I never thought I’d see a correction notice to match this one, but the Feb. 6 New Yorker (yes, I’m falling behind again) contains the following gem from the Guardian (of April 22, 2004, according to this site):
In our profile of Daniel Dennett (pages 20 to 23, Review, April 17), we said he was born in Beirut. In fact, he was born in Boston. His father died in 1947, not 1948. He married in 1962, not 1963. The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett’s students was Dennett’s seminar at Tufts, not Gould’s at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin’s Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a “Darwinian fundamentalist”. Only one chapter in the book, not four, is devoted to taking issue with Gould. The list of Dennett’s books omitted Elbow Room, 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987. The marble sculpture, recollected by a friend, that Dennett was working on in 1963 was not a mother and child. It was a man reading a book.
You’ve got to admire a publication that can correct itself with such panache.
Now I know what the new epilogue for “A Million Little Pieces” will read like.
I think that it’s sort of picky to make a fine distinction between Beirut and Boston.
Whaddya wanna bet the Beirut/Boston confusion was either an autocomplete setting in Word or a blind acceptance of the spellchecker’s correction for some odd mistyping of Boston? Autocomplete may be slightly more likely than spellcheck.
Another possibility is that the writer was selecting from a drop down menu, though that kind of error is usually with countries, not cities.
Yeah, I see lots and lots of software-caused errors in proofreading.
If one doesn’t already exist, Steve should solicit a nice Latin or Greek name for this particular kind of errors (caused by autocorrect, reliance on spellcheck, autocomplete, etc.) Sort of like “iatrogenic”.
I liked that one too, but the best correction of all time was this one, correcting the Virginian-Pilot’s story on the Wright Brothers flight 100 years later. The original was apparently concocted from the barest of facts by an imaginative reporter.
Upon preview, registration seems to be required, so here’s the whole correction, published December 17, 2003:
Oh, fricken gawd bless the Grauniad. That’s priceless, but sadly typical of their “fact” “checking”.
From time to time, they get the big story, and they get it right, but it’s like the boy who cried “8-foot tall robot gerbil with six legs!”
After a while, you just gotta stop trying to figure out what to believe.
The latest Guardian corrections column: http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,,1714854,00.html
contains the usual catalogue of errors, including:
“Our obituary of George Psychoundakis declared that his memoir, The Cretan Runner, was translated “with inimical lyricism” by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Inimitable, we meant. (Inimical = unfavourable, hostile).”
I prefer this, from the same page: “On a map indicating the environmental impact of airports planning to expand, page 7, February 20, we showed Teesside airport, incorrectly spelling it “Teeside”. In any case, it has for some time been Durham Tees Valley airport.” They managed to get getting the thing wrong, wrong.
They should put out a collection of corrections. I’ll bet it would sell.
Oh but they did:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,411866,00.html
As the review of the corrections collection mentioned by x points out, one of the joys of Guardian corrections is the occasional dry aside. Witness this recent correction from February 10, 2006:
“”Soave, fluent, funny …” (Further diary, page 8, Education, January 31). That would have been the wine talking.”
X pwns Hat.
Hat is delighted to be pwned. From x’s link:
He has a pretty wit and the best deadpan style since Jack Benny. As a favourite he offered: “The building illustrating Simon Hoggart’s Diary was not the Cheltenham Town Hall, as the caption suggested it might be. It was Boots the Chemist’s.” “Quite close for us,” he added, sotto voce…
Sometimes a note of weariness enters Mr Mayes’s prose. “We spelt Morecambe, a town in Lancashire, wrong again yesterday. We often do.”
Life would be bleaker without the Guardian, the only newspaper I know of whose stylebook specifically allows “fuck” and bars “political correctness.” Downloadable at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2004/07/15/styleguidepdfjuly2004.pdf, near which you can also find a PDF of the 1928 style guide.
I much more trust a newspaper that has a corrections column than a newspaper that doesn’t – and congrats to the Guardian for just winning the award for “World’s Best Designed Newspaper” from the Society for News Design, based in New York.
Fev: barring “political correctness” means relatively little when this is also in the stylebook:
As to swearing, well, British broadsheet-ethos papers have been European about it for twenty years at least now. The Guardian isn’t exceptional in its attitude there today.
Sorry if I was unclear; what it bars is the phrase itself, not the sort of language often grouped under the concept. I’ve seen few stylebooks that are as open about the role of language in reflecting the paper’s philosophy.
