Typo of the day for librarians

Reflecton* (for Reflection*)

2012-01-30T05:00:00.001-08:00

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)

2012-01-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

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*)

2012-01-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

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)

2012-01-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

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*)

2012-01-24T05:00:00.001-08:00

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)

2012-01-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

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

Interpretatacion* Interpretataion* Interpretatation* Interpretationan* Interpretatoi* Interpretatt* Interpersoa* Interpre0* Interpretataion*...

2012-01-20T05:15:00.000-08:00

...Interpretationan* Interpretatoi* Interpretatt* Interpritation* for Interpretation and interpret

The above are from a couple of different areas of the Ballard List of misspelled words in online library catalogs. Evidently there are a lot of ways to misspell and mistype today's word. It sort of reminds me of how my documents would look if I couldn’t instantly correct my typos when pounding too adamantly on the keyboard. (I went through a lot of Wite-Out back in the day.) Sometimes I feel like Porky Pig has taken possession of my hands – I just keep typing and I just keep hitting the wrong keys. Since it’s Friday, and this my first week of writing for this blog, I would like to share my favorite Porky Pig moment. I haven’t passed this by the people in charge, so I hope don’t get in too much trouble. But I suppose I should warn you that it’s rated PG. Here it is.

(The photo of Mr. Pig is from Wikipedia.)

Brian Dahlvig

Mineapolis (for Minneapolis)

2012-01-19T05:36:00.000-08:00

There was a previous entry on this blog about Mineapolis and how it is a High Probability error. I’m sure it’s still that way, lo! these four and a half years later. While there are several US cities with that name, I would like to briefly discuss the one in Minnesota (which, by the way, has a Moderate Probability of being misspelled as Minesota*). It’s January right now, so much of the country figures I have plenty of time to write these entries because it’s so cold and there’s so much snow I haven’t left my house since Christmas. Well, alright, fine, we are having a cold snap right now...and yes, it just happens to be snowing, but many people don’t realize that we get pretty darn hot, too. The record low for our state is -41 F (1888), but the record high is 106 F (1936). Granted those are the records for the entire state, but nevertheless, during any 365-day cycle, the fine citizens of Minneapolis experience a temperature range of over 125 degrees. And that is why clothiers love us so much—we have to buy a lot of clothes.

(125 degree temperature swing and the Mississippi flows right though the middle of it! Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)

Brian Dahlvig

Biograh* and Biogrp* (for Biography)

2012-01-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

Or, I assume it’s Biography. When I saw the misspellings, however, I immediately thought of Biograph, the early motion picture camera/projector/processor all wrapped into one. Biograph is also the shortened name of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, an early producer of films, started by William K. L. Dickson, who invented the Kinetoscope in 1891 at the Edison laboratories. However, while it did use a film loop, the Kinetoscope was a single-person peepshow. The first machines to project a moving image on film appeared in 1894 and 1895, the Bioscop in Berlin and the Phantoscope and Cinematograph in France. The Vitascope and the Eidoloscope were then introduced in the United States within six months. In the years that followed, we can’t forget the Kineopticon, Magniscope, Cieroscope, Plattenkinematograph, Filoscope, Cinegraphoscope, Criterioscope, Phenakistoscope, Hypnoscope, Centograph, Animatoscope, Chronophotographoscope, Variscope, Criterioscope, Vitropticon, Vivrescope, Diaramiscope, Venetrope, Motograph, Zinematograph, and, well, you remember the rest.

Biograh* and Biogrp* are in section B of the Ballard list, with 16-99 hits in OhioLINK. Evidently no one has problems spelling the sundry film projector names as none of them made the list.

(Photo taken from Public Domain Review, originally shot with the Zoopraxiscope—the one that really started it all.)

Brian Dahlvig

Massachusetes (for Massachusetts)

2012-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

Massachusetes, not surprisingly, is under Section B, High Probability, of the Ballard list. Not only is the state hard to spell, but "molasses," the sweetener that was the cause of a major disaster in Boston is pretty darn tough for some of us, too. The Great Molasses Disaster happened on January 15, 1919. Twenty-one people were killed and 150 injured when a tank containing 2,300,000 gallons of the sticky stuff exploded, sending a 40-foot wave into the surrounding area with enough force to knock buildings off their foundations and break girders for the elevated train. The molasses traveled at 35 miles per hour (which answers the question about molasses in January) and either completely covered those in its way or picked them up as though they were body surfing. It took 300 people two weeks to clean up the mess, but the litigation went on for three years. For more on this, see the Wikipedia entry. For a lot more on this, see The Dark Tide by Stephen Puleo.

(Photo of the damage to the elevated train from Wikipedia, January 15, 2009. How many cookies would 2,300,000 gallons of molasses make?)

Brian Dahlvig

Brtain (for Britain)

2012-01-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Along with the British music invasion of the early 60s, the United States—and the rest of world—was introduced to the greatest fictional spy of all time, James Bond. So far there have been 22 films (with one on the way), all produced by the Broccoli family. (Plus two others, but we’ll let those be.) Along with his partner, Harry Saltzner, Albert “Cubby” Broccoli started producing the Bond films because he was friends with Ian Fleming, author of the Bond novels. This, of course, explains why Albert Broccoli produced the not-nearly-as-successful-as-the-Bond-films Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

While inventor Caratacus Potts and spy James Bond may seem at odds with each other, just think of the women: Truly Scrumptious and Pussy Galore. Oh yeah! One person from the Bond films that Broccoli did not bring along with him to make Chitty was Maurice Binder to do the opening credits. Hmm, wouldn’t that have added an extra dimension...? Today's typo was found eight times in OhioLINK, making it a "low probability" one on the Ballard list.

(Broccoli photo, July 2005, from Wikimedia Commons. Unfortunately, the story I had heard of the vegetable being named after the family appears not to be true.)

Brian Dahlvig

Understad* (for Understand*)

2012-01-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

Edith Unnerstad was born in Helsingfors, Finland, in 1900 and died in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1982. Finland, I've been given to understand, as well as Scandinavia in general, produces some marvelous children's writers. Finland was the home of Tove Jansson, mother of the Moomintrolls; Denmark, of course, gave us Hans Christian Andersen; and Sweden has a long tradition of such writers, including Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. Pippi, as you probably recall, lived happily without benefit of parents or siblings, although she did share her spacious abode with a monkey and a horse. By contrast, Edith Unnerstad's Larsson family consists of seven children and two adults coexisting in rather tight quarters. According to the publisher of The Saucepan Journey, illustrated by Louis Slobodkin (who also did the drawings for Pysen and Little O): "The background is of cramped living and the housing shortages of Stockholm in the 1940s where families with many children were often denied housing." Understandably enough, we found 11 examples of Understad* in OhioLINK today and 144 in WorldCat.

(Edith Unnerstad, ca. 1960, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Appilcat* (for Applicat*)

2012-01-12T05:00:00.001-08:00

It's a well-known fact that cats like to climb trees (from which they traditionally require extrication on occasion by the local fire department). I had an apple tree on my property as a kid that I also liked to climb. I would bring my latest library book with me and settle into a well-worn crook for a sun-dappled, sweetly scented read. (I love this antique picture of a young girl going out on a limb for a book.) Those of you who prefer to do your reading via an online application may know that cats are notorious for liking your computer as well (perhaps it's the mouse... ;^) and will stretch right out on the keyboard if you let them. There were three cases of Appilcat* in OhioLINK this morning and 52 in WorldCat.

(Cat in an apple tree, 23 June 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Crimnal, etc. (for Criminal)

2012-01-11T05:00:00.001-08:00

In the Fritz Lang movie of the same name, starring the marvelous Peter Lorre, the letter M stands for Mörder (meaning "murderer" in German). But in this case it's merely the middle letter of our typo for the day, as well as the middle letter of the alphabet itself—one that is very often misused and misplaced. (Note the way I set off that last phrase with what's known as an em dash, so named because it takes up about the same width as the letter M on a typewriter key—cf. the en dash.) I'm reading an interesting book right now entitled Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (2011). Author Bill James writes about cases as disparate as those of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan, the so-called "Black Dahlia," the Scottsboro Boys, O. J. Simpson, Sam Sheppard (the putative source for the TV show "The Fugitive"), Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, Randall Dale Adams (upon whom the first film by Errol Morris, The Thin Blue Line, was based), Katherine Ann Power, the Lindbergh Baby, the McMartin Preschool, the Menendez Brothers, JonBenet Ramsey, and a great many others, cases both utterly notorious and far more obscure. He states: "We are, not as a nation but as human beings, fascinated by crime stories, even obssessed with them. The Bible is full of them... And yet, on a certain level, we are profoundly ashamed of this fascination." There is nothing to be ashamed of, but something to be fully investigated, in the fact that there were five cases of both Crimnal* and Crimimal* in OhioLINK today (66 and 46 in WorldCat) and just one of Crininal* (17 in WorldCat).

(Peter Lorre, 1946, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Revov* (for Revolv* or Recov*)

2012-01-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

See you later, escalator! But first I need to inform the powers that be near the place where I work that they've got a misspelled sign on their hands pointing visitors in the direction of the "Escaltor to Museum Lobby." Much like elevators, in the famous joke I made up myself, these things really "drive me up a wall." I mean, just how little regard does one have to have for the work of editors and proofreaders to neglect to run a bit of text by at least one other person (or an automatic spell checker) before sending it off to be carved in stone (or whatever the modern-day version of that, involving electroplating or galvanization or enamalizing, etc., might be). I couldn't find any typos for escalator (or elevator either, for that matter), but I decided to do a little research on them anyway. According to Wikipedia, Nathan Ames of Saugus, Massachusetts, patented the first design for what he called a "revolving staircase" in 1859. And it was all downhill (or maybe that's uphill) from there. Thirty years later, Leamon Souder patented another escalator-type "stairway" and in short order several other models followed. Weary riders of such things are no nudes descending a staircase, but their evolution does represent a revolution in getting around. When the first "moving staircase" was installed in Harrods Knightsbridge store in England on November 16, 1898, "customers unnerved by the experience were revived by shopmen dispensing free smelling salts and cognac," according to Bill Lancaster in The Department Store: A Social History. This typo seems to refer to words like revolve and revolution about as frequently as it does words like recover or recovery. There were five cases of Revov* in OhioLINK, and 150 in WorldCat.

(Seattle Public Library escalators, 26 April 2005, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Caeser* (for Caesar*)

2012-01-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

I took part in a "potluck Scrabble invitational" at a coworker and neighbor's house over the weekend and, though I promptly and predictably lost the game, I did learn a cool new word in the process. The Scrabble dictionary is an interesting reference work. It excludes "four-letter words," racial epithets, and certain other examples of offensive slang, but at one point I did manage to put down swear itself. Since the rules we were playing by allowed for a rather liberal use of the dictionary, it was there that I stumbled upon said cool word. And the next time I actually do stumble, I'll have to remember to use it! Gor, it seems, is a "mild oath" or what's also known as a minced oath. Amazingly enough, when I mentioned this find to my fellow players, the hostess replied that she had actually heard it used just the other day in the 1945 film Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. No way, I thought, or rather, "Gor!" (I love a great coincidence like that.) There were nine hits on Caeser* + Caesar* in OhioLINK, and 35 on Caeser* alone (172 and 620, respectively, in WorldCat). Some, however, look as though they might be early variant spellings (such as Zealous beleevers are the best subjects to Cæser...), so be sure to check the original works for any of these you might also find.

(Still from the film Caesar and Cleopatra, courtesy of the website Acidemic.)

