one writes without ANY mistakes. So you either run nothing but the rare ones that are really well done, or you do some editing so you can run more points of view, or you run all letters as they are (editing for brevity, of course, which is not subject to debate, since voices are many and space finite), and let most people look bad.
Do we make them perfect? Hardly. I generally leave alone such things as like/as errors, or colloquialisms such as “I’m going to go lay out in the sun.” I even let people use “impact” as a verb.
But I’m not going to waste the space running a bunch of junk that doesn’t communicate clearly.
That’s scandalous to people who think making such decisions is censorship or some such. Those people have failed to take time to contemplate the root of the word “editor.”
Let me clue you in on something — an editorial judgment is made about every word in the paper. And that would be the case if you were producing the paper also. Changing a word, cutting it out or leaving it alone are ALL editorial judgments. It’s extremely hasty, and sometimes even unconscious, judgment, but a decision of sorts is made in every case. Even if you copy and paste something into the paper with your eyes closed and refuse to see a proof, you’ve made a decision.
I never knew that the root of “editor” is “megalomaniac.”
I guess Brad avoids W’s speeches like the placque!
(I meant to do that)
After all that, I hate to point out that the letter in question was still printed today with “Islamofascists” misspelled as “Islamofacists.”
Primary problems with most newspapers regarding letters to the editor:
1. Editors will nitpick grammar and punctuation, but print unsubstantiated assertions without any filter.
2. Editors don’t take letters seriously, unless they come from politically powerful. The rabble are given in just for amusement.
3. Editors play games of balance. They seek to demonstrate that they are not biased by printing letters on several sides of an issue, giving the same weight to ignorant rants as they do to experts in the field. The result is that most experts don’t bother trying to educate newspapers.
Brad has “steely buns.” hehehe.