On swearing in general, sure; the British press is far less prudish than the American. But it’s still a matter of degree. On one example that springs to mind — John Lydon’s unblipped live outburst on “Celebrity” a couple of years ago — I think it’s fair to say that the Guardian was, well, franker than the qualities or the tabs. The Sun, the Guardian and the Telegraph all rendered Lydon’s interjection “f***ing c***s” or the like. The Guardian not only spelled it out but put it in big type.
Apologies to all; that’s “the Sun, the Independent and the Telegraph.”
Or “Eds: Insert dropped word ‘not’,” as the wires would have it.
Well, the BBC still prefers prissy circumlocutions like “the F-word”, including on their news site — I mentioned an instance only today.
As for corrections, your examples are simply stupefying. Still, I was a bit taken aback by the NYT having to print this clarification not long ago. I mean, really, by now people should know about the old hat of “all sex is rape”. (The clarification includes a link to Snopes, no less.)
Ah, right. And when their philosophy involves believing the phrases “the disabled, the handicapped, the blind, the deaf” to be somehow different to and worse than “disabled people, blind people, deaf people”; it’s the Süddeutsche Zeitung for me.
And when their philosophy involves believing the phrases “the disabled, the handicapped, the blind, the deaf” to be somehow different to and worse than “disabled people, blind people, deaf people”
Surely one does not have to “believe” such phrases are “worse”; I assume it’s a matter of adopting the principle (which is also mine) of avoiding terms that offend the people referred to. Does the Süddeutsche Zeitung make a practice of deliberately using the most offensive terms they can find for people not like “normal Germans”? If not, I fail to see the distinction.
And if you’re going to say “Oh, but nobody’s offended by those terms except a few troublemakers,” I’ll want to see some statistics.
One has to believe them different on a level deeper than that of grammar; that’s something I have trouble with, just as I would have trouble accepting that “the French” means something different to “French people” or “the young” means something different to “young people.”
And to prefer one to the other is to think the first better for one’s purposes than the second; perhaps not better in general, but certainly better in context. That this preference is listed in the APA style guide, which seems to be the source of the idea as a textual norm, isn’t enough to convince me that it’s widely held, and thus actually better in context. Swathes of people hold illogical ideas all the time, sure, but logical ones tend to be the default case–and if the Wikipedia is to be believed, the question’s not resolved yet.
When I read corrections like this, with so much incorrect, it makes me a little nervous about trusting what I read!!
I think Aidan’s (rather deliberately) missing the point. Most stylebooks and news guides present news language as a sort of clear pane of glass — a nonrefractory, affect-free substance we hold up to give the rest of you a clear view of the world. (I think Deborah Cameron, the British linguist and pioneer of stylebook paleontology, came up with the glass metaphor, but I can’t find the reference from here.) What makes the Guardian unusual is that rather than contending all its choices are value-free, it acknowledges that most _do_ come with ideological baggage.
What’s interesting is not whether there is or isn’t some perfectly neutral, Edenic way of saying “people in wheelchairs” or “people whose skin is darker than mine” (or some Edenic way of spelling “Muhammad,” but I’m filing that with the collection of coins marked 6 BC). What’s interesting is what goes on in newsrooms by way of producing language that’s perceived as neutral and “correct.” Whether we should all follow Fowler in demanding a return to “Mahomet” is really kind of beside the point. Something of some import, though, went on when the guy became “prophet of Islam” rather than “founder of Islam” in the AP stylebook.
I don’t know of anybody who’s suggested that the matters in question have been “resolved.” But enjoy your Suddeutsche Zeitung. More beer for the rest of us.
Swathes of people hold illogical ideas all the time, sure, but logical ones tend to be the default case
I’m not sure whether I want to live in your universe or not, but it sure isn’t the one I’m currently living in. I submit that 1) it’s “illogical” to object to any word that has a clear referent, and 2) a vast majority of people object to such words (eg, “bitch,” “wog,” “darkie,” “crip”) when applied to themselves or someone they care about. Whether to pay attention to such preferences is not, of course, a matter for logic to decide.
I’m not deliberately missing anything; from the
looks of things, we value different aspects of publishing
newspapers.
? I don’t understand you there. People do tend
towards logic more than illogic; otherwise, logic in itself would have
limited value, because it could not be used as a tool to win
arguments.
Accepted, that
it’s illogical to object to any word that has a clear referent. Not
accepted, that an adjective in a nominalising usage should have a different
value judgement applied to it than the same adjective in attributive usage
in the language I grew up speaking and have a reasonably-grounded confidence
about.