Carol Reid

Twon (for Town)

2012-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

In the truly wonderful 2010 documentary Marwencol by filmmaker Jeff Malmberg, a miniature Belgian town, populated by Barbie dolls and World War II action figures, is lovingly created in the backyard of Mark Hogencamp as a means of self-therapy after Mark is viciously attacked and left severely brain-damaged by a gang of thugs in Kingston, New York. Rarely does an act of senseless violence have such an uplifting, heartwarming, and outright artistic outcome and, though I would love to say more about this touching and fascinating story, I don't want to "spoil" it for you. I'll just say, count your blessings, open your mind, get dressed to the nines, and go to town. You can read all about it later on. There's a good chance your local library has a copy, but it's also available from Netflix, both on DVD and streaming. Marwencol is a very moving movie that you won't soon forget. There were 25 cases of Twon (for town) in OhioLINK and 323 in WorldCat.

(Official theatrical poster for the 2010 documentary feature film Marwencol, from Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Devleo* (for Develop*)

2012-01-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

Whether you believe in astrology or not, you've probably believed in a Leo at some point in your life. Those born under this sign tend to be proud, persuasive, confident, and self-assured (-absorbed, -involved, -obsessed, etc., depending on the Leo) and, fortunately for them, are often blessed with that much envied and highly valued physical asset, great hair—much like the "king of the jungle" with his glorious mane. Barack Obama is a Leo; so is Madonna. Some folks regard Leos as highly developed creatures, while others would say their egos are frankly over developed. Wikipedia puts it with a certain even-handed bluntness: "They are known to have plenty of worshipers, but also many hidden enemies, and they are normally recognized by their self-absorbed personalit[ies] and their big ego[s]." Leos are generally considered most compatible with the other two Fire signs, Aries and Sagittarius, and least so with the Earth and Water signs. We found 24 instances of Devleo* in OhioLINK and 367 in WorldCat.

(Drawing of the constellation Leo by John Hevelius, 1690, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Janurary (for January)

2012-01-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

Many of the fun facts about the first month of the year have already been touched upon in this 2009 entry for Janaury, so let me just report that, while it's snowing ever so slightly and lightly here right now, it has been unseasonably warm and dry so far. On the other hand, hope springs (or should that be winters?) eternal in the hearts of skiers, skaters, and other fans of the cold fluffy white stuff. The ice skating rink adjoining my workplace has just reopened after several years of being shut down and, despite not having strapped on skates since I was a kid, I just might give it a whirl. In Holland, people often use skates and bikes for both fun and exercise, although bicycles are also a primary mode of transportation. Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World, recently wrote in the New York Times that "while many Americans see their cars as an extension of their individual freedom, to some of us owning a car is a burden, and in a city a double burden. I find the recrafting of the city in order to lessen—or eliminate—the need for cars to be not just grudgingly acceptable, but, yes, an expansion of my individual freedom. So I say (in this case, at least): Go, social-planning technocrats! If only America’s cities could be so free..." We found 17 cases of Janurary in OhioLINK today, and 498 in WorldCat. Check your own catalogs this January morning and skate through today's typos with ease.

(Enjoying the Ice, by Hendrick Avercamp, ca. 1630-1634, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Bedit* (for Edit*)

2012-01-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

At the height of the war in Vietnam, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who were married on March 20, 1969, took advantage of the expected press attention to stage a "Bed-In" at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. Dressed in white and sitting in bed ("like angels," said John) beneath signs reading "Hair Peace" and "Bed Peace," the couple held court every day for a week, confusing the media and delighting their fans. ("The newspapers said say what're you doing in bed / I said we're only trying to get us some peace"—The Ballad of John and Yoko.) The two planned to hold a second Bed-In in New York City, but as John was barred from entering the country due to a pot conviction the previous year, they decided to go to the Bahamas instead. Apparently, the hotel there didn't have air conditioning, though, because they quickly changed plans again and headed north to Montreal. This time they invited Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, Al Capp, Murray the K (aka the "Fifth Beatle"), and others to help record the album Give Peace a Chance. Today's typo appeared 21 times in OhioLINK and 147 times in WorldCat. (Most occurrences seem to have been matters of omitting the delimiter sign in a subfield b.) All we are saying is it might have been hard to get out of bed this morning after the long, peaceful holiday weekend, but our catalogs need editing and you're just the folks to do it.

(John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and friends, recording "Give Peace a Chance," June 1, 1969, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Lesss* (for Less*)

2012-01-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you were at the store yesterday, picking up a few ingredients for a hangover cure or grabbing a quick bite to eat and were in a hurry to get in and out. If so, you may have found yourself standing in a checkout line with a sign reading "Ten Items or Fewer." This, as we all know, is more grammatically correct than its longtime predecessor "Ten Items or Less" (less refers to an aggregate amount and fewer to numbers of individual things, whereas more covers both), but it doesn't sound quite as satisfying. There's just something about shorter words that, all things being equal, makes them preferable to longer ones. This is true of speaking as well as writing. For example, "2012" is going to be easier and pleasanter to say than "2011" was. (It's not only the fewer syllables involved, but the agreeable alliteration as well.) So have a happy, pithy New Year—or, should you prefer, a Tweety 2012! And always remember that less is more (although when it comes to typos, that really should be fewer). Today's typo was found seven times in OhioLINK (all errors except for Less's Authenticity, Uncorrupted Preservation, and Credibility of the New Testament) and 1288 times in WorldCat. Lessen the impact on your own catalog by extracting, where necessary, that extra S in Lesss*.

("One Less Car" sign spotted at London Critical Mass, April 29, 2005, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Breif (for Brief)

2011-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

On this last typo-day of the year, allow me to be brief. I’ll merely convey my best wishes for a happy and prosperous 2012 to all.

(Oh, you knew it couldn’t be that simple! Breif is supposed to be a typo of moderate probability, but a search in the OhioLINK database retrieves 73 hits. Many are already marked “[sic],” which means you could reasonably expect the same in your own catalog. Additionally, the Oxford English Dictionary lists “breif” as a variant form, so its usage in older works may be correct.)

(Grape-Shot: 1915 English Magazine Illustration of a Lady Riding a Champagne Cork, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Batle* (for Battle, etc.)

2011-12-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
Jericho Jericho
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho
And the walls come tumbling down

This popular African-American spiritual is thought to date from the first half of the nineteenth century. On the surface, it portrays the fight of Joshua and the Israelites against Canaan, although its alternate meaning is a promised escape from slavery. The song has been recorded by artists as varied as Mahalia Jackson, the Swingle Singers, Elvis Presley, and actor/musician Hugh Laurie.

Batle* is from the low-probability section of the Ballard list. However, an OhioLINK search limited to English will still pull up more than 400 results. Excluding the legitimate surname Batley will bring it down to a more manageable 15 entries in the quest to isolate true instances of today’s typo.

(The Taking of Jericho, by James Jacques Joseph Tissot, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Radiaton* (for Radiation, etc.)

2011-12-28T05:00:00.001-08:00

The 19-mile exclusion zone around the site of the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine is now home to a thriving wildlife population. In the 25 years since a disastrous meltdown required the government-ordered evacuation of more than 100,000 residents, nature has reclaimed much of the area. But scientists still disagree about how much damage the high levels of radiation have inflicted on local populations of birds, fish, wolves, and other animals.

What is clear is that the region will remain unsafe for human habitation for years to come. And yet some have chosen to return to their villages, willing to take the chance that old age will kill them before radiation-induced cancers or other illnesses can.

Fortunately, radiaton* is not dangerous in an online catalog, merely annoying. It should require little effort to eradicate this low-probability typo. Currently, there are nine entries for it in OhioLINK.

(International symbol for radiation, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Smakes (for Snakes)

2011-12-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

When American comedian and singer-songwriter Jim Stafford penned his whimsical 1974 hit “(I Don’t Like) Spiders & Snakes,” did he deliberately choose to name two of the fears that commonly afflict us humans? Google “top phobias,” and nearly all the resulting lists feature arachnophobia (fear of spiders), while a fair number also mention ophidiophobia (fear of snakes). In fact, LiveScience calls the fear of snakes one of the most prevalent and suggests it could be evolutionarily imprinted. As for Stafford’s song, it was successful enough to earn a place on Billboard’s Hot 100 Country Songs, a list of the top country songs to appear on its chart during the first 50 years.

Smakes, a lowest-probability typo, is not nearly so ubiquitous as its associated phobia. There is only one entry for it in the OhioLINK database.

(Caravaggio’s Medusa, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Pressent, Pressents (for Present, Presents)

2011-12-26T05:00:00.000-08:00

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Without doubt, the most humorous Christmas present I received this year was “Lizzie’s Leftovers,” a small tin adorned with this jump-rope rhyme and a portrait of the infamous Ms. Borden herself. Inside was a tasty selection of foil-wrapped chocolate body parts!

I remember well the 1975 made-for-television movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, in which actress Elizabeth Montgomery played the title role. But until I searched for Lizzie’s portrait on Wikipedia, I had no idea America’s favorite witch might actually have been related to the alleged axe murderess–they were thought to be sixth cousins, once removed.

Pressent appears five times in English-language OhioLINK entries, while a search for Pressents yields one.

(Lizzie Borden, circa 1889, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Vladm* + Vladi* (for Vladi* or possibly Vladm*)

2011-12-23T05:00:00.001-08:00

One of my very favorite Christopher Hitchens essays concerns one of my all-time favorite novels, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. In an essay, which appeared in the December 2005 Atlantic, Hitchens begins by saying: "In Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which young female students meet in secret with Xeroxed copies of Nabokov's masterpiece on their often chaste and recently chadored laps, it is at first a surprise to discover how unscandalized the women are. Without exception, it turns out, they concur with Vera Nabokov in finding that the chief elements of the story are 'its beauty and pathos'..." Vladimir Nabokov loved language and butterflies. Regarding the former, please turn to Lolita if you've not yet had the exquisite pleasure. As to the latter, Nabokov was also a lepidopterist who identified and named the Karner Blue Butterfly, a species first spotted in Albany's "Pine Bush," a beautiful and dwindling ecosystem comprising pine barrens, lupines, and little blue butterflies. There were 29 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK and 404 in WorldCat.

(Butterfly drawn by Vladimir Nabokov for his wife Vera, "Christmas 1969," from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Cristmas* (for Christmas*)

2011-12-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

The only difference between today's typo and the word for which it stands is the letter H. Which for me this week stands for Hitchens, who famously stood four-square against Christmas. Christopher Hitchens passed away a fortnight ago, but his spirit remains as strong as ever among his many devout followers. He argued fervently against the promotion of religion, the existence of God, and the hypocrisy of many Christians during his final years (his book God Is Not Great came out in 2007) and somehow it seems fitting that his first posthumously published essay should concern the "forced merriment" of Christmas. It seems like it should be one of the happiest days of the year, but then there's always a Hitch. If it's not the compulsory cheer, it's the unrealistic expectations, the crass materialism, the shameless lying to children, the pious bias against non-believers, the holiday-themed Muzak, the drunken mall Santas, the phony flying reindeer, the rock-hard fruitcake, noxious eggnog, hideous sweaters, preening "Christmas letters," etc., etc. Cristmas* was found eight times in OhioLINK and 43 times in WorldCat.

("Where Santa Claus Lives," 1900, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Natoin* (for Nation*)

2011-12-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

I first became aware of Christopher Hitchens when he began writing for The Nation in the early 1980s. His column appeared side by side with that of his then friend and political comrade Alexander Cockburn. They were the very first things (helpfully arranged on facing pages) that I turned to every week and I'm sure that was true for many Nation readers. Victor Navasky recalls how one day, shortly after hiring him, "around five p.m. a dimpled five-o'clock shadowed face peered through my half-open door, surrounded by a haze of smoke. 'Drink?' asked the deep, richly accented baritone voice that accompanied all of the above. If it is possible in one word to convey an upper-class sensibility attached to a heart ostentatiously identified with the toiling masses, Christopher Hitchens succeeded." Hitchens succeeded at more things than most of us have ever attempted and, though he wasn't able to outwit cancer, his "elegance, wit, and brilliance," as his grieving editor put it, will live on in the hearts of all who knew and admired him. There were eight instances of Natoin* in OhioLINK today and 36 in WorldCat.

