Eighteen cases of Scuptur*, two of Scluptur*, and one of Scuptor* were found in the OhioLINK database the other day. A scup (or porgy) is a fish found in the Atlantic Ocean between South Carolina and Massachusetts. Piscean sculptor and architect Frank Gehry (whose performing arts center at Bard College I found myself in last weekend) reportedly has a fondness for fish motifs. And, incidentally, while most dictionaries consider sculpt to be a valid back-formation or alteration of the word sculpture, some old-timers don't, preferring we use sculpture for both noun and verb, or even just as noun alone. Sculp, however, is widely viewed as incorrect, although Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language ("regarded by many as the finest English dictionary ever published") defines it without reservation as "to carve; to engrave." (The 1993 Columbia Guide to Standard American English calls sculp "standard" but "rare.") Not to sound too wishy-washy or to pick a fight here, but I'm not really sure what I think about all that, and I'm also not sure whether anyone has ever sculpted a scup. (I did, however, find this wonderful photo by Gerardus of "Fish with Soldier" by Tom Otterness, located in The Hague, Netherlands, at Wikimedia Commons.)
"Blessings on thee, little man," my father would intone at the dinner table on occasion, in a kind of mashup of grace and poetry. "Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan! With thy turned-up pantaloons, and thy merry whistled tunes..." The typo John Greenleaf Whitter turned up in OhioLINK to the merry tune of four times; WorldCat served up 26 hits for that one and three for Jon Greenleaf Whittier, plus one apiece for John Greeleaf Whittier, John Grenleaf Whittier, and John Greenlead Whittier. Although he received little in the way of formal education, Whittier managed to complete high school in a single year and was a devoted Quaker and avid Abolitionist. He was also editor of the influential Whig journal the New England Weekly Review. I'm sure his editorial blessings would be on all of you as well if you would be so kind as to correct those misspellings of his name in your catalogs. (1885 portrait of John Greenleaf Whittier from Wikimedia Commons.)
In Miss Rumphius, Barbara Cooney paints the picture of a librarian who follows her grandfather's recipe for a purposeful life: "Do something to make the world more beautiful." She decides to plant lupines. Eleanor Estes once told an interviewer that the character of Rufus Moffat "was based on five-year-old Barbara Cooney who filed a library application, climbing the big stairs of New Haven's George Bruce Branch Library where I worked." I found several typos for the word Barbara sprinkled throughout OhioLINK, including one for Babrara and three for Brabara, but further variants proved somewhat elusive. A search on Babara retrieved 50 hits, but only a dozen after modified thusly: Babara + Barbara. Similarly, I reduced 76 hits for Barbar to the more appropriate ten for Barbar + Barbara. Doing this judiciously will help you effectively separate the wheat from the chaff, although it can also end up missing some of the wheat should an errant cataloger have used copy & paste, thereby replicating the typo consistently. Boolean searches will cut down on false positives, but won't entirely eliminate them. In another example, I got 39 hits on Barbara + Barbra, only 22 of which explicitly contained a typo. (One of those that didn't was Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America—and Al Franken is #37. He counts among such notables both Barbara Walters and Barbra Streisand, along with two other Barbaras.) Be sure to check the work itself if you're in any doubt. (Portrait of Barbara Cooney, who clearly left the world a more beautiful place, from the Favorable Impressions website and the Skidompha Public Library, in Damariscotta, Maine.)
March is National Women's History Month and the one in which six more states held caucuses or primaries for the 2008 presidential election. In honor of the history-making campaigns this year by both a woman and a black man, let's pause to remember Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American to run on a major party ticket in 1972, and Victoria Woodhull, who represented the "Free Love" platform exactly one hundred years before that. OhioLINK gives us several typo candidates for feminist* and feminism, including Fminis* (two), Feminisn (one), Femenist* (six), and Femenism (four)—the latter two initially striking me as witty, if unwitting, bids for inclusion. Upon further inspection, it seems as though a few of them actually were "ment" to be puns. (Photograph of Shirley Chisholm from Wikimedia Commons.)
