{"id":227,"date":"2007-07-05T10:28:58","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T15:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/?p=227"},"modified":"2007-07-07T10:31:43","modified_gmt":"2007-07-07T15:31:43","slug":"we-face-typo-gremlins-daily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"We face typo gremlins daily"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world of deadline journalism presents challenges. On countless occasions, I’ve explained to a critical reader \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or an even more critical reading public \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that we at the Optic didn’t make the errors; rather, the typos resulted from something else.<\/font>Like the kid who swears, “Gee, Mom, I was just playing, and all of a sudden, the vase fell all by itself \u00e2\u20ac\u201d honest,” we’d like to hear from readers who say, “Out of the 20,000 words you printed today, 19,998 were correct.” But we seldom hear about correct spelling or punctuation.<\/p>\n

Without seeming like members of the Nixon or Bush administration, whose mantra is and was “mistakes were made,” rather than “I blew it,” let me acquaint you with gremlins that infest newspaper copy, usually after we’ve put the paper to bed, and quite often after a power failure, of which we’ve had our share.<\/p>\n

Once the lights start to blink at the Optic, David Giuliani, our managing editor, shouts out, “Everybody save!” We all know that a computer crash occurs only when we’ve failed to save our copy. A sign above the computers in a desktop publishing lab at Highlands once read, “Jesus saves \u00e2\u20ac\u201d so should you.”<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the errors that are made \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I’d like to believe \u00e2\u20ac\u201d are purely external, caused by something or someone else. Of course, when someone else makes errors, we all wonder, “What were they thinking?” or “Why can’t they get their act together?” In our case, night-tripping fairies rearrange our carefully written copy, while we sleep. In the case of other papers, well, they just need to poofread more carefully.<\/p>\n

A long-time reader of the printed word is Elizabeth Bunch, who once showed me a copy of something that ought to go into the “What are we gonna do now” category. It was a front-page article in the Optic that read simply, “Couple loses grazing rights.”<\/p>\n

On the surface, that sounds serious. We herd the husband and wife might have to mooove; maybe they developed psycowlogical problems, without even the opportunity to ruminate about it.<\/p>\n

And on reading a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc70s glossary of then-contemporary terms, Elizabeth discovered the definition for “cake cutter.” Now we all know that the best way to cut a fresh cake is not to saw it, as if it were a piece of plywood. Rather, someone came up with a tool with very few, widely spaced teeth in a straight line. It works great and enables the user to break off a piece rather than smash it down by continuous sawing.<\/p>\n

In the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc70s, when the Afro hairdo was popular, many young people carried a cake cutter in their back pocket. It was called that because it closely resembled the tool one uses on actual cakes.<\/p>\n

The definition Elizabeth showed me would qualify for the “But Doctor, I was born this way” category. It read: Cake cutter: a comb used by African Americans with widely spaced teeth.” We ask, “What does a person’s dental arrangement have to do with combing?”<\/p>\n

Susan Swan of Las Vegas, whose husband Dr. Van Swan, an OB\/GYN, made his share of emergency room visits at Northeastern Regional Hospital, caught an item in the Optic that qualifies for the “And don’t let us see you here again” category.<\/p>\n

The Optic boo-boo \u00e2\u20ac\u201d obviously the result of technical difficulties and not at all because the writer or editor failed to think \u00e2\u20ac\u201d described an assault on a local man. It reported that the victim who was transported to the ER “was threatened and released.”<\/p>\n

And we used to think a hospital emergency room was a place for comfort and relief!<\/p>\n

Eleanor Nelson this week noticed an item in the Albuquerque Journal that is sure to draw the attention of the financially strapped. We’re all aware of the exploding birth rates in third-world countries and how there’s an inverse correlation between the number of children a family has and its income.<\/p>\n

Monday’s Journal carried an item that qualifies for the “Now we can stop having \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcem” category. The headline reads, “Spay Clinics For Poor Residents.” Spay is the act of rendering a female animal infertile. The article mentions Las Vegas as one place the mobile van is headed this month.<\/p>\n

We wonder whether the birthrate of us human animals is so far out of control that it’s necessary to drive a mobile unit around the state to curb the problem.<\/p>\n

Strange how the word “poor” means not only impoverished but inferior. For years we just assumed the expression “poor teacher” was a commentary on the abysmal faculty salary schedule and not the teachers’ fitness for the job. Often it’s both.<\/p>\n

But there’s also a third meaning of “poor,” this one referring to “unfortunate,” as in “the poor prisoner got abused.” We wonder which slant of “poor” the spay clinic article refers to.<\/p>\n

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The world of deadline journalism presents challenges. On countless occasions, I’ve explained to a critical reader \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or an even more critical reading public \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that we at the Optic didn’t make the errors; rather, the typos resulted from something else.Like the kid who swears, “Gee, Mom, I was just playing, and all of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}