(Current and past editors of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Victor Navasky, courtesy of the New York Times.)

Carol Reid

Dirv* + Driv* (for, usually, Driv*)

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Virtually all eight cases of today's typo found in OhioLINK (and 167 in WorldCat) occurred as part of the phrase "CD-ROM drive," a common enough usage nowadays, although to pre-Internet generations, the word drive had a distinctly different connotation. Someday soon we may find ourselves explaining to befuddled young people that in olden days cars didn't just go: people had to drive them. Christopher Hitchens was reportedly a rather bad driver; this, however, may have simply been a principled refusal to get behind the wheel after a typical night out, given his legendary appetite for alcohol. On the other hand, it seems that he also nursed the rather nice fantasy of tooling around in a bookmobile, driving the library to the patrons, the teeming masses yearning to read free. In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2010, Hitchens writes: "When I was very young I lived in a remote village on the edge of an English moorland. Every week, a mobile library would stop near my house, and I would step up through the back door of a large van to find its carpeted interior lined with bookshelves.... If I live to see retirement, I would quite like to be a driver of such a vehicle, bringing books to eager young readers like a Librarian in the Rye." Christopher Hitchens has now gone on to that Great Bookmobile in the Sky, and we're left down here below to thank and praise him for all the wonderful reading material he's brought us over the years.

(Bookmobile of the Zagreb City Libraries, Croatia, 12 October 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Fotun* (for Fortun*)

2011-12-19T05:00:00.000-08:00

Phil Ochs, whom I blogged about here once before, was born on Dec. 19, 1940, and died on April 9, 1976, at the age of 35. I just watched the 2010 documentary film entitled Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, which features a few cameo appearances by fellow cultural avatar Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens states that, while it's easy to love Bob Dylan, it takes a special sort of person to appreciate Phil Ochs. I come from a family of "folkies" (folk music aficionados) and was introduced to the music of Phil Ochs when I was a teenager. Like Hitchens, Ochs was an alcoholic and I was well aware that he had died by suicide, however the film made me much more cognizant of his inherited manic-depression along with his deep professional and political disenchantment. Listening to some of his songs as I write this, I am made both melancholy and nostalgic, especially by the words to the unbearably poignant "When I'm Gone." Phil Ochs, much like Christopher Hitchens, was blessed with a truly beautiful voice; both men had the misfortune of losing their voices, to some extent, shortly before their untimely deaths. Long live Phil Ochs and Christopher Hitchens, without whom the Sixties simply would not have been the same. Fotun* was found four times in OhioLINK, and 72 times in WorldCat, although fortunately not all of these are typos. Many of them are, though, so be sure to check your own catalog when you get a chance.

(Poster created for a concert at the Salle Claude Champagne Music School ,Vincent d'Indy, now belonging to the Faculty of Music at the University of Montreal, 1 May 1975, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Kippling, Kilping, Kiplng* (for Kipling*)

2011-12-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

Rudyard Kipling wrote:

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.

I've quoted this charming verse before, but please indulge me once again. Christopher Hitchens, who passed away late last night in a hospital in Houston, wrote about Rudyard Kipling for The Atlantic Monthly; he also once wrote about drinking tea. There wasn't very much that Hitchens didn't write about (see his 2011 book of essays, Arguably, for so many marvelous examples) and with his sudden, if not entirely unexpected, demise, it feels like the bottom's dropped out of the universe. I wanted to eulogize Hitchens today in this all too modest space, but it just felt too enormous, too difficult, too wrong somehow. In the midst of a furious flurry of blog postings in the wake of his death, Alexandra Petri warns against the tendency to wax lugubrious or try and get too personal. I have to confess that I too, like all the others, am feeling sort of stupidly sentimental at the moment and possessed of a precious little "how I once met Christopher Hitchens" story, but rest assured I shall restrain myself. Instead, I'll approach the subject obliquely, a little at a time. Sneak up on it, as it were. So today it's about Rudyard Kipling; in my heart, though, it's all about Hitchens. (The typo Kippling* turned up once in OhioLINK and 55 times in WorldCat—14 if combined with the correct spelling. We also found a handful of both Kilping* and Kiplng*.)

(Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from Current History of the War, vol. I, December 1914–March 1915, New York Times Company, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Paly+ Play (for Play* or Paly*)

2011-12-15T05:00:00.001-08:00

Did the March 19, 1971, episode of TV's The Odd Couple ("What Does a Naked Librarian Say to You?") go beyond the pale in its allusions to public nudity and the stereotyping of our profession? Well, probably, yeah, but on viewing it over forty years later, it still speaks to me with its lighthearted references to both censorship and librarianship. Written by Peggy Elliott and Ed Scharlach, the story concerns Felix's new girlfriend, Madelyn (played by Marj Dusay), who tells him she's a librarian as a means of throwing him off the track to her real occupation, which at the moment is being the lead actress in a nude off-Broadway play. (Murray the cop remembers arresting her during a recent raid on the theater.) The title of the episode is a play on the 1970 film by Allen Funt called What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? Today's combination typo found 23 results in OhioLINK (half a dozen of which were false hits on proper names and words like palynological) and 431 in WorldCat. What do you say you check this one out in your own library's catalog?

(Photo of Marj Dusay, found on the Web.)

Carol Reid

Railraod* (for Railroad*)

2011-12-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Today is the birthday of Erastus Corning. Which Erastus Corning, you say? The former mayor of Albany, New York? Well, it seems that there were two of those. The original Erastus Corning was born on Dec. 14, 1794. He was elected to office as Albany's mayor and served from 1834 to 1837. A century later, his great-grandson, Erastus Corning 2nd, also became mayor of this fair (?) city, holding onto the job for more than 40 years. (Growing up around here, the words Mayor, Corning, and Democratic Machine were virtually synonymous. His minions—that is to say, the voters—looked upon him as a benevolent despot. I wouldn't exactly say we were railroaded, but I was in college by the time I realized it was actually possible for anyone other than Corning to be mayor.) Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good Corning-related typo for the day, but Erastus the elder might just as well have been known as "Mr. Railroad." He was president of the Utica-Schenectady Railroad and a major shareholder and developer of railroads throughout New York State and beyond. Railraod* turned up 13 times in OhioLINK and 289 times in WorldCat. Take a good look today at your own political "machine" in order to rid it of any corruption you might find there.

(Portrait of Erastus Corning, between 1855 and 1865, by either Mathew Brady or Levin C. Handy, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Aslyum* (for Asylum*)

2011-12-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

Um, as lies go, most asylums are probably not all they're cracked up to be. The Opal (1851–1860) was the newsletter of the State Lunatic Asylum in Utica, New York, and was a fascinating attempt to shed light on this often maddening subject from the point of view of the patients themselves, who did much of the writing and editing. "Devoted to Usefulness," the newsletter published poems, essays, news articles, correspondence, and editorials; covered local and national events of interest; and addressed topics of a political, religious, literary, and social nature, sometimes in a humorous or satirical way. It also discussed current attitudes and theories concerning mental illness. The Opal's historic and ongoing legacy can be found in the mission of The Opal Project, which is dedicated to "ending psychiatric oppression" in all its forms. Some mental patients are indeed paranoid, but they may not have been the only ones. In 1875, Commissioner Norris of the Kings County Lunatic Asylum stated, with regard to reports of abuse: "This sort of thing is very common among lunatics; they are always imagining themselves in great danger of being killed by their keepers." Well, perhaps so. And perhaps their keepers were always imagining, in some cases anyway, that the inmates weren't running the asylum. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure I witnessed three cases of Aslyum* in OhioLINK this morning, and 40 more in WorldCat.

(Cover of The Opal, vol. 1, no. 1, from the New York State Archives collection.)

Carol Reid

Forster* + Foster* (for Foster* or Forster*)

2011-12-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

A segment on ABC's 20/20 recently had me wondering what some folks think foster care is actually for—in addition to whom mind-bending, mood-altering prescription drugs are supposed to be for. It seems that many children in foster care are being given "powerful psychotropic drugs" for no apparent reason other than the fact that it's cheaper than therapy. But being distressed over the loss of one's parents or one's home does not constitute mental or emotional illness per se. Traumatic though such things are, they shouldn't really require more than a modicum of medication, along with some counseling and, dare I say love, in order to help most kids deal. According to research conducted by 20/20, these kids are up to 13 times more likely than other children to be prescribed such drugs; "hundreds" of them are on five or more of them at once. One tiny interviewee said the drugs made her "sleepy in the day," while others displayed symptoms that were much more disturbing. Most expressed insight and outrage far beyond their years and spoke feelingly about how happy and "free" they became once they were finally taken off their meds. We found 84 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK and 974 in WorldCat. You'll probably find some in your own catalog as well. Not all of these cases will need correction, of course, but please deal appropriately with those that do.

(Krishna with his foster mother, Yasoda, painted as a Keralite mother and child, 1901, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Pwer* (for Power*)

2011-12-09T05:00:00.001-08:00

I've blogged about the Powerpuff Girls and the power of squirrels, but never both together in the same posting. The other night I caught an episode of PPG called "Stray Bullet" in which Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup discover a baby squirrel who's been mauled by a mean old owl and then take it home to nurse it back to health. He/she (they can't decide whether to name the patient Lady Josephine, Miss Fluffy, or Bruce) soon recovers and, in fact, develops superpowers of its own, thanks to Bubbles slipping it a bit of Chemical X. The squirrel is then deemed an honorary Powerpuff Girl and given the "B-name" Bullet. But here's the cool thing: it's a red squirrel, despite the fact that the story takes place in "Townsville, U.S.A." (In some cultures, redheads are thought to have supernatural powers, yet the beleaguered red squirrels in Europe seem to be losing the battle.) Later the Powerpuff Girls watch a TV documentary about the "clever and endearing forest squirrel." (The squirrel is gray.) "A highly intelligent creature, known for its charm and resourcefulness, the common North American tree squirrel is a natural acrobat..." The girls object: "That's nothing! Bullet can jump miles further than that! Of course she can! Bullet can fly, silly! Bullet's the best super-squirrel in the whole wide world! No, Bullet's the best any kind of squirrel in the whole wide world! No, Bullet's the best any kind of animal in the whole wide world..." Bring your own superpowers to bear on our typo of the day, which was was found nine times in OhioLINK (all legitimate) and 272 times in WorldCat (a mixed bag).

("Cycling Squirrels? Someone has adapted the warning sign for the West Yorkshire Cycleway, except that red squirrels no longer occur in this area." February 17, 1991, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Dewlling* (for Dwelling*)

2011-12-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

Fairies drink dew. But you knew that, right? And they dwell under toadstools and in various other spots throughout the garden. The herb Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla) collects the morning dew, which when dropped into the eyes is said to enable one to see fairies. Many people believe in fairies, especially those who dwell in the United Kingdom, and this was particularly true in 1917, when two teenage cousins from Cottingley, England, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, managed to convince quite a few folks that they had not only seen, but photographed, fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously defended the photographs as genuine and spent years promoting them to the public. The truth is, they were genuine photos, but they were fake fairies. In the early 1980s, the elderly cousins confessed their longstanding deception (the "fairies" were paper dolls hung from branches), although they disagreed about the nature of the fifth picture and jointly maintained that, in any case, they still saw them. I wouldn't dwell on this too much (or maybe I would), but in the meantime, we found three of these typos hiding in plain sight in OhioLINK, and 40 in WorldCat.

(Frances Griffiths with fairies, taken in 1917, first published in 1920 in The Strand Magazine, from Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Multp* (for Multiple, etc.)

