I swear to God, if I’m stupid enough to pay $37 for another year of the Grosse Pointe News, please shoot me in the head. The paper, craptastic to begin with, changed hands earlier in the year and, if anything, has gotten worse. The editorial page now belongs to canned op-eds, the government coverage is phoned in and even the man-on-the-street interviews are ridiculous. (Before Christmas, a polar bear said he really wanted Santa to bring an end to global warming.)
And now this:
I’m a writer and editor; I know typos happen. But when they happen in 96-point type, it calls for public horsewhipping. I wonder if anyone has actually noticed yet.
beb said on December 27, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Are they selling the coast or biking the coast?
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Jeff said on December 27, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Ah, the Columbus Dispatch had someone put “the peddle to the metal” in print a few weeks ago. I just sigh quietly and turn the page . . . but i’m reading the Indy Star this week, which is almost enough reason for me to want to move back here. That, and the local news on TV here, which Nancy points out wins bushel-baskets of Peabody Awards.
Discussion question for the day: is SpellCheck a force for evil in the modern world, or just a hapless tool of other malign forces?
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Julie Robinson said on December 27, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Just checking my email at lunch when I saw the news of Benazhir Bhutto’s assination. Stocks are down and no doubt gas will go up. And our daughter is just about to head to Thailand, which is close enough to Pakistan to make me concerned. As if I wasn’t already by her nonchalant announcement that they will be staying in the slums of Bangkok. In the residents’ homes.
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alex said on December 27, 2007 at 12:51 pm
I dunno, Jeff, but in MS Word it can be set up to correct your work automatically. Fine when you’re typing hundreds of words per minute to beat a deadline. Trouble is it doesn’t have medical or legal dictionaries built in and it really fucks up my shit some days.
A program that’s made to help idiots only it makes the rest of us look like idiots.
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Sue said on December 27, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I have almost made this a game these days. Not just newspapers, but local AND national tv. I always watch the graphics on a news program, then try to guess how many people the error got past before it made it to the screen. First the misspellings etc. were only on weekends, when the A-Team was replaced by the Z-Team, but now it’s crept into daily news life. I like ironic touches, too, like the time I saw a hot babe newswoman talking about voting rights history (it was the anniversary of women getting the vote or something) and the graphic behind her used the word “sufferage”. You’ve come a long way baby, haven’t you?
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Vince said on December 27, 2007 at 1:40 pm
I hope you send that to Columbia Journalism Review.
It’s a shoo-in for The Lower Case.
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MichaelG said on December 27, 2007 at 3:47 pm
It’s not spell check (which I agree you have to use carefully) that bothers me so much as all the automatic shit they build into each successive iteration of MS Word. It takes me a long time to find all that crap and stamp it out. And each version has much more bloat than the one it succeeds. I doubt I use 10% of Word’s capability including tables which I used to use lots. Same applies to Excel.
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alex said on December 27, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Had I not just glanced up at the screen this moment, I wouldn’t have realized that goddamned thing was changing “punctate” to “punctuate.” I’m writing about brain lesions on an MRI.
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nancy said on December 27, 2007 at 4:52 pm
That’s one of the few things I like about Word — that it fixes certain dumbass typos as they occur. I never considered the punctate/punctuate problem.
And Vince, I wonder if the GPTimes would call it a “shoe-in.” (It’s like a love-in, only with shoes.)
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kayak woman said on December 27, 2007 at 4:52 pm
I am not much of a writer but I can spell. And I once made that very error on my blog (but not in huge type) when writing about a kayak tour of the Pictured Rocks. Didn’t even notice the spell-check had underlined it. I eventually caught it — no editor around here except maybe my sister-in-law, who loves to correct things. Love her anyway.
Julie, I don’t know how old your daughter is or what kind of program she’s going to Thailand with (guessing it’s some kind of study abroad?). My daughters have both done a college “junior year abroad.” The younger one is currently in Senegal. It *is* scary, but at my kids’ college, the people who set up the programs are very careful about the families they place the students with, *particularly* when they are in third-world countries, and my daughter loves her African host family. Also, Thailand is a very popular program at their school.
