Nora + Norah (for Norah or Nora)

Norah Woodson Ulreich, known by her reading public simply as Nura (a nickname invented by her husband, Eduard Buk Ulreich, because he "never calls people by their right names," she said) was a children's author and illustrator born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1899. I discovered her work for myself amid a privately owned "lot" of books I bought a few months ago on eBay. Her stories are sweet, but rather odd. In the two Nura books I now possess—All Aboard, We Are Off and The Mitty Children Fix Things—the (two different) female protagonists both end up somehow owning and knowing how to fly a plane, and giving the various children in these stories airplane rides. It makes me wonder whether Nura herself had a pilot's license, but I haven't been able to determine that: there really isn't a lot of biographical information about her online. Here's what I did find, though. Norah Woodson studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York City. She met her painter husband in Chicago (Eduard had been born in Austria in 1889 and moved to NYC with his family as a child) and the pair eventually settled into a studio apartment in Manhattan. They would sometimes create murals together for the WPA, signing them "Bukannura." They never had any children, however, as Nura explained that "a real one might engross her to the point that she could not paint imaginary ones," according to a Time magazine review of her 1934 book Under the Buttermilk Tree. While there may have only been one Nura, there are plenty of Nora's in the world, some of whom spell their name Norah. There were 14 hits on today's combination typo in OhioLINK, exactly half of which were records containing two differently spelt names for two different people. There were also 288 found in WorldCat, presumably in approximately the same typo to non-typo ratio.

(Illustration from Nura's 1944 book All Aboard, We Are Off, from the Carol Reid collection. Here the children learn a lesson in moderation as they visit a land where everybody does nothing but read all day long!)

Carol Reid

Reflecton* (for Reflection*)

Haven't I seen you somewhere before? You may or may not have come across our typo of the day today in your many travels, but it looks as if it hasn't been blogged here yet, nor is it to be found on the Ballard list. The word reflect means to turn, bend, or be cast back, but the most famous character in mythology to be entranced by his own reflection, Narcissus, ultimately came to grief when he may have bent too far forward while gazing lovingly at himself. (In most accounts, he ultimately died of starvation and insularity; in some renditions, though, he actually falls into the pool of water and drowns.) According to Wikipedia: "In 1898 Havelock Ellis, an English sexologist, used the term 'narcissus-like' in reference to excessive masturbation, whereby the person becomes his or her own sex object." Around 15 years later, Freud published a paper entitled "On Narcissism: An Introduction." There were 12 instances of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 44 in WorldCat, a fact I wouldn't reflect on for too terribly long here. However, you might want to take a quick peek and see how those numbers are reflected in your own library's catalog.

(Pied Avocet, juveline, near Oosterend, Texel island, the Netherlands, June 2010, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Moeny (for Money)

Women and girls famously "don't get the Stooges" (coincidentally, Columbia Pictures released its first Three Stooges movie, Woman Haters, in 1931) and I have to admit, I'm not exactly an exception to that rule, although I can kind of relate to Moe's bangs. Wikipedia reports that his "distinctive hairstyle came about when he was a boy and cut off his curls with a pair of scissors, producing a ragged shape approximating a helmet or bowl." I did something sort of similar on the eve of my kindergarten class photo in a strikingly unsuccessful attempt to draw a straight line above my eyebrows. (While I did not, like Moe, hide under the house for several hours, creating a "panic," my mother was just as understanding about it as Mrs. Horwitz, who was so glad to finally lay eyes on her missing child that she didn't even bring up the hair thing.) Moses Harry Horwitz was born in 1897 in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, the fourth of five boys and the middle one of the three original "Stooges." The passage of time has given me a little more insight into and appreciation of the Stooges, who were really quite innovative in their own way. For example, they made three different anti-Nazi spoofs during the 1940s: You Nazty Spy! (Moe's favorite Three Stooges film), I'll Never Heil Again, and They Stooge to Conga. According to Wikipedia: "Moe's impersonation of Adolf Hitler highlighted these shorts, the first of which preceded Charlie Chaplin's controversial film satire The Great Dictator by months." There were no examples of today's typo in OhioLINK, although I did find 30 or so in WorldCat (around eight of which proved to be correct spellings of the surname Moeny).

(Promotional photo of actor Moe Howard of The Three Stooges, 1933, from Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Shcool* (for School*)

It seems like America's sign makers may be just too cool for school these days. Or maybe it's just that they've been drinking on the job, which is sort of what it sounds like when you try and pronounce this typo out loud. In any event, the latest example is from Stanton Street in New York City, which, after a year and a half of being ignored, was finally corrected yesterday. (Apparently, there are plenty of typos to go around in this case: the "word" X-ING was missing an I; The Post article misspelled Stanton as "Station"; and the Dept. of Education reportedly had the nearby Delancey Street spelled "Delancy" in its database.) The quite similar looking picture here comes from Guilford, North Carolina, and I referenced yet another one, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, in a blog entry I posted in 2009. I suspect there may be more of these topographical typos lurking out there as we speak, confusing and/or amusing school children throughout the land. There were 51 examples of today's typo in OhioLINK and 633 in WorldCat.