2011-12-07T05:00:00.000-08:00

Our typo of the day is almost always a multiple one. But it's not always easy to tell how many cases we will find, or what the cause for the trouble might have been. In the recent book Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan, we learn that the famous albeit anonymous "Sybil" (Shirley Mason) never had 16 separate personalities at all. Rather, she was part of a folie à trois, comprising her therapist, the author who made her story a bestseller, and herself. Essentially, though, she was a victim of rogue psychiatry and professional aggrandizement. Nathan is the journalist who publicized false sex-abuse cases like McMartin in the Village Voice. She also coauthored, with Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence in 1995, about the extended hysteria (encompassing everything from "ritual abuse" in daycare centers to "repressed memories" in therapists' offices) that swept the nation during the 1980s. There were four instances of Multp* in OhioLINK and 183 in WorldCat. Take a look at what's inside your catalog today and see what typos you can expose.

(Cover of Sybil Exposed by Debbie Nathan.)

Carol Reid

Disese*, Diseas (for Disease, etc.)

2011-12-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season for diseases. At least, those of the sore throat, drippy nose, stuffed head, hacking cough kind. I've caught a cold. And, though it's nice to have an excuse to lie on the couch all day and read the new library book, while being brought comfort snacks and cups of herbal tea now and again, it's really no fun being sick. However, the home-remedy "cure for the common cold" self-tinkering is always instructive. This time I'm trying oranges and lemons, garlic and honey, elderberry syrup, and some beautiful purple homeopathic lozenges. I'm feeling under the weather today. It's been raining all afternoon. Time to get back to my book now, though. I'm afraid I'll be feeling much better in the morning. If you feel up to it, get back to work checking for our two typos today. Disese* was found 21 times in OhioLINK and 242 times in WorldCat, while Diseas turned up seven times and 262 times respectively. (I noted some, however, with a "sic" in tow and others that may have been older spelling variants).

(Color lithograph advertising poster: "Dr. D. Jayne's Tonic Vermifuge. A Sure Remedy for Worms. The Best Tonic for Young and Old. The Cure for C[ough]s, Colds, Asthma, or any Lung or Throat Disease, is Dr. D. Jayne's Expectorant." Captioned: "The Child Moses." From Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Alic + Alice (for Alice)

2011-12-05T05:00:00.001-08:00

Today is the birthday of Calvin Trillin, who Wikipedia describes as an "American journalist, humorist, food writer, poet, memoirist, and novelist." Trillin was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1935. He attended Yale University and eventually landed jobs in New York City at Time magazine and The New Yorker, where be became a staff writer in 1963. Trillin pens a long-running politically inspired weekly poem for The Nation called "Deadline Poet." Although he has covered some "hard news" over the course of his career, he has a penchant for two topics in particular: food and his late wife, Alice. The book Alice, Let's Eat, published in 1973, pretty much sums up his worldview. Calvin Trillin married the writer and educator Alice Stewart in 1965 and together they had two daughters, whom they brought up in Greenwich Village, where Trillin still resides. Alice Trillin died on September 11, 2001 and her doting husband wrote about her one last time in The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, in an essay entitled "Alice, Off the Page." There were seven cases of Alic + Alice in OhioLINK today and 65 in WorldCat.

(American writer and humorist Calvin Trillin at a discussion at Dartmouth College, February 2, 2oll, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Prsent* (for Present*)

2011-12-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

At my family's Thanksgiving celebration over the weekend, my sister handed me a gift bag, an "early Christmas present," she said, "that just can't wait." It was a coffee cup with a picture of Santa Claus on it and the words "Marry Christmas." A typo mug for the typo blog! (As Pee-wee Herman, undoubtedly a big fan of the present-giving holiday, might say: "If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?") When I got home later that night and turned on the TV, I immediately heard someone say, "I'm not the marryin' kind..." Well, me neither, I guess, but I'm certainly glad someone was. This present is priceless. And now I can present it to all of you. Prsent* (for present*) turns up 88 times in OhioLINK and "too many records found for your search" in WorldCat. Here's hoping that those numbers presently go down like a misspelled mug of Christmas grog.

(Mug shot.)

Carol Reid

Continum* (for Continuum*)

2011-12-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Continuum is one of a relatively small group of words that contain two U's in a row. Many of these have Latin roots; some are Hawaiian. There is, of course, the familiar vacuum, along with the more obscure, and fun to use, ahuula (feather cloak or cape made of minute red or yellow bird feathers, trimmed with black or green feathers, worn in Hawaiia by high chiefs and kings); squush (which the Scrabble dictionary claims is a synonym for squash, and the derivative squushy); and suum (a term imitative of the sound of the wind, used by Shakespeare). Extra credit goes to muumuu (a loose-fitting dress of Hawaiian origin, much favored by Mama Cass) and zuuzuu (candy or confectioneries sold to prisoners from vending machines) for having TWO sets of double U's in each word. There were 14 cases of Continum* in OhioLINK and 470 in WorldCat. Hey, youse guys, do you think you could check your own catalogs for the Case of the Missing U today? (Notice that I'm being a suaviloquus—a term meaning "he who speaks rhetorically"—when I ask that.)

("Continuum" sculpture, 2005, by Michael Snape at Docklands, Victoria-Melbourne, Australia, March 31, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Opprtun* (for Opportun*)

2011-11-30T05:00:00.001-08:00

Recent college graduates face a nine percent unemployment rate and many of them end up living at home with their parents because they're financially unable to support themselves. Not only is there a shortage of jobs requiring the four-year degrees they've worked so hard to obtain, but the burden of trying to pay off their monstrous students loans eats up all the money they do have. It's a very sad situation, for many reasons, but one still finds occasional cause to smile at the thought of equal educational opportunities. I laughed outright when I came across the following typo the other day: "Equal Educational Opportuniact." Yup, I thought, all things being equal, given the current cost-benefit ratio of higher education these days, one could be forgiven for supposing that only a maniac would care to avail themselves of the opportunity. Today's typo, Opprtun*, comes up three times in OhioLINK and 92 times in WorldCat.

(Wesleyan College graduates in 1913, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Biolol* (for Biolog*)

2011-11-29T05:00:00.001-08:00

Biology classes, particularly the junior high school kind, can sometimes cause students to LOL, especially when the subject at hand is the human body. Just like with women's stockings, there's "nude" and then there's "transparent." And then, of course, there's "gray," as in Gray's Anatomy, the go-to book for what all's inside us. Genuine intimacy, which frequently leads to good sex, can often allow people to "see right through" their partners. And sex is primarily a function of the brain and the genitals, plus (some would passionately argue) the important inclusion of the heart. But, truthfully, every part of us plays a part. Laughter has also been shown to be closely related to orgasm. I'm not trying to be funny, though, when I say there were four cases of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 151 in WorldCat.

(Drawing of the female anatomy in Qvinnans Kropp, the Swedish edition of a German book by Dr. G Panzer, 1897, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Staight (for Straight)

2011-11-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

It looks like straights are in curious straits these days. Linguistically speaking, that is. In fact, it's a queer kettle of fish they currently find themselves swimming in. A non-gay guy wrote to Dan Savage recently to ask whether his transsexual friends were being unreasonable by calling him "transphobic" because he had confessed to not finding MTF transsexuals as attractive as "cis females." (Otherwise, his "LGBTQA" credentials appeared to be impeccable.) Was he, he worried, a "hypocrite"? He's not transphobic, replied Dan's expert, Kate Bornstein, a transsexual woman herself. But neither should he be calling himself "straight." Rather, she says, he's a "queer heterosexual." And that's where she loses me. Bornstein is suggesting that the word "straight" no longer serve as a value-free analogue to "gay."The way she sees it, "queer" no longer simply describes one's sexual orientation, or even one's gender identity; it now speaks to personality, politics, and point of view. And, by extension, she seems to be saying, "straight" equates to narrow-minded and prejudiced. (Okay, I'll admit that the word itself has a rather uptight quality, especially when you compare it to "gay." But perhaps we should have thought of that 75 years ago when these slang terms for heterosexual and homosexual were first coined.) So whither "queer"? Is there anywhere else for it to go at this point? It's one thing to "reclaim" a word that's long been used as a cudgel by bigots; it's another to start applying it willy-nilly to anything that strikes one's PC fancy. Will white people who oppose racism become known as "queer Caucasians"? Will ecumenical Jesus followers be referred to as "queer Christians"? Will males who support feminism be called "queer..." (wait, no, that won't work). I fear this far-flung fetching of "queer" to modify anything and everything positive with regard to sexual equality and freedom is a big mistake. (And I find myself cringing over my ancient proselytizing on behalf of made-up words like "herstory," "womyn," and "wimmin" as well.) The guy who wrote Dan that letter is not a "queer heterosexual." He's a plain old heterosexual (otherwise known as straight) who happens to support queers (also known as gays, bis, and trannies). As well we certainly all should. So straighten up and fly right (this includes you queer lefties too!) and search your catalogs for today's typo, which was found six times in OhioLINK and 68 times in WorldCat. My favorite? Rainbow Times: Your Insider for the VSU LGBT Community, by the Valdosta Staight University Gay-Straigh Alliance. Straigh, by the way, gets one hit in OhioLink and 46 in WorldCat. (Note that some of these are personal names, correctly spelled.)

(The Straight Swift, who also goes by another name, the Parnara Guttata, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Entrepri* (for Enterprise)

2011-11-25T05:00:00.000-08:00

Let’s hear it for free enterprise! Black Friday shoppers everywhere must be relieved to know that this year they can get the earliest possible start on those holiday bargains. Several retailers, including Macy’s, Target, and Best Buy, will all open their doors at 12:00 AM. Finally, the 24-hour stores will have some real competition!

By the time you read this, it will be far too late to get the best deals. But there’s still plenty of time to find and correct the moderate-probability typo Entrepri* in your catalog. Doing so will take a little diligence, as limiting an OhioLINK search to English still pulls up 181 entries. Many of these are actually instances of the French “entreprise.”

(Black Friday at Walmart by Dustin, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Morther (for Mother)

2011-11-24T05:00:00.000-08:00

In 1991, naturalist and writer Joe Hutto got the rare opportunity to be a mother to 16 wild turkeys after a neighbor left a bowl of eggs on his front porch. Once the eggs hatched, he would spend the next year and a half guiding the youngsters to adulthood. However, as Hutto tells it, he learned more from his constant and sole companions than he taught them, coming to appreciate their individuality, curiosity, intelligence, and complex vocalizations, many of which he in time grew to understand. But most of all, he took from the relationship a profound sense of the turkeys' ability to live entirely in the moment, and the joy that experience brings.

My Life as a Turkey, the film version of Hutto’s story, was aired recently as an episode of the PBS series Nature. It was in turn based on the author’s book Illumination in the Flatwoods.

The lowest-probability typo Morther is much more rare than wild turkeys. At present, there are no entries for it in the OhioLINK database, and a WorldCat search yields only 29 hits. So don’t feel the need to spend your holiday hunting for it in your own catalog.

(Wild male (tom) turkey from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Relationsip* (for Relationship, Relationships)

2011-11-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you, like I, missed the news this past spring about a bizarre symbiotic relationship between armadillos and humans. Researchers confirmed that about one third of the leprosy cases diagnosed in the United States each year are the result of humans coming in contact with infected armadillos–often because they ate them. If that’s the bizarre part, here’s the symbiosis: leprosy was unknown in the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans, but armadillos are indigenous to the Americas only. So humans transmitted it to armadillos in the first place!

Relationsip* is a low-probability typo on the Ballard list. There are five English-language entries for it in the OhioLINK catalog.

(Nine-banded armadillo by Tom Friedel, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Sciecn* (for Science, etc.)

2011-11-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

On June 18, 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke these words in the British House of Commons:

I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

A colleague referenced Churchill’s concern about perverted science when he forwarded me a chilling article from London’s Independent newspaper. “'Super Soldiers': The Quest for the Ultimate Human Killing Machine” describes the attempts of scientists “to produce a soldier who kills without care or remorse, shows no fear, can fight battle after battle without fatigue and generally behave more like a machine than a man.” If they succeed, I wonder if anyone will call this our finest hour.

