A Matter of Degree
May 23, 2011
In today’s Washington Post you can find a story in the Metro section about a typo on Georgetown University’s commencement program cover. The headline and much of the story’s content focuses on the transposition of two letters in the word “university.”
This is a blog about language and we’ve noted in earlier posts that the Post has lost its groove when it comes to producing clean, error-free copy. I’m not calling them out for noting the error. It’s just the degree to which they’ve highlighted it that irks me. For the newspaper to make such a big deal about a single typo strikes me as a case of people living in glass houses throwing stones. Notoriously, the Post has gone downhill in the copy editing department ever since they’ve thinned the ranks of what used to be one of the finest stables of copy editors around.
Yes, misspelling “university” is embarrassing and shouldn’t have happened. But I suspect it occurred for the same reason that it happens daily among the pages of the Post and in other publications: fewer people are taking on more work as resources shrink. It’s true at Georgetown, as it is true pretty much everywhere else.
I’ve made my share of typos (I made three errors in the first draft of this post which my husband caught. By the way, he caught two errors in the Post yesterday). When I have time I use the old proofreader’s trick of reading text backwards so as to catch errors that my mind might otherwise skip over. But, alas, mistakes still get through. So until we all replace our windows with Plexiglas®, maybe we shouldn’t throw such big stones.
–Barbara