Oooh! Nominalizing usage fight! Nominalizing usage fight! Nominalizing usage fight!
Dennett has an excellent beard. These things matter. I think I speak for many Hatters in this.
[Quoting from a different thread, but I think more appropriate here in this context **]
Daniel Dennett passed, a few days ago. [via aldaily]
[**] There are many mentions of Dennett round these parts. The beard is crucial.
People do tend towards logic more than illogic; otherwise, logic in itself would have limited value, because it could not be used as a tool to win arguments
Optimistic even 18 years ago, clearly not the world I see on my screen today. People in most public discussions accept logic only if it’s on their side, but mostly they try to win arguments by strawmanning, whataboutism, shouting, and name-calling… (some civilized venues like this here excepted.)
Optimistic even 18 years ago
Not optimistic but utterly absurd, and not just now or 18 years ago but for the entire history of our species. I dropped the discussion because I could see I was dealing with someone unable to see the reality of the world around him. Anyone who thinks logic wins arguments has never had an argument outside of debate team.
Anyone who thinks logic wins arguments has never had an argument outside of debate team.
It’s fair to say that logic wins arguments. It just doesn’t change opinions that are not based on arguments.
Off the bat I can’t think of an opinion of mine that is derived from arguments. On the contrary, I muster arguments in support of my opinions.
When no one challenges an opinion of mine, I don’t bother to search for arguments in support of it.
Moreover, people (including me) tend to be very reluctant to follow through the logical consequences of their own beliefs. (In fact, pointing this out to people is very rude and a great way to lose friends and alienate people: “But if you really believed that, you would surely …”)
By and large, this is probably a very good thing.
(Many widespread and perfectly reasonable beliefs are wide open to refutation by reductio ad absurdum. The itch to make such arguments is strong in teenagers.)
Yes it is. I don’t know why so many people think logic (or what they imagine to be logic) should rule us all.
On following through logical consequences: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
(To my surprise, Google doesn’t find that ever quoted at languagehat before.)
… some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Nah. Fichte already dealt with that one. In a typically overexcited passage about the supposedly scary notion of infinite space (vel sim.), he essentially says: “Relax, it’s all in your imagination”.
Vistas of reality my foot. Buncha eggheads clutching their pearls of wisdom and realism.
#
Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.
You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But he’ll trap you in the end,
And he’ll stick you for her price.
With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;
But she’s heard it all before,
Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.
#
To infinity and beyond!
Where there’s a will, there’s an Ellis wormhole. To Infinity and Beyond
Curious!
Being rather long, it tends to be taken apart into Least Quotable Units, of which I’ve quoted go(ne) mad from the revelation a number of times.
Is that the most dread German Idealism?
Is that the most dread German Idealism?
‘fraid so… But the “relax” part of it is useful. Just discard the gnosoplastic bubble-wrap.
gnoseoplastic. Blâmable !
Least Quotable Units: I was looking for “correlate (all) its contents”, the point of contact with the previous bit about logical consequences, but that sequence has apparently never appeared here before, despite being an LQU. That’s what surprised me.
The most merciful…new dark age.
now that’s what i call inimical lyricism!
(though, honestly, i think i’m with the uncorrected text in trusting fermor to deliver that specialty, more reliably if not more elegantly than poor old howard – i kinda wish PLF had turned his hand to cthulhuvian (or antecthulhuvian) fiction)
Dunno about HPL, but correlating all the contents of my mind wouldn’t be much of a challenge, really. Couple of weeks should be plenty of time to finish it. Say three weeks, with an index and bibliography.
The sci-fi thriller based on it could be called The Eddyshaw Correlation.
Third comment from the top: “Whaddya wanna bet the Beirut/Boston confusion was either an autocomplete setting in Word or a blind acceptance of the spellchecker’s correction for some odd mistyping of Boston?”
Nope. Beirut is in the story (which is still online). Dennett was born in Boston to a family of the Boston elite, but spent most of his early childhood up to age five in Beirut, where his father was a spy working for OSS. The writer heard something about that childhood and perhaps misheard or over-interpreted it to mean he was born there, or perhaps the writer or editor mistakenly amalgamated a couple of sentences.
Nice Henley pome, Stu. I only knew Invictus (who doesn’t?)
Speaking of the Grauniad — there was an opinion column during the BoJo premiership* with the headline “Britain is being ruled by a dangerous cult.” A few days later they published a letter from a reader who said he was glad to see that the newspaper’s legendary penchant for typos was still alive.