The typo Sciecn* occurs four times in the OhioLINK database. Three entries are for English-language works, while the last can be found in the title proper of a French work.

(Sir Winston Churchill, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Heaa* (for Hear, Heart, etc.)

2011-11-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? While I can’t answer that age-old question, I can definitely attest to the fact that a toppling tree will make a really loud noise if there are people nearby. Our neighborhood was built in what used to be woods, and one recent windy night, we were quite startled by a large crash next door. Fortunately, there was no loss of life or limb—well, except for the tree itself!

Heaa* is a low-probability typo with only three entries in OhioLINK, so hopefully you won’t find many in your own catalog. And even if you do, at least you won’t need a chain saw to get rid of them.

(Fallen Oak 4 by erinmont, from stock.xchng)

Deb Kulczak

Citze* (for Citize*)

2011-11-18T05:00:00.000-08:00

You might want to sit down for this one. Especially if you've just had a baby/episiotomy or are suffering from hemorrhoids, prostate problems, anal or vaginal fissures, genital herpes, inflammatory bowel disease, or bladder infections. Pretty much anything that ails you "down there." Sitz baths, which some people call "sits" baths and which comes from the German word Sitzbad—a bath (Bad) in which one sits (sitzen)—are ones in which the bather sits in water that just covers the buttocks and hips. They work by increasing circulation to the affected area and keeping it clean. You can buy "sitz baths" that attach to the commode, or you can simply run a little water in the tub. Some people like to add mineral salts, baking soda, or vinegar to the water. You can also alternate between hot and cold immersions every few minutes. It doesn't necessarily make you a good citizen to take them, but it does show a certain can-do spirit to try healing thyself at home before running off to see the doctor. See if you can find any samples of this typo that might be sitting in your catalog today. This one occurred 38 times in OhioLINK and 323 times in WorldCat.

(Nineteenth-century bathtub in Ludington, Michigan, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Scandel, Scandels (for Scandal, Scandles)

2011-11-17T05:00:00.001-08:00

In the wake of the disturbing allegations of sex abuse at Penn State University, Dr. Drew Pinsky referred to childhood sexual abuse as the "gift that keeps on giving" and added that this was "irony, folks." He apparently had been criticized earlier for this statement and now added that what he had meant was that abuse has lifelong effects and is often passed down through generations. My first reaction was that it wasn't irony so much as sarcasm, but after I considered for a bit, I concluded that Dr. Drew was right. These words are defined as near synonyms, both involving "incongruity" between literal meaning and intent, with irony edging out sarcasm in the "wit" and "subtlety" departments. According to Dictionary.com: "The distinctive quality of SARCASM is present in the spoken word and manifested chiefly by vocal inflection, whereas IRONY and SATIRE, arising originally as literary and rhetorical forms, are exhibited in the organization or structuring of either language or literary material." If Dr. Drew had said, "Molestation makes a great Christmas gift" or "It's just what I've always wanted!" that would have been sarcasm. He would have been saying the exact opposite of what he meant. But in fact what he said, albeit idiomatically, was precisely what he intended. It's just incongruous to speak of gifts and abuse in the same breath. That's what makes it ironic. Ironically, I couldn't find any typos for irony or sarcasm, etc., in OhioLINK. But Scandel and Scandels were in relative abundance, found 15 times and two times apiece. Not the worst thing in the world, all things considered, but certainly worth looking into.

(Irony picture from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Parmaceu* (for Pharmaceu*)

2011-11-16T05:00:00.000-08:00

If your idea of la dolce vita is a ham and cheese sandwich in a bucolic and historic section of Italy, the city of Parma is for you. According to Wikipedia, Parma is "famous for its ham (Prosciutto di Parma), its cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano), its architecture, and the fine countryside around it." Parma is an exceptionally old city, "already a built-up area in the Bronze Age." Although it "did not see widespread destruction" during the Second World War, portions of the Biblioteca Palatina were wiped out by Allied bombing. There are still many beautiful old churches, palaces, and other sights to be seen there, including the Museum House of Arturo Toscanini and the Ospedale Vecchio ("Old Hospital"). The latter was originally built in 1250 and later renovated during the Renaissance; currently it's home to the State Archives and Communal Library. Instead of a trip to your local pharmacy, a visit to Parma may be just the cure for what ails you. Parmaceu* (for pharmaceu*) pops up nine times in OhioLINK and 71 times in WorldCat.

(Townhall of Parma, Italy, March 28, 2002, by Herbert Ortner, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Squirel* (for Squirrel*)

2011-11-15T05:00:00.000-08:00

For over a century now, the Eurasian red squirrel has been gradually displaced by the Eastern gray squirrel (which is the more common squirrel this side of the pond) and is currently facing possible extinction in the U.K. Desperate and depressed over this invasive species, English squires and their ilk have begun organizing shooting parties. Red squirrels are apparently less of a nuisance than gray ones and seem to be a bit more attractive or arresting, like most redheads do. (If the one shown here isn't cute enough for you, check out this baby picture.) We have a lot of squirrels in our own backyard and, so far, we rather enjoy their antics. My companion refers to them, when they really get going, as the "Curious Squirrel Circus," a sort of rodent Cirque de Soleil. But gray squirrels, in general, are pretty naughty. They climb bird feeders, dig up flower bulbs, and worse. Just like me, though, they love nuts and forget where they put things. (They even have a name like mine: Sciurus carolinensis). Don't forget to check your catalog for today's typo, which was found five times in OhioLINK and 79 times in WorldCat.

(Red squirrel in Bialowieza National Park, Poland, May 23, 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Buget* (for Budget*)

2011-11-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

"Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms..." goes the dispirited children's ditty, and while bugs are not worms, exactly, most people hold exactly the same morose viewpoint when it comes to eating them as well. However, if you happen to be on a tight budget, bugs just might fill the bill. Many insects, in fact, are not only edible, but highly nutritious, and commonly consumed throughout the world. While I couldn't find any appetizing pictures on Wikimedia Commons of chocolate-covered ants or anything to feature here, I did come across this adorable picture of a couple of dapper-looking grasshoppers who could be heading out to lunch. (Actually, they're copulating, but it seems they might have already had a bit of grass to get them in the mood.) Mexican grasshoppers are often eaten roasted with chiles and lime and are called chapulines. Not to bug you about this, but try and budget some time to check for today's typo, which was found 15 times in OhioLINK and 428 times in WorldCat.

(Differential Grasshoppers, copulating, by Eric R. Eaton, Oct. 10, 2010, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Separt* (for Separat, Depart)

2011-11-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

A young person of whom I'm very fond informed me recently that she'd just read the John Knowles novel, published in 1959 and beloved of high school English teachers ever since, A Separate Peace. (The title comes from a line in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.) Somehow having missed this perennial assignment during my own tender years, I found myself finally settling down to read it on Veterans Day. This poignant memoir is set in 1944 at a tony New Hampshire prep school known as "Devon" and is loosely based on the author's experiences at Phillips Exeter Academy (one of the characters bears a resemblance to fellow alumnus Gore Vidal). It's an idyllic coming of age before going to war, and the personal/political tragedy that punctuated and defined it. Protagonist Gene Forrester movingly tells the story of his close and complex relationship with his roommate Phineas and how they were ultimately separated amid classmates' departures into a world dominated by defense departments. There were 26 cases of today's typo (usually but not always for separate, etc.) in OhioLINK (half a dozen or so being transcribed instances of antiquated spelling) and 681 in WorldCat.

(A Separate Peace, 1960 MacMillan edition, courtesy of Whitmore Rare Books.)

Carol Reid

Invisb* (for Invisible, Invisibility)

2011-11-10T05:00:00.000-08:00

Some typos don't show up very often, or hardly ever appear at all, because the words they're meant to represent simply don't occur with much frequency themselves. Such near invisible typos include the pairs Wale* + Wail* (only three in OhioLINK, all false hits in one way or another) and Wales + Wale (which also got three hits, two of them legit). In the 1933 James Whale classic The Invisible Man, Una O'Connor gives a whale of a performance. She plays the the Irish innkeeper's wife and I'm not sure which is more disconcerting, listening to her shrill banshee-like wailing after "seeing" the Invisible Man, or watching Claude Rains disrobe into total nothingness in her sitting room. There were 13 cases of Invisb* in OhioLINK and 113 in WorldCat. Take a look in your own catalog today and, by fixing any you see there, render this typo invisible. For now. Just remember to keep an "I" (or three, or five) on (or in) it.

(The Invisible Man movie poster, from Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Movel* + Novel* (for Novel* or Movel*)

2011-11-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is the brainchild of author Chris Baty and it's been taking place every November for the past ten years or so. The goal is to churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month, which, in case you're wondering, comes out to about 1600 words a day. In 1999, Baty and some friends launched the project in San Francisco with 21 participants; by the following year, the ranks of the writerly wannabes had swelled to 140. In 1992, there were 5,000 people signed up and last year over 200,000. If you haven't gotten started on your novel yet, it's definitely time to get a move on. No Plot, No Problem! is how Baty puts it in the title of his self-help book; the main thing is just to keep it moving. It's all about the word count, at least for now. (Apparently, December has been dubbed "National Editing Month" to allow and encourage post-NaNo revising and proofreading.) Just channel your inner grade-schooler trying to make your composition long enough: "It was a very very very very very cold and rainy day in November when I finally sat down to write my novel...." NaNoWriMo has been criticized for seeming to suggest that anybody can be a successful writer and for trivializing the art of authorship, but while some of the points made in that regard do resonate a bit, I really don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging people to try writing this way. We can't all be Irma Rombauer, but we can all practice and experience the joy of cooking. Likewise, you might not have a novel when you're done here; you may just have 50,000 words of something. But novel schmovel, I say have fun with it. Writing is no different than any other hobby or means of self-expression. It's inherently pleasurable and mind-expanding and sometimes one simply has to "do it" to find that out. We found three cases of today's typo in OhioLINK and 34 in WorldCat.

(Chris Baty, from the Web.)

Carol

Turth (for Truth)

2011-11-08T05:00:00.000-08:00

In the 1957 British comedy The Truth About Women, directed by Muriel Box and co-written with her producer husband Sydney, the simple truth is that there is no single truth when it comes to women. Laurence Harvey plays Sir Humphrey Tavistock, a long in the tooth man of the world (a baronet in the diplomatic corps) who's seemingly seen it all: from a financially independent suffragette who wants to live together without benefit of marriage (Diane Cilento) to an oppressed but highly ranked harem girl (Jocelyn Lane); a modern-minded Paris matron looking to take a lover (Eva Gabor); an American heiress with an avaricious mother (Lisa Gastoni); a talented if timorous British painter (Julie Harris); and an utterly selfless Swedish nurse (Mai Zetterling). Tavistock's maritally maladroit son-in-law prompts him to recount, via flashbacks and philosophy, his many and varied romances throughout the years. It's not a great movie, truthfully, but it is a nice premise, neatly done, and offers an interesting look at 20th-century sex roles and attitudes, especially if you enjoy British films from the 1950s—which, in truth, I do. Turth was unearthed five times in OhioLINK and 69 times in WorldCat. You can try truncating this typo as well, but as with love, be prepared for some false hits.