Steroid use in competitive sports has hit a sore spot with bad-boy ballplayer Jose Canseco's told-ya-so tell-all called Vindicated, in which he declares victory over the blind as a bat naysayers in his chosen field. OhioLINK swells with a muscular 36 cases of Steriod* and four more of Stereoid*. (Pictured here on an early 20th-century baseball card is Hall of Famer Addie Joss, looking quite naturally fit and trim, from Wikimedia Commons.)
were present in OhioLINK this morning. A search in Google tells us that at least one rock band has deliberately taken the name Crucifixation, so we would urge more caution than usual in evaluating and possibly correcting records with this term. As an aside, we seem to remember reading that the Good in Good Friday was derived from God, but couldn't back that up today in any recognized source.
man mind tends to fill in missing information without setting off mental alarm bells. We were surprised to learn that there is a learnig.com, but later found that this is a shell site being sold by a company called **Fabulous Domains.** Otherwise, there is a modest 220,000 hit count in Google for this typo.
not, apparently, catalog audio-visuals, so these records are usually added by member libraries of OCLC. Most libraries do not have the levels of quality control found in the Library of Congress, so we expect more trouble. On the whole, this is not a widespread error - in Google, the count of Leprecauns is less than 1 per cent of the count for the correct word. As always, we suggest that you check each record before making a correction.
Yesterday's typo has led to some further developments. After perusing the Ballard list, I discovered that there are a lot of different ways to misspell this word and its attendant forms. As usual, it seems, the "devel" is in the details. The following typos fall from up on "high" down to the "lowest" level of probability:
The "jackalope" has long been a popular trope among pranksters, developing a variety of different looks along the way. The technical term for this cryptid is Wolpertinger. They usually have the body of a rabbit or other small mammal and what appear to be antlers (believed to be caused by the Shope papilloma virus). While these medical/mythical mysteries may have a "hare" too many appendages, who would have the "hart" to lop them off? However, that's just what you'll need to do to the third e in today's typo, which seems to be taking its cue from words like envelope and antelope. Where discouraging words are seldom heard in OhioLINK, I did find 37 samples of this one. In addition to Develope, you might also want to search for Developes and Developement* (I got 16 and 111 hits, respectively, including some seemingly misspelled French words and some with "[sic]" after them), but be careful when it comes to truncating this typo. Both developed and developer properly include that extra e. (Early drawing of Wolpertinger from Wikimedia Commons.)
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the word Picure* in OhioLINK is only worth seven. (An exploratory search of WorldCat, however, picks up 75 records containing the typos Picure, Picures, and Picuring.) There are ice picks, guitar picks, toothpicks, and picks of the week. There are pics we stick on walls and ones we attach to emails. And then there's that particular pick that dares not speak its name—furtive, illicit, and socially unacceptable. (As Seinfeld once put it, after being caught in an apparent pick at a traffic light: "I am not an animal!") Generally speaking, it's not a pretty picture. But when left in the hands of a child, even this one makes for a very cute pic. (Picture by photographer Steven Yang from the Dunhuang China website.)
Yesterday's typo featured Judy Holliday, who chose to spell her stage name like that in order not to be confused with the great torch singer Billie Holiday, whom she idolized. But, despite Holliday's best intentions, she apparently couldn't prevent—and may even have thereby added to—the confusion. Billie Holliday appears 19 times in OhioLINK (and Judy Holiday once). This could be owing to the fact that there are about a hundred times as many records involving Billie Holiday as Judy Holliday, combined with a tendency for those double "l"s in the singer's first name to consequently crop up again in the last. (Portrait of the artist as a young girl named Eleanora, whose childhood was no holiday, from Wikimedia Commons.)
Judy Holliday, whose given name was Judith Tuvim (which roughly translates to "holiday" in Hebrew), was born to Russian immigrant parents in New York City in 1921. As a relative unknown, she landed the lead in Born Yesterday after Katherine Hepburn and Garson Kanin wangled a supporting role for her in Adam's Rib, thus showcasing her talent to the suits who had originally wanted to give it to a better known bimbo. Judy took a busman's holiday of sorts when she was called to testify a couple years later before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about her association with known Communists. Despite an IQ of 172, she pulled off her dumb blonde act to such dazzling effect that they let her go with just a warning. Although her dithering did not prevent her being briefly blacklisted on radio and TV (but not in films), she was able to avoid naming names. When asked whether books advocating treason and the forcible overthrow of the government ought to be disseminated, Holliday replied: "No, I don't, but I think that brings up the whole question of do you think that people ought to be allowed to say what they are thinking and write what they think. I think, and this is just a theory, that I think it is a lot better to know what people are stirring than to let them stew around subterraneanly." Judiasm turns up 14 times in OhioLINK and Judism twice.
