Misssion (for Mission)

Misssion (for Mission)

Jeffrey's selection of "Misssion" made me think immediately of "Mission: Impossible," the TV show from the sixties. I was such a faithful fan! Couldn’t wait to see the tape spinning in the huge tape recorder, hear what the next top-secret assignment would be, wonder if the agent would chose to accept, and then watch the tape catch fire and go up in smoke. What state-of-the-art technology! We may chuckle about 1960s technology and special effects--but technology for finding typos in online catalogs has not advanced much. Until our online catalogs begin to highlight or identify typos in bibliographic records, we will continue to find typos the old-fashioned way, by looking for them, and making those manual corrections one-by-one. Should you choose to accept this challenge and seek out the typo "Misssion" in your catalog, you may find you have very few entries to correct.

Wendee Eyler

Guatamala (for Guatemala)

Guatamala (for Guatemala)Jeffrey Beall from the University of Colorado Denver and a member of the Libtypos group has selected five words from his list of the ten original typos he used when he created the "Dirty Database Test" back in 1991. This was the true beginning for finding and correcting typographical errors in online catalogs. He supplied many of the photos to accompany the blog entries for this week. The typo "Guatamala" is interesting because the cause is most likely faulty spelling rather than a finger blunder. For many American English speakers there is such a subtle distinction for the pronunciation of the "e" in Guat-e-mala that some assume the correct letter is "a." Most library catalogs have a high probability of this typo.

Today's entry includes a gorgeous picture of the Volcan de Agua and the Santa Catalina convent arch in Antigua, Guatemala.

Wendee Eyler

Rocester (for Rochester)

Rocester is spelled correctly (according to the Library of Congress authority file, but not the somewhat error-prone Columbia Gazetteer of the World) for the town in England, in two out of six occurrences in OhioLINK. But the other four are definitely typos for Rochester, New York—which, by the way, has the interesting distinction of being known as both the "Flower City" and the "Flour City"! While seeking out other misspellings for the word Rochester, I was a bit surprised by the two hits I got: references not to a place, but rather to the words orchestra and orchestral. This typo is of a certain kind that we occasionally see in which the first letter of a word is missing. (It also occurs sometimes with the final letter.) This may be due to a filing-indicator problem (if the search is done in browse mode), but is more likely the result of simple haste. Take time to spell and smell the flowers (Rochester's Lilac Festival is May 9-18 this year) and please have a cookie. (I made them myself.)

Carol Reid

Errata: I must apologize to the Columbia Gazetteer of the World, which is correct in spelling the Rochester in Kent, England, with an h. There is also a Rocester in Staffordshire, spelled without the h, but it's unlisted. This brings the number of typos found in the gazetteer down to a more forgiveable one: "Southhampton," a town in Long Island, New York, which also has an h, but only one.

Pillip*, Philiip*, etc. (for Philip*, Phillip*)

Simon and Garfunkel wrote "A Simple Desultory Philippic" as a sort of slap at Bob Dylan, or the cult of Dylan at any rate, and I suppose that TotDfL is a "simple desultory philippic" of sorts as well. Desultory means random, disconnected, jumping from one thing to another (which is something we do day to day, if not line by line) and philippic is a bitter verbal attack (although surely we're more nitpicky than bitter and more on a bit of a crusade than an all-out attack). Like a couple of incipient folksingers in a sea of Cleveland seniors, the following names jump out at us like a bunch of off-key notes: Pillip* (12 times—interesting aside: actress Rhea Perlman has written six books for kids about "Otto Pillip" and his palindromic ways), Philiip* and Phllip* (11 times), Philliip* (twice), and Phiilip* (once). A quick glance at the keyboard suggests these may occur because the L and I are sitting so close together, and not that far from the P and H. (Early snapshot of Paul and Art sitting in with Don Webster in the Upbeat audience, from the Cleveland Seniors website.)

Carol Reid

Reort* (for Report*)

"Ornament, Ornament, wherefore ort thou, Ornament?" the Bard of Avon might have asked in a slightly garbled but self-satirizing moment. To which one could only retort: "Why not?" I love words for things you never even suspected there was a word for. An ort, so it seems, is "the snippet of thread left over in the needle after finishing a section of embroidery" (from an obsolete Dutch word meaning "a scrap or fragment of food left from a meal") and a former librarian has found a rather festive way to recycle hers. She's resorted to stuffing them inside a Christmas tree ornament. I know it's only May, it may not be orthodox, and it's certainly not orthogonal—but if you start now, you'll have something different to display in December. Reort* is reported to be found 17 times (plus one "sic") in OhioLINK, making it a typo of "high probability" on the Ballard list. (Picture of an "Ort Port" from CameoRoze.com.)

Carol Reid

Metamop*, etc. (for Metamorphosis)

One of the first term papers I ever wrote in high school was, for some reason, about Franz Kafka and, after discovering his letters and diaries and overall métier of "troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal and bureaucratic world" (Wikipedia), I've had a soft spot in my heart for him ever since. (And another Kafka cockle just got warmer upon realizing he was born on the same day as my book-revering grandmother, twenty years earlier.) The work most of us were required to read at a time when many of us felt quite a lot like large grotesque bugs ourselves was The Metamorphosis, and the following typos for that word appear in OhioLINK as follows: Metamop* (12 times), Metmorph* (five), and Metomorph*, Metemorph*, and Metamorpo* (one time each). (A mop-haired young Franz, before metamorphosing into a moping one—a common caricature of Kafka—from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Sidney (for Sydney) and vice versa

A reader wrote to tell me about the typo Sidney for Sydney, Australia, which is a hard one to pin down. Sidney + Australia brings up 71 records in OhioLINK, but only a handful include this typo. A more productive approach is to search on Sidney + Sydney, which gets 127 hits, the majority of which seem to involve misspellings of personal names. Sylvia Sidney, born August 8, 1910, was that rare seeming anomaly, a retiring Leo (who took up film acting in order to overcome shyness), along with being a lifelong smoker who was also the stepdaughter of a dentist. She was married three times, often quite briefly; her husbands included the "Famous Writers School" instructor Bennett Cerf and the famous acting coach Luther Adler. When she wasn't playing the demure Madame Butterfly, she flocked to grittier roles, such as the female lead in Fury, Fritz Lang's first American film. Like those of us here at TotDfL, Sidney seemed to enjoy taking the wrinkles out of messy situations. She says, "I'd be the girl of the gangster ... then the sister who was bringing up the gangster ... then the mother of the gangster ... and they always had me ironing somebody's shirt." (Picture of Sylvia Sidney, who managed to keep her own Y's and I's straight, along with her many dramatic roles, courtesy of a lovely blog called Allure. And check out her contemporary, Sidney Fox, while you're in there. Silky and sylphlike in flapper attire and cloche. Note to today's fashionistas: Women have never looked so fetching.)

Carol Reid