(Actress Diane Cilento, photographed 5 January, 1954, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Adnrew (for Andrew)

2011-11-07T05:00:00.001-08:00

Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on January 14, 1919, and grew up only a few blocks from the house where my mother, aunts, and uncles did. He even looked rather startlingly like my late uncle, with whom he shared many of the same Depression-era thriftiness (aka collecting/hoarding) tendencies and curmudgeonly attitudes. Not to mention a keen wit and intellectual curiosity, true patriotism and willingness to serve his country, and an unwavering atheism. In a lot of ways he feels much like a member of the family. Rooney was a lifelong writer and reporter, starting on the literary magazine at Albany Academy; moving on to the student newspaper at Colgate University, the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, and various other print and television gigs (working for both Arthur Godfrey and Harry Reasoner); and ending up on 60 Minutes in 1978. I saw him give the keynote address at the NYLA conference in 2001 on the topic "Libraries: Investment in the Future." (His speech was a lot grouchier and funnier than that stuffy title makes it sound.) Andy Rooney died last Friday at the age of 92, just a month after he had reluctantly retired. The 60 Minutes clock, which has been comforting and afflicting us every Sunday night from 7 till 8 since 1968, will go right on ticking without him, but it really won't be the same. Rest in peace, Albany's own Andy Rooney, and thanks for all the memories. Today's typo appeared four times in OhioLINK and 37 times in WorldCat.

(Andy Rooney, photographed by Stephenson Brown, June 3, 2008, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Productin* (for Production*)

2011-11-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Story of Temple Drake was considered so daring in its day that it's been credited with ushering in the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code), or at least affording it the clout needed to effectively censor the movies. It's based on the William Faulkner novel Sanctuary and stars the evanescent and eponymous Miriam Hopkins, along with a great cast overall, including the sexily thuggish Jack La Rue. Hopkins plays a "hedonistic" young woman, granddaughter of the town judge and a bit of a tease (found written on a restroom wall: Temple Drake is just a fake. She wants to eat and have her cake). She's a good-hearted good-time girl, though, who simply prefers partying to being some man's property. In what is perhaps the first cinematic deployment of "It's isn't you, it's me," Temple rejects a marriage proposal by adding: "It's just me ... it's something inside me ... it's like there's two me's..." Of course, there's much much more to this "1933 scorcher," which, according to TCM guest host Michael Phillips, "gets more evildoing done into seventy minutes than most films can come up with at twice that length." A search on Productin* (for production*) produced 27 hits in OhioLINK and 855 in WorldCat.

(Glass slide advertisement for The Story Of Temple Drake, courtesy of Jeff Bridges on Flickr.)

Carol Reid

Thomson* + Thompson* (for Thompson* or Thomson*)

2011-11-03T05:00:00.001-07:00

I learned the word flâneur while reading a eulogy for Martin Slobodkin (no apparent relation to Louis), the dearly departed "Boston bon vivant." The author referred to Mr. Slobodkin as having been more than merely "a man in a flaneursuit." According to Wikipedia, a flâneur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, or as Charles Baudelaire expressed it, a "gentleman stroller of city streets." There is no exact equivalent for the term in English. The concept of the flâneur is important in the work of Walter Benjamin, plays a role in academic discussions of modernity, and is also used in architecture and urban planning. "The Flâneur is typically well aware of his slow, leisurely behaviour and had been known to exemplify this state of being by walking turtles on leashes down the streets of Paris." The idea of someone taking a turtle for a walk put me in mind of Eloise at the Plaza, "the only hotel in New York," she points out, "that will allow you have a turtle." While scarcely evoking the words "slow" or "leisurely," Eloise in Paris could have been dubbed the "Frantic Flâneur," or maybe the "Flighty Flâneur." As a further point of interest, Eloise was reportedly modeled on Liza Minnelli, the goddaughter of author Kay Thompson. It occurs to me that Liza at the Plaza might have made a marginally better title for the book, but perhaps those involved felt it wiser not to be too explicit about who the heroine's "rawther" neglectful mother actually was. There were 1194 hits on Thomson* + Thompson* in OhioLINK (although some of these, of course, are bound to be cases of two people/two spellings). Walk, don't run, to your nearest library catalog to check for this typo today.

(Illustration picturing Eloise walking her turtle Skipperdee.)

Carol Reid

Villian* (for Villain*)

2011-11-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Batman, the wonderfully campy TV show that ran from 1966 to 1968, centered around the trials and tribulations of Batman and Robin, aka "millionaire Bruce Wayne" (played by Adam West) and "his youthful ward Dick Grayson" (Burt Ward, another happy homonym). It was filled with variegated villains—does anyone remember Roddy McDowall as "The Bookworm"? Villainesses were never in short supply either and famously included Catwoman (played by Eartha Kitt and Julie Newmar), along with Marsha, Queen of Diamonds (Carolyn Jones); Ma Parker (Shelley Winters); Zelda the Great and Olga, Queen of the Cossacks (Anne Baxter); Lola Lasagne (Ethel Merman); Lady Peasoup (Glynis Johns); Dr. Cassandra Spellcraft (Ida Lupino); The Black Widow (Tallulah Bankhead); Minerva (Zsa Zsa Gabor); "women's rights advocate" Nora Clavicle (Barbara Rush); and Lorelei Circe, also known as "The Siren" and portrayed by Joan Collins. ("Well, look who's here," she sneers, ball-bustingly, in The Wail of the Siren: "Batgirl and Batboy!") It's hard to beat the female baddies of Gotham City for sheer panache, although Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) was not just the daughter of Police Commissioner Gordon, but also a "sexy librarian," giving new meaning to the old adage "Knowledge is power." OhioLINK uncovers 111 cases of Villian* (some are personal names, but most seem to be typos for villain*) and WorldCat a whopping 1,253. Wham! Bam! Pow! Defeat those typos now!

(Screen capture of the title card for Batman, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Smyp* (for Symp*)

2011-11-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Deborah Kerr and John Kerr homonymically co-star in the 1956 movie Tea and Sympathy, based on a stage play by Robert Anderson. (Homonyms are, strictly speaking, "one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings"; technically, the two Kerrs are homographs.) Deborah Kerr (like the automobile) and John Kerr (like the mongrel dog) play Laura Reynolds, the wife of a macho-seeming house master, and Tom Lee, the insecure prep school student she takes under her wing. Laura and Tom do not always look or sound like the other people around them—Tom in particular is taunted by his classmates for being a "sister boy." His perceived lack of sexual and athletic prowess is seen as symptomatic of a strange otherness. In one pivotal scene (though these words are not actually used), Tom is clearly shown to be a bit "light in the loafers," as they used to say. Laura is drawn to the boy, who reminds her of her first husband, an equally sensitive soul who died trying to prove his masculinity. She proffers the tormented Tom "tea and sympathy," which at times seems to spill over into something more. Some critics have deemed this film a cop-out for suggesting that Tom is truly heterosexual, but in a sense it's rather timely given the current focus on bullying and the fact that young people, especially males, are often targeted for "acting gay," whether they really are or not. Nevertheless, the censors fought this film every step of the way. Have some sympathy for today's typo, which was found five times in OhioLINK and 70 times in WorldCat. All five of the former, it should be noted, are for forms of the word symphony, a carefully composed piece of beautiful music, something which Laura and Tom manage to make together by the film's end.

(First edition cover of Tea and Sympathy, from Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Hatian, Haitain (for Haitian*)

2011-10-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

I attended a Halloween special at the New York State Museum the other night, part of the perennially popular series known as Cooking the Tree of Life. The topic this time was the food origins of certain "monster myths": vampires (pellagra from corn), zombies (potion of pufferfish, cane toad, and the so-called Zombie Cucumber), and the witches of Salem and elsewhere (ergot on rye). We got to see our Museum scientists dressed up as ax murderers and vampires (the one who emerged from an upright coffin literally hailed from Transylvania!) and partook of some safer samples (a variety of delicious dishes including corn, cucumber, and rye bread) expertly prepared by a chef from the Food Network. Watch what you eat now and don't be spooked by today's typos, which, I hasten to add, are found 12 and four times apiece in OhioLINK, and 103 and 18 times each in WorldCat.

(Zombie Cucumber, also known as Jimson Weed, Hindu Datura, Indian Apple, Sacred Datura, or Thorn Apple, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Soth America* (for South America)

2011-10-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today we focus on a topic near and dear to the hearts of many. I am, of course, referring to chocolate! This divine substance comes from the bean of the cacao tree, and in the South American country of Peru, the hunt is underway for new varietals. NPR reported recently that the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service has been hot on the trail in the Amazon rainforest there, and in 2008 and 2009, they documented 342 wild specimens. Experts say the flavor of cacao, just like wine, changes with the region where it’s grown. But don’t expect a taste in the near future, because newly cultivated cacao plants are slow to grow and produce beans.

Though less rewarding than the quest for chocolate, finding and correcting typos like Soth America* should help kill a little time while you wait. Enclose the phrase in quotation marks, and OhioLINK will yield 2 entries.

(Theobroma cacao by Luis Ovalles, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Bewteen (for Between)

2011-10-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

I remember that, in my earliest years of elementary school, I was taught “never walk between parked cars.” But my sister, who is three years younger, has no such recollection. It’s unlikely this important lesson was dropped from the curriculum at our school, so can it be that my memory is simply better? I’d like to think so, but she would probably just claim “I was absent that day.” Such was the title of an entertaining piece that appeared on National Public Radio back in July. Correspondent Linton Weeks reported (in part) on the more than 4,000 responses NPR received after asking Facebook Friends to “tell us about something you were embarrassed to learn as an adult that you should have learned much earlier.”

Bewteen has clearly gained momentum since its entrée to the low-probability section of the Ballard list. There are presently 19 English-language entries for this typo in OhioLINK, so don’t be embarrassed if your catalog has some too.

(Car Park, by heartbeaz, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

For the the (for For the)

2011-10-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

“Oh, for the love of Mike!” How often have you heard this expression and wondered about its origins? It’s yet another example of a minced oath—the “semi-technical term for a swearword modified so as to be used without giving offence,” as the Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language defines it. In this exclamation of surprise or impatience, the word “God” is replaced with the euphemistic “Mike.” Or in some cases, “Pete.”

For the the is a high-probability typo, meaning you should expect to find some examples in your catalog. But depending on how your keyword index is configured, you may have to experiment with search strategy. Even limiting to English, if you submit the plain phrase to OhioLINK, it tops out at 32,000 results. Enclose the string in quotation marks, and you get a more manageable 63. Which could still leave you uttering a few choice oaths (minced or otherwise) of your own.

(Profanity from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Warrent (for Warrant)

2011-10-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

"Literary warrant” is a term that many librarians—particularly catalogers—will recognize immediately. Basically, it means that subject terminology should derive from existing literature on a given topic, rather than from a preconceived conceptual framework. Literary warrant underpins much of Library of Congress practice today.

What most of us probably don’t know is that the notion of literary warrant came from the writings of E. Wyndham Hulme (1859-1954), a librarian working at the British Patent Office in the early part of this century. (An interesting article about Hulme’s work can be found in the journal Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, v. 5, no. 1, 1984.) The concept of literary warrant was quite forward-thinking for its time, but some librarians maintain it is no longer adequate for our current information environment. Instead, they argue “user warrant” is an equally important basis for subject vocabulary.

Warrent occurs 20 times in OhioLINK , so it’s a lot more prevalent than its low-probability status would suggest. I warrant you’ll want to investigate your own catalog for this typo.

(Library of Congress Subject Headings)

Deb Kulczak

Diversti* (for Diversity)

2011-10-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

We’re often told we should celebrate diversity. But while this sentiment nowadays refers to the human condition, consider this: according to the University of Illinois Extension site “Let’s Talk about Insects,” these creatures make up more than half of all living things in the world today. It’s estimated 10 quintillion of them (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000) share the planet with us at any one time, and all total, there are more than one million insect species. It makes you wonder how we could possibly measure up!

Fortunately, the typo Diversti* is not nearly so prolific as our six-legged friends. There are only 2 English-language instances in the OhioLINK catalog, making it a low-probability error. Remove that restriction, and you get 2 more hits for “diverstissement,” a misspelling of the French word “divertissement” (meaning entertainment, recreation).