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Barb said on December 27, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I must be getting old and slow in the brain. I was spelling bee champ as a youngster, but it took me a second to catch it. Reminds me of the local Fort Wayne newscast where they did a special feature on holiday “EATABLE” treats
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michaelj said on December 27, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Merry Christmas, y’all. I’m inclined to God Rest Ye. Saw MJQ on the old Today Show do that very merry carol when I was a kid, and those guys could play. Of course, its a drinking song, and somewhat cynical.
Newspaper typos are something thoughtful people should cherish. They tend inadvertantly to communicate national angst If you apply ‘peddling’ to the invasion and occupation, you end up with Cheney’s war profiteering. Republicans love Musharraf, who is the patron saint of A.Q. the H.R. Macy of the nuclear bazaar. Our great anti-terriss pal seems to actually make things easy for Al Quaeda, and then his nemesis is murdered. One way or another, this is all money for Vice Presidents with stock holdings. Shiite Iraq is Iran West without moderates, Kurdistanis a powerful rogue state, and the Sunnis willnever give up. Anyboddy with n internet connection could have seen this exactly before the invasion.
We spent a bunch on Doctors Without Borders, for Christmas and for tax season. Mostly my idea, picturing biplanes and silk scarves We build Jimma houses and makethe food runs. We don’t think we do enough
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Cosmo Panzini said on December 27, 2007 at 9:57 pm
You’re peak over the bad spelling is understendable. But why not do something cinstrucktive and right them a letter or call them and tell what dumm fukks they nare? A sign not far from where I live advertises “Auto Reper”. No wonder Dubby got re-elected.
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Chris said on December 27, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Worst typo ever: sent a letter for my boss seeking donations for the building of a “pubic” swimming pool. OOPS. Confirmed everyone’s worst fears about damn pools.
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michaelj said on December 28, 2007 at 1:44 am
Cosmo. Dubya got reelected, if you could call it that, on the basis of the Swift Boat slander and the Ohio vote hijack (announced ahead of time). His ‘reelection’ was about as legitimate as Putin’s or Musharraf’s. Please cf Mencken’s opinion about democracy, stupidity, and deserving to get it good and hard..
If Musharaf didn’t have Bennazir Bhutto killed, they certainly looked the other way. If it was Al Quaeda, why didn’t they kill the US great ally in the war against global terrism (no typo)? Inesplicable. As in, Lucy can’t splain.
Anyway, there’s no such thing as worst typo. They’re all wonderful. The Athens (GA) Banner Herald 48 point headline for J2P2: First Non-Catholic Pope, surely rules.
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Colleen said on December 28, 2007 at 9:58 am
Used to work with a woman at WOSU who joked that her main job was to make sure every time a written missive went out from the station, there was ALWAYS an “L” in public radio.
Some of my faves include the large “shoots” the Dispatch showed us in an old building…it was a hardware warehouse, and the “shoots” were how they got merchandise from floor to floor. Rights of passage are always nice, too. Towing the line is cool.
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nancy said on December 28, 2007 at 10:10 am
As a former horsewoman, the rein/reign thing always drives me nuts, too, although mistakes are a tad more forgivable.
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Sue said on December 28, 2007 at 11:21 am
At my doctor’s office, they have posters all over the place encouraging flu shots, which say “Shoe the Flu”. Hmm. I keep thinking of tiny little blacksmiths putting tiny little flu shoes on tiny little flu bugs. Also, their posting of what to do when various disasters hit includes the recommendation that first, you “asses” the situation. ok. Maybe it’s time to look for a new doc.
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Kim said on December 28, 2007 at 11:52 am
Stuff like this makes me weep. In a similar vein (the clueless vein, that is) has anyone received the latest ad campaign from Domino’s Pizza? It’s the one that touts, in the 90-plus type, The BFD. In my day, BFD stood for something other than Big Fantastic Deal.
I swear the country is run by idiots, from GWB and Dick C. to the goofs writing ads for crappy pizza chains.
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Marie said on December 28, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Sure sign that it’s Friday: It took me a good minute of staring before I figured out what was wrong with that headline. Must. Increase. Caffeine intake/Vacation days. Yikes.
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MichaelG said on December 28, 2007 at 2:20 pm
How about all the apostrophe’s people use in plural’s these day’s?
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