(Misspelled sign in Guilford, North Carolina, from The Telegraph website.)

Carol Reid

Havey + Harvey (for Harvey)

Have you a little Harvey in your house? Or one of pretty much any size and shape, for that matter? Jimmy Stewart, in the role of Elwood P. Dowd, considered a six-foot three and a half inch invisible rabbit named Harvey (a shape-shifting nature spirit, or púca to be exact) his very best friend, in or out of the local looney bin, in the eponymous 1950 film, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Mary Chase. (Ms. Chase was a fascinating figure too, it turns out, a journalist, playwright, and screenwriter, who in 1954 wrote a play called Lolita—one whose title she "hastily switched" when she learned that "a certain sensational novel" bearing the same name had just been published—and wrote two children's books to boot, Loretta Mason Potts in 1958 and The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House in 1968.) But back to Harvey and his faithful friend, Elwood P. Dowd. Elwood's family and friends are worried in equal measure about his sanity and his drinking habits, but the unflappable object of their concern seems to have gotten his priorities straight. He tells the doctor: "Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be'—she always called me Elwood—'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me." (Thanks, I just did!) There were five cases of Havey + Harvey in OhioLINK (make that 36 for Havey alone, or 44 if truncated as Havey*, but do be aware that Havey is not an altogether uncommon surname) and 43 in WorldCat. Have a smart and pleasant time with this one.

(Cropped screenshot of James Stewart from the trailer for the film, 1950, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Legilat*, Legilsat* (for Legislat*)

Last weekend on Portlandia, the Independent Film Channel's hit comedy show, in a sketch that I assume was probably called "No, You Go," two characters, played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, arrive at a four-way stop-sign standoff. They each sit there waving the other one through for so long their respective cars might have eventually turned to rust or gotten up and walked away of their own accord had the drivers not finally decided to both go at the same time. ("No, you tow" was the inevitable punchline.) In another bit from the same episode, Armisen plays an incredulous cashier confronted with a hapless customer who has forgotten to bring his shopping bag. (Armisen's head almost explodes.) "When I wake up in the morning, my eyes don't forget to open, my heart doesn't forget to beat..." chides Brownstein as the store's manager. "Yeah, I don't get in my car and forget the car and drive down the street, like running down the street, going like this, and then park it, and then put it in park, and then lock the door!" Armisen hilariously piles on. There were nine cases of Legilat* in OhioLINK today and 218 in WorldCat. (Legilsat* was found twice in the former database and 112 times in the latter.) I considered writing something about sexual harassment legislation or the entrance exam for aspiring law students, the LSAT, but hipster/anti-hipster sketch comedy and crazy public art from the Czech Republic seemed like a lot more fun. We're a few days late here, but apparently Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, has proclaimed January 21, 2011, "Portlandia Day." Many happy returns of the day, and many happy reruns of the show!

(Sculpture of a Trabbi on legs at the German embassy in Prague, 2010, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Beardon + Bearden (for Bearden or Beardon)

Today's typo was taken from real life, i.e., the schedule for a series of art films being shown at the State Museum every Thursday at noontime all throughout January and February. The one I saw last week was entitled "The Art of Romare Bearden," but the subject's last name was misspelled Beardon on the handout. Romare Bearden was an African-American artist born in Charlotte, North Carolina, although he was raised and lived most of his life in New York City, where he became a well-known figure in the Harlem Renaissance. There seems to be some dispute as to the year of his birth: Wikipedia puts it at 1911; according to his obituary in The New York Times, it was 1912; and Bearden himself claims during an interview (unless this was a transcription error) that he was born in 1914. Bearden discovered his love of art (starting with cartoons) while in high school, but didn't become serious about it until after he graduated from NYU with a science degree (he had planned to be a doctor) in 1935. He was very prolific and wide-ranging in his output, but is probably best known for his works of collage and assemblage. Bearden focused on the "black experience," but had a very catholic view of humanity. (He was light-skinned enough to "pass" and was told he could pitch for a major league baseball team because of it; the author Elton Fax once described him as "black by choice.") During that 1968 interview at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, Bearden stated: "If you equate a lot of the things that happened in Negro life you see there's a continuity with many of the great classical things that have happened before. And this is what I tried to find in my work, this connotation of many of the things that have happened to me with the great classical things of the past." Today's combination typo was found four times in OhioLINK and 24 times in WorldCat.

("After Church" by Romare Bearden, 1941, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid