No matter how keen the editing, typos have a way of slipping into published books. Acclaimed authors like Tom Wolfe, Henry Miller, and Kurt Vonnegut — whose books have the dubious distinction of appearing on the dreaded “Corrigenda List of Book Errata” — know this all too well. Therefore, please forgive me if you found/find any typos that make this book a candidate for that list.
(“Acknowledgement,” The iPINIONS Journal, Vol. 1, 2006)
Notwithstanding the above, one of my cultural pet peeves is finding articles in major publications that are littered with typos. In fact, family members and close friends will attest that I get more exasperated on Sundays finding typos in the New York Times than I get watching my quarterback throw interceptions in Football games.
Frankly, it’s one thing for you to find typos in commentaries on my weblog (and I invite you to point them out, by the way); it’s quite another for you to find them in articles in the New York Times.
After all, writing commentaries is not my day job. More to the point, unlike the Times, I don’t have a department of editors getting good money to proofread and edit everything I publish.
This is why I feel some measure of vindication that other major publications now have the balls to take the Times to task for its typo problem, which is becoming embarrassingly chronic. Here, for example, is how the Huffington Post is now hounding the Times in this respect:
Last week, we reported that the New York Times had published a story on its front page that began mid-sentence and failed to include a byline or subheading.
Today, the Times has committed yet another huge front-page error with a glaring typo in the lead Ebola story.
Can you see it?
(October 20, 2014)
See it? It was impossible to miss! After all, this glaring typo appeared on the front page, in a centered headline, and in boldface type. It read as follows:
Panic Were Ebola Risk Is Tiny; Stoicism Where It’s Real
To be fair, though, this seems a minor typo when compared to the more egregious ones that have become a regular feature of articles in practically every major newspaper, including no less a publication than The Times of London.
Interestingly enough, after reveling in the New York Times’s humiliation, the Huffington Post offered the excuse that the typo-littered pages of America’s leading newspaper might be due to major layoffs as part of its transition to digital publishing. But it might just be that the digital editors have already taken over; and, as anyone who reads online knows all too well, typos in digital content are as commonplace as farts in men’s locker rooms.
Thanks to the cognitive dissonance social media hath wrought, we live in typo times….
Related commentary:
Ebola scaremongering…