(Bumblebee, by P7r7, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Humilat* (for Humiliat*)

2011-10-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Last night the author Wayne Koestenbaum spoke about his most recent book at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany. I am embarrassed to admit (if not quite humiliated) that I was utterly unfamiliar with Koestenbaum and his work, except for a recent spate of advice columns on Salon. But I was so impressed with his kind and courteous manner, as well as the enthusiasm of the crowd and the great reviews his books have gotten, that I'm looking forward now to reading Humiliation: Big Ideas/Small Books, as well as perhaps The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993) and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (1995). Among the numerous humiliation anecdotes the author shared with us, my favorite concerned his short tenure as a high school English teacher. One of his charges was widely considered the worst student in the school, but despite the roughness with which he handled the language, he turned out to be the teacher's favorite. One assignment he handed in told of how he had been at the grocery store one day with his mother when she angrily pulled him by the ear. The store owner observed this and out of sympathy for the boy gave him a lemon. Koestenbaum found the story both symbolic and "minimalist" and told his student so. Years later, the young man came upon a mention of his now-published former teacher and wrote him a letter. Much good, it seems, was generated from that single act of humiliation. If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade ... or, better yet, write a short story about it, or a letter to your old English teacher! We exposed 18 cases of Humilat* in OhioLINK (15 of which appeared on older records and could be a variant spelling) and 120 in WorldCat.

(Wayne Koestenbaum, February 21, 2007, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Ledgend* (for Legend*)

2011-10-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I should have led with the story of the sinking library yesterday—rather than sandwiching it in between Bill Maher and Nick Baker—since it seems that there's more to this architectural anecdote than meets the eye. It's a story that really has legs. According to Snopes (the "myth busters" of dubious forwarded mass emails), "That Sinking Feeling" is a persistent urban legend dating back to the 1970s. Many libraries, including those at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Indiana University at Bloomington, Canada's University of Calgary and the U. of Waterloo, even the Vatican, have been subject to this myth. But the one thing they all have in common is the clueless architect who forgot to account for the "weight of the books." It's an interesting fantasy, which Snopes suggests may be a "metaphor for the crushing weight of the knowledge students are expected to absorb." Or you may prefer the "more straightforward interpretation (fellow who is supposed to be so smart forgets something blindingly obvious, thus allowing us lesser souls to experience a moment of self-congratulation)." In either event, as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother would undoubtedly say: "Legen ... wait for it ... dary!" We may feel that our libraries are sinking under the pressure of budgetary cutbacks or technological advances or what have you, but few librarians are currently complaining of too many books. Unlike the online stuff, books possess a weightiness that most of us still enjoy having on our hands. Although, occasionally, some of them have to go. In a parody of this particular urban myth, Barbara Mikkelson once wrote about the opposite situation: a library that began to rise after some of its outdated books were removed from the collection. Here's hoping that books of all sorts do not become the stuff of legend, nor mark the end of libraries. There were five copies of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 45 in WorldCat.

("Modern Book Printing," the fourth of six sculptures in the Berliner Walk of Ideas, unveiled 21 April 2006 at Bebelplatz near Humboldt University, to commemorate Johannes Gutenberg, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Architeture (for Architecture)

2011-10-19T05:00:00.002-07:00

Last week on Real Time with Bill Maher, the free-speaking HBO host shocked his library-loving fans by flatly asserting (although to me it sounded more like he was kidding, or being sort of ironic): "We have the Internet. We don't need a library anymore." As proof of this, he added: "I don't know anyone who's gone to a library since 1998." This was in response to Penn Jillette's definition of libertarianism: in short, that taxation is a valid means for preventing violence, but not for "building a library." However, even he seemed a bit taken aback by Bill's blanket dismissal, and mentioned how he likes to use the WiFi connection at his own public library while his kids check out the picture books. It reminded me of an episode of How I Met Your Mother, in which Ted tells Robin a cautionary tale about an architect who had designed the perfect library building—except for the fact that it would sink an inch or two deeper into the ground each year. "He forgot to account for the weight of the books," Ted sums up glumly. "Okay, first of all," replies Robin, "nobody goes to libraries anymore, so who cares about that guy?" Which, in turn, put me in mind of a report by Nicholson Baker published in The New Yorker in 2008 (ten years after any of Maher's pals supposedly couldn't have cared less) about the otherwise capacious new San Francisco Public Library, where staff was forced to start wholesale "weeding" upon moving in because adequate shelf space hadn't been factored into the architecture. Like the one in Ted's story, the New Main's architects hadn't "thought of the books." But you definitely should. As for Bill Maher, let's cut him some slack in light of his supportive "New Rule" from 2006: We Don't Need Drug Tests for Librarians. There were five examples of today's typo taking up space in OhioLINK, and 267 in WorldCat.

(Looking down in the atrium of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, August 7, 2009.)

Carol Reid

Pictues (for Pictures)

2011-10-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

This is our modest pick for Tuesday, a picture of the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), along with the typo Pictues. Mussorgsky is best known for a piano suite called Pictures at an Exhibition, a title that would almost suggest the artist might have had synesthesia. I don't suppose that he actually did, but he did suffer from an acute case of dipsomania. Alcohol was practically de rigueur in the circles the young pianist ran in, but it eventually did him in at an early age. Mussorgsky was considered crude and unpolished by many of his contemporaries, an "idiot" by some and a "genius" by others. But for all of his creativity and originality, Mussorgsky was hobbled by poor technique and inadequate training. Although he had been born into an aristocratic family with a princely lineage, the struggling composer ended up a laid-off civil servant with a drinking problem. His reputation, however, has improved with age. Pictures at an Exhibition was included on two albums (1971 and 2008) by Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and A Night on Bald Mountain appeared in both Fantasia and The Wizard of Oz. We found 21 examples of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 108 in WorldCat.

(Detail from Ilya Repin's celebrated portrait of Mussorgsky, painted 2–5 March 1881, only a few days before the composer's death, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Short + Shor (for Short)

2011-10-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'll make this short. (Anyway, I'll give it a shot.) Some of the best things in life are short: shortbread, shortcake, shortcuts, shorthand, short ribs, shortstops, and last, but surely not least, short stories. But short does have its shortcomings. It can be shortsighted or short-tempered. It can prove short-lived, or give short shrift. And then there's the queerly monikered short snorter: "a banknote inscribed by people traveling together on an aircraft." Today's typo was found 17 times in OhioLINK (about half of which were legitimate spellings for different words) and 119 times in WorldCat. You shor 'nuff might find a few in your own catalogs too, so make short work of 'em if you do.

(Actor Martin Short hosting Broadway on Broadway, September 10, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Clevelend* (for Cleveland*)

2011-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is "Sweetest Day," observed in certain areas of the Northeast and Great Lakes region, though gradually spreading to other parts of the country. Sweetest Day was begun in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922. It's like a rather more amorphous Valentine's Day, with a hint of Halloween, historically manifesting as candy-coated alms for the poor, as well as "the sick, aged and orphaned." Along with, assures Retail Confectioners International, pretty much anyone else whose day you'd like to sweeten. It's also sort of a role reversing day for women, who tend to be the ones giving candy to their husbands and boyfriends, as well as to freely indulging children. It all started with a philanthropist and candy company employee named Herbert Birch Kingston, who "wanted to bring happiness into the lives of orphans, shut-ins and others who were forgotten," according to the website Sweetest Day History and Facts. Some fed-up Clevelanders, however, would like to put an end to this "concocted" celebration, which they scorn as a "Hallmark holiday," despite the fact that it was not originally connected in any way with the greeting-card company. (Hallmark has, however, jumped on the candy bandwagon, as has American Greetings.) Tomorrow, residents of Cleveland will be cleaving over the question of just "how sweet it is." Today's typo occurred six times in OhioLINK, and 55 times in WorldCat.

(Window of the Dalesman Café Tearooms and Sweet Emporium advertising some of the wares on sale, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Cornel + Cornell (for Cornell or Cornel)

2011-10-13T05:00:00.001-07:00

Today marks the birthday of Poland-born actor/director Cornel Wilde (1912–1989), a man who probably saw both parts of his name misspelled with some regularity throughout his life. In fact, the name by which he became known in Hollywood was a kind of misspelling in and of itself, an Americanized version of the one he had been given at birth, Kornél Lajos Weisz. Having emigrated to America at the age of seven, Wilde soon proved to be replete with natural endowments. According to Wikipedia, he was a "talented linguist and an astute mimic," with "an ear for languages which became apparent later in his acting career." He also won a scholarship to the Physicians and Surgeons College at Columbia University and "qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater." Wow, sexy, strong, smart, and sensitive! There were nine cases of Cornel + Cornell in OhioLINK (six of which were actual errors) and 110 in WorldCat. Now quit staring at the birthday boy and start looking for this typo.

(Screenshot of Cornel Wilde from the trailer for the film The Greatest Show on Earth, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Mathews* + Matthews* (for Matthews* or Mathews*)

2011-10-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

Larry Mathews, account executive, part-time actor, and 1976 UCLA graduate, is probably best known as "Ritchie Petrie" from The Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966. In one episode, Larry lent his first name to a large unruly dog, the visiting pet of Buddy Sorrell. A rambunctious "Larry" drove a nervous Ritchie to barricade himself inside a kitchen cabinet, crying: "Don't let him eat me!" "He may not be the smartest boy in class," his beaming folks once confessed, "but he's the cutest." Ritchie's middle name, in an amusing nod to Orson Wells, is "Rosebud" (an acronym for seven of his male relatives). The genuine affection for each other felt by Larry Mathews and his TV parents was plainly apparent on the show. In another episode, a desperate Laura dyes her hair blonde because she thinks her husband has grown bored with her. Later Ritchie asks his dad if "Mommy's hair is gonna be brown again." "It certainly is," says Rob. "That's good!" replies Ritchie. "Oh, you think Mama's prettier with brown hair too?" "No, I think she's prettier with yellow." "You do?" says Rob." "Then why are you so happy about her turning brown again?" "Because I don't want her to look prettier," says Ritchie. "I want her to look like Mommy!" Some people are smart, some are cute, some are blonde, and some brunette. Some people spell their name Mathews, while others spell it Matthews. But everybody, as they say, wants their name spelled right. There were 135 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK and 1251 in WorldCat. And here are six "little known facts" about The Dick Van Dyke Show.

(Studio shot of Larry Mathews, from the Web.)

Carol Reid

Robet* + Robert* (for Robert* or Robet*)

2011-10-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today's typo reminds me of sherbet. By which I don't mean, of course, that people named Robert are like sherbet. (Though you might know a Bob or a Rob who's both fruity and icy, as well as virtually lactose-free. That really wouldn't surprise me.) I just meant that many folks tend to mispronounce sherbet as "sher-bert." Perhaps it has something to do with the way the two syllables rhyme (sort of). Or maybe it's the unconscious association with the word brrr. Some dictionaries have even caved at this point and agreed to allow sherbert as an acceptable or variant spelling. However, please note that acceptable does not mean standard or preferred. But getting back to Robert* + Robet*. There were 56 hits on this one in OhioLINK, and 678 in WorldCat. Although, as with virtually all combined searches of this sort, some of the results do not contain typos, just cases of two different (but correctly spelled) words. In this case, the biggest spoiler is one Robertus Robet. Just ignore him! And place your bet on -bert.