*Not a Ludlum novel
That’s beautiful.
@DE, let me help with an impressionistic index:
Pages 1-555: Details on Kusaal
Pages 556-1111: Details on other African languages and their cultures
Page 1111: Scandi-Congo (as the world’s leading expert)
Pages 1112-2221: Welsh
Page 2222: Everything else
It seems that the text is double-spaced (as appropriate for an academic treatise.)
On reflection, the Scandi-Congo material may in fact include things that Man Was Not Meant to Know.
It does not really affect me in the way that it affects
humansother people. It is to be hoped that my occasional allusions to this material have not doomed you all.I don’t quite get it. What could any word in that headline be a typo for?
“Ruled” for “rused”, in the common UK sense of “deceived.”
(Or possibly “runed”, though the use of “rune” as a verb “bewitch” is less common nowadays.)
Ah. Not much of a difference.
Now I’m really laughing! The implication is that “cult” should read “cunt.”
(I’m quite shocked that DE didn’t get that. Must be the Scots prudery.)
(Unless of course he did, and his response was po-faced Welsh drollery. Wheels within wheels…)
I got it too. The simplest explanation is that you and I are irredeemably vulgar. It might be an American thing.
Goddam right, buddy!
I had assumed that DM got it too. The Viennese are, after all, notoriously depraved. If it’s not Logical Positivism it’s Freudianism. Irredeemable.
Oh no, more wheels!
Ah, but Viennese swearing is all about arses and their holes and products, Czech-like. Cunts are known but largely ignored, so I had no concept of “a dangerous cunt”…
Freud was something of a prophet in his own country. He’s a very poor fit for Vienna, except evidently the 19th-century upperclass.
I don’t know if I would say cunts are ignored in Vienna. After all, one of Austria’s most famous 20th century lyrical works is Ernst Jandl’s “Alter Wiener Futoper” (“Old Viennese Cunt Opera”).
Interesting. I can think of at least 3 Jandl works*, and this is not one of them.
(…also, alte, because the opera stays feminine even after losing her a)
* Ottos Mops, Heldenplatz, and…
manche leute glauben,
lechts und rinks
kann man nicht velwechsern.
werch ein illtum!
Sorry “Alt-Wiener Futoper” is the proper title.
He reads it here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dvB2G5zVL4
When I think of Jandl I think of “auch hitler war ein österreicher, / nicht nur christus” or is that from Heldenplatz?
My impression has been that only Brits (or maybe just Englishmen) aspire to cunthood. While their moral equivalents in the US are best described with DM’s viennoiseries.
Yes, that usage is totally un-American.
We are a simple people.
Larry David (Season 2 Episode 4, the shrimp incident (2001))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Curb_Your_Enthusiasm_episodes
provides an in-depth analysis of American usage…
contains the following gem from the Guardian [2004]
The Guardian’s obit Born in Boston, Dennett spent the first five years of his life in Lebanon. has maintained the correction. The Telegraph (syndicated in my local paper) persists in
Come on people! You’ve had 20 years. You could have checked in Wikipedia.
I’d also say their Hed (or it might be my local paper) fails to understand a scintilla of the man “… who saw human brains as ‘programmes'”. Such nonsense is contradicted by the very article.
I don’t expect the Telegraph to be sympathetic to a “Fiery atheist”; but have standards of UK journalism fallen so low? (NZ
journalismreportage is already beyond rescue, of course. We have no journalists, only those who can parrot press releases.)You malign a fine British newspaper (and on St George’s Day, too! For shame!)
The Torygraph likes to keep things nice and simple for its elderly readership. There are Goodies and there are Baddies. Their actual attributes all follow directly from this primary classification.
It is unreasonable to expect a busy Torygraph obit writer to research facts about a Baddy, still less any of the Baddy’s writings, which would only be unwholesome and unsuitable for its readers. In any case, we already know all we need to about people of that sort. Our time would be better spent reminiscing about the glories of the Empire and how we single-handedly beat the Germans (especially as the Baddies are sowing doubts about these matters with their Cultural Marxist openness to what in their debased jargon they call “actual evidence.”)
[Your suggestion of consulting Wikipedia gives the game away. Has not Elon Musk Himself, the Saviour of Twitter-as-Was from the Evil Empire of Cancel Culture, exposed this as the anticapitalist conspiracy that it is?]