Thursday, February 19, 2009

Relect* (for Reflect, Reflection, etc.)

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" ... who's the smartest of them all? ... who's the (fill in the blank) of them all?

All bona fide questions, yet they do reflect a certain amount of superficiality. The properties of mirrors are such, that depending on whether your mirror is concave, convex, or a combination of the two, you might be very surprised to see how your image is reflected: perhaps not as fair, or smart, or ... as you originally thought.





Relect* appears 71 times in OhioLink, thereby placing it on the B list of Typographical errors in Library databases.

Cary Daniel

Image of mirrors from Google Images

2 comments:

Michael Minkoff said...

"Relect" seems to have been used as an alternate spelling for relic back in the day, so not all of those instances are necessarily typos.

Terry said...

We never make the claim that any of these are necessarily typos. What we do is find words that are possibly typos in a catalog and ask the librarians out there to check the records individually for context.