Source: The Smoking Gun

The Joural’s recent use of the word in an article about the enigmatic substance’s use in a “medical-research reactor” leaves us to draw some conclusions:

• Iran is further along in the space race than previously thought and is mining material from the seventh planet from the sun.
• The ultra-Islamic regime has found a practical use for its gay citizens and is making them rich in the process.
• According to Colbert, Iran is using a combination of uranium and Pomeranians to make bombs.

If any of the above seem far-fetched, we can presume only that the Wall Street Journal let one slip:

Click here to watch the episode.

So, how did you do?

http://www.documentaryfilms.net/reviews/woodrowwilsom/

Although one could certainly speculate whether the headline was indeed an error, the point is, you want to be sure to avoid those pesky, and costly, Freudian slips.

Can you spot the error? No tricks here—just a plain, old-fashioned printer error.

LaVonne

When it comes to errors of this type, no one is too big to fail. Take, for instance, this MSN web page entitled “Fright Stuff,” which discusses “the most terrifying scenes ever filmed.”  Below you can see that the title of the article appears to be correct:

Now, look at the information in the page title:

While the web page title may not seem to be a major problem, it can affect a search engine’s ability to find the page. At least the word “fright” is spelled correctly in the URL.

Then again, maybe this error isn’t too far off. I always thought Fight Club was pretty scary!

The boys are thirsty in Atlanta

And there’s beer in Texarcana

Yes, with a “c.” My initial guess was that the person who transcribed the lyrics was thinking of the word “arcane”; or, maybe he or she was drinking Tropicana orange juice at the time. Regardless, the individual was too geographically illiterate to know that the city’s name is a portemanteau of Texas and Arkansas.

Though I was fighting for my life (well, let’s just say I was), I was not going to let them get away with that, even if it was only a cable network and the song contained lyrical gems such as loaded up and truckin’ and put that hammer down and give it hell. No, this was about justice for state line straddlers everywhere! So, I dragged myself out of bed and composed an e-mail that I’m sure seemed cogent to my fevered brain, but probably went more like this:

You dumb dummies. You can’t even spell good. You dummies.

The network never replied.

Quite a while after that incident, I discovered the probable cause of the typo: copying and pasting the information from the Internet. I have no idea why or how I stumbled across “East Bound and Down” lyrics on one of those ad-ridden lyrics sites, but sure enough, there it was right below the “whiten teeth at home” ad: Texarcana. What is worse is that more than one web site has the town’s name misspelled, presumably because the sites copy the information one from another. In the Wild West of low-budget websites that seem to have no other purpose than to test people’s pop-up blockers, does accuracy really matter?

I guess the lessons here are (1) be careful about the credibility of your sources, (2) always double check your information for accuracy (a simple spell checker run would have caught this one), and (3) even a potentially lethal combination of an elevated body temperature and a Burt Reynolds movie are no excuse for letting misspelled place names go unnoticed.

LaVonne

In the Gosselin family alone, Mady is not the only child to have a name that could be easily misspelled. Mady (short for Madelyn—another name with several alternate forms) has several siblings whose names could be easily misspelled. Her twin, Cara, could as easily be “Kara” while younger brother Aaden’s name would more likely have his name written as “Aiden” or “Ayden” if no one bothered to check. As far as that goes, Mady’s parents could be “John and Cate”!

Like it matters.

What does matter is that whether you are decorating a cake for a nine-year-old or proofreading a multi-billion dollar corporate real estate transaction (I have done both), correctly spelling the names of all parties involved is critical to ensuring everyone’s satisfaction. While a cake decorated with a misspelled name will taste just as sweet, the error could add extra bitterness to an already sour situation.

LaVonne

LaVonne

The same seven letters in the same order go into each blank to form an English word or words. Can you figure out what they are?

The ________ doctor was________ to operate because she had ________.

Ready for the answer? The seven letters are n, o, t, a, b, l, and e, from which you can create notable, not able, and no table. So the answer is,

The notable doctor was not able to operate because she had no table.

This clever puzzler shows us that accidentally adding or deleting a space could change the meaning of the sentence or make it nonsensical, but this puzzler also made me consider rogue hyphens, which can be even more insidious than rogue spaces.

A rogue hyphen can appear several ways. For example, a typesetter might insert a hyphen either accidentally or intentionally by thinking that a hyphen needs to be inserted where it does not belong. Often, however, technology is to blame for the appearance of rogue hyphens.

When we see text in its final, published form, some or all of the content may have existed in one form or another in various printed or electronic files. Sometimes these electronic files were created in older versions of programs that do not always play nicely with their newer counterparts. Rogue hyphens also tend to show up in scanned text where there was a hyphen in the original copy, usually where a word is broken at the end of a line. The OCR (optical character recognition) software incorrectly interprets the soft hyphen (a hyphen that would disappear if the word did not appear at the end of a line) as a hard hyphen (a hyphen that would appear no matter where the word showed up).

Let’s look at an example of how this might happen:

Dr. Smith was working with Doctors without Borders. But the no-
table doctor was unable to perform surgery because of inadequate
facilities.

If this text were input incorrectly, the hyphen might remain intact, possibly leading the reader to think that Dr. Smith is some sort of New Age healer who eschews the demeaning practice of placing patients on tables.

Let’s consider another example:

If you watch CNN regularly, you know that Sanjay Gupta is a not-
able physician.

This would be a bad end-of-line break to start with and a good editor would avoid breaking the word this way, but we know that not all copy is properly edited. Although most readers would think the phrase not-able physician sounded awkward and would question it, we cannot presume that all potential readers know English well. In fact, in today’s global marketplace, we must assume that a certain percentage of readers will not have a firm grasp of English. In this case, not only does the rogue hyphen created an awkward sentence, it could mislead some readers to think that Dr. Gupta is either incompetent or somehow incapacitated.

As you proofread, you will not only want to be on the lookout for rogue hyphens, but also be watchful of hyphens that should be there but have been accidentally or intentionally dropped. For example, Dr. Smith may actually be a no-table doctor, but not a particularly notable one. Never assume and be sure to query if you are not sure.

LaVonne