(A glass dessert cup of raspberry sherbet, 1994, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Imflamm* (for Inflamm*)

2011-10-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

This public service model, looking at once both hot and cool, seems to be announcing "I'm flammable" as she fashionably demonstrates fire safety awareness with her shiny white go-go boots and flaming red fire extinguisher. Like a cross between Emma Peel of The Avengers, a cartoon superheroine whose special power is putting out (sorry!), and a beauty pageant contestant about to show us how to kick a fire's ass, her appeal is undeniable. Yesterday kicked off Fire Prevention Week, which was established in 1925 by President Calvin Coolidge to commemorate the Great Chicago Fire, which occurred on October 8–10, 1871. Calling the loss of 15,000 lives to fire the previous year "startling," Coolidge stated: "This waste results from the conditions which justify a sense of shame and horror; for the greater part of it could and ought to be prevented... It is highly desirable that every effort be made to reform the conditions which have made possible so vast a destruction of the national wealth." There were seven examples of today's typo found in OhioLINK and 74 in WorldCat.

(Sixties-era photo from the State Library's ephemera collection, presumably a production of the New York State Health Dept.)

Carol Reid

Licenc* + Licens* (for Licens* or Licenc*)

2011-10-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

Once when I was little, I saw the expression "poetic license" and asked my mother what it meant. I think I thought it was some sort of literal license they gave to poets. Her answer, though somewhat vague, turned out to be much more intriguing. She said it meant that you could say whatever you wanted to say, however you wanted to say it. I was too young to know very much yet about democracy and the First Amendment, but as I got older, this concept blended nicely with another one I came to fully embrace: "freedom of speech." The summer before I began library school, I signed up for a seminar in censorship. Though they had to cancel it as only a few students had shown up, the dean treated us to a full three hours of thrilling talk about "banned books" and "intellectual freedom." If I hadn't been quite sure of my new choice of vocation before, that clinched it for me. In the Loudon Wainwright song "Jesse Don't Like It" (from the 1999 album Social Studies), he sings: "In the kindergarten, years ago, Jesse got rude / He took a red Crayola and he drew a nude / The teacher took a ruler to Jesse's behind / She beat his butt, but she ruled his mind..." I love Loudon's use of poetic license—the alliteration and assonance and internal ryhming, the repetition of words and homonyms. And, of course, I love his hilarious taking down of Jesse Helms, that one-time enemy of the arts and, specifically, the NEA. Today's typo garners 161 hits in OhioLINK, not all of which are actually typos. Americans spell license with an S, but the British, Canadian, and Australian spelling uses a C. If you do a combined search on both spellings, you will surely find some inconsistencies; however, you'll want to make sure to check the works themselves to determine any errors in transcription or instances where a "sic" or "i.e." is called for.

(Jesse Helms, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Octover (for October)

2011-10-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

October's just begun, but it feels like it will soon be over. This is a bittersweet time of year in upstate New York, as we desperately try to soak up the waning warmth of an "Indian Summer" (those few sputteringly summery days scattered here and there, like gifts, amongst the growing cold and damp) and start hunkering down for the long winter. The leaves falling faster and faster from the trees look like the quickly flipping pages of a calendar connoting the rapid passage of time. My favorite color is yellow, which seems to suggest both cheerfulness and agedness. Slavs call October "yellow month" and the official flower of October is calendula. Like the Halloween jack-o'-lantern, these help to brighten the otherwise darkening skies and sometimes gloomy moods associated with this month. There were 11 examples of Octover in OhioLINK today, and 197 in WorldCat.

(Le mois d'octobre, église de Bagnot, France, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Insuren* (for Insuran*)

2011-10-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

I saw a sign on the way to work this morning that would undoubtedly quicken the pulses of Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, authors of the chronicle The Great Typo Hunt. It was a sort of trifecta of typos, containing errors in spelling, punctuation, and/or syntax. "We accept," it read, "Medicaid, Medicare, Fidelis, CDPHP, SWH, and others insurences." That last bit should be either "other insurance" or, possibly, "others' insurance." But Insurences, while obviously a rather awkward shortening of "insurance policies," still misspells the root word insurance. There was only one case of this disorder detected in the OhioLINK database, but there were 96 found in WorldCat. (Note, however, that Insurent happens to be the name of an apartment lease guaranty company.) Just to be on the safe side today, check up on this typo in your own library's catalog.

(Metropolitan Life Insurance building, New York City, July 2003, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Lili* + Lilli* (for Lilli* or Lili*)

2011-10-04T05:00:00.001-07:00

I caught the charming 1953 film Lili the other day and was reminded of the way my mother used to steer me toward this darkly romantic tale as a child, along with other works by Paul Gallico like The Snow Goose. Lili was based on a story called "The Man Who Hated People," which had been published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1950. Gallico was widely considered to be a very affecting, even sentimental, writer (Wikipedia states that "a public library puts [The Snow Goose] on a list of 'tearjerkers'"), but he also had his followers among critics of serious literature. Gallico did not eschew the "sentimental" tag, in any case, opining that, when it came to "the contest between sentiment and slime": "Sentiment remains so far out in front, as it always has and always will among ordinary humans, that the calamity-howlers and porn merchants have to increase the decibels of their lamentations, the hideousness of their violence, and the mountainous piles of their filth to keep in the race at all.'" There were 164 hits on today's combined personal-name typo in OhioLINK, the first ten or so clearly being typos. But never say never: the children's poetry book I Never Did That Before is written by Lilian Moore, but illustrated by Lillian Hoban. Leslie Caron sings "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo" in the movie under discussion above, which prompts me to point out that this one is a typo of "highest" probability on the Ballard list.

(Cropped screenshot of Leslie Caron from the trailer for the film Lili.)

Carol Reid

Oder* + Odor* (for Odor* or Oder*)

2011-10-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

If something stinks in your library catalog, it could be the combination of Odor* + Oder* (the sort of search which often reveals one misspelling or another, but not always, particularly in the case of foreign words). The smelliest thing I've come across lately (in print, anyway) is the oft-praised, southeast Asian durian fruit, which, although being described in olfactory terms as resembling "pig-shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock" or if you prefer, "civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray, and used surgical swabs," is reportedly, nevertheless, addictively delicious. You might want to bring along a Tic-Tac, though: "Your breath," says aficionado Anthony Bourdain, "will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother." British novelist Anthony Burgess once wrote that indulging in durian is rather "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory." Durian is known as the "King of Fruits" due to its hefty size and weight, and people are advised not to stand beneath these trees for danger of getting conked on the head with one. Predictably, it's also considered to have great nutritional and aphrodisiacal powers. We sniffed out eight cases of our odoriferous typo in OhioLINK today, and 148 in WorldCat.

(Flowers of durian, Vietnam, 2008, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Nutitio* (for Nutrition, Nutritious)

2011-09-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

I am flat-out nuts for nuts of all sorts and, as with one's children, try not to make invidious comparisons among them since they're all quite nutritious and delicious in their own way. But I especially love the way hazelnuts are sometimes called filberts. If I ever get a pair of parakeets or goldfish or something, I just might name them Hazelnut and Philbert, which sound a lot like characters out of the funny pages. They look like something your Depression-era parents might claim they had to use for marbles since they were too poor to afford glass. And if you're wondering whether anybody has ever tried to build a better filbert, try the DuChilly kind, says Melissa Clark in the New York Times. Hazelnuts make a great flavoring for coffee and are commonly used in pralines, truffles, and tortes. They're also the nut employed in the chocolatey spread known as Nutella, first created in Italy during the World War II in response to the rationing of chocolate. Turkey is the largest producer of hazelnuts in the world, although on this continent, most of them come from Oregon and British Columbia. There were seven cases of Nutitio* in OhioLINK and 125 in WorldCat.

(Hazelnuts, or Corylus avellana, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Friut* (for Fruit*)

2011-09-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

"Pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your pocket ... way down yonder in the pawpaw patch," goes the old children's song, but it appears that few of us have ever actually eaten a pawpaw. Despite the fact that this "tropical" delight is native to the United States (in fact, it's the largest fruit grown on U.S. soil), the pawpaw has never been sold commercially in grocery stores. Lately, however, the lucky, or plucky, fruit lover has been able to purchase pawpaws from certain orchards and select farmers markets. According to a piece on NPR today: "It's sort of mango-meets-the-banana ... with a little hint of melon." Thomas Jefferson was a big fan of the pawpaw, as were Lewis and Clark. Today you can even find pawpaw beer and pawpaw sorbet made from this delectable fruit. Perhaps you can even fry it! We found Friut* four times in OhioLINK and 114 times in WorldCat. Most of them seem to be typos for fruit*, but you may see a few foreign (e.g., Swedish) spellings tossed into the mix.

(The pawpaw tree, Asimina triloba, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Tweny (for Twenty)

2011-09-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

American money is hardly worth the paper (or cotton, actually) it's printed on these days, but we all still crave it like Wall Streeters being punked by Yippies. In a rather less delightful, but perhaps increasingly desperate, bit of street theater, members of the current Younger Generation made a Sixties-style attempt last week to "Occupy Wall Street," while the mainstream media did its level best to ignore them. Although it appears that nobody really understands the "dismal science" (at least, one doesn't need to be right about the economy in order to be an "economist"), the somewhat disoriented demonstrators on Wall Street were subjected to tear gas from the police force and withering sarcasm from the New York Times. There were seven occurrences of today's typo in OhioLINK and 110 in WorldCat. Of the former, one of them proved to be a case of idiomatic spelling: Why Don't You Do Right: Get Me Some Money, Too! Performed by Kansas Joe, and with words and music by Joe McCoy, the first line goes: "You had plenty money nineteen twen'y two." What goes around comes around and nobody ever said it would be easy to "buck" the system. Many happy returns of the day, though, MBR!

(Big "fan" of the double sawbuck, or $620 in twenties, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Afair* (for Affair*)

2011-09-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

The 1890s were an exciting decade for women, who, although they still lacked the right to vote, were nevertheless moving ahead with alacrity, pursuing higher education, professional careers, and sexual and reproductive rights. However, their affairs were still considered a fair bit less important than those of men. The 1981 book The Fair Women: The Story of the Women's Building, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 , by Jeanne Madeline Weimann, tells the story of a group of women who were given an inch, but took a mile. According to the book's dust jacket, Congress had "almost absently legislated a token women's board as a sop to women around the country who wanted a part in the Fair. The women themselves built the Board of Lady Managers into an impressive body which created not only buildings and exhibits, but made important contributions to knowledge through their Congresses and original research. Among the famous women who played a role in the drama of the Fair were the painter Mary Cassatt, Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Henrietta Szold, Jane Addams, Harriet Monroe, Frances Willard, Sarah Bernhardt, Clara Barton, Queen Victoria, Helena Modjeska, the African explorer May French Sheldon, the sculptors Vinnie Ream Hoxie and Harriet Hosmer, and the architect Sophia Hayden." Feminism is forever, but fairs are ephemeral. As one reverent reviewer on Amazon stated: "When I finally finished the book, I felt bereft, like the people who had worked so hard to put the fair on must have felt when it was suddenly just gone, like Brigadoon." There were 32 cases of Afair* in OhioLINK and 575 in WorldCat (some of which might be antiquated spellings).

(Cover of The Fair Women by Jeanne Madeline Weimann.)

Carol Reid

Adn (for And)

2011-09-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Adn is a teeny-tiny typo with a great many alternate and legitimate meanings, mostly acronyms and abbreviations. According to Wikipedia, it can stand for at least eighteen different things, from Application Delivery Network (a suite of technologies), to ammonium dinitramide (a rocket propellant denser), to Anchorage Daily News (an Alaskan newspaper), to "any day now" (Internet slang). Perhaps my favorite one, though, is what other (dyslexic?) countries call DNA. For this reason, we got 215 hits on it in OhioLINK, though only a fraction of them were typos for the word and. If you care about this small, but all-important, part of speech and you don't mind sifting through a heap of false positives, why don't you do a search on our (possible) typo of the day and see what you can do to restore this humble connector to its rightful spelling.

(Création pour présenter les OGM, as they say in France, or, Created to introduce GMOs, as we say in the USA ... or OMG, as we all say in cyberspace! From Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Exmaple* (for Example*)

2011-09-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

It's the first day of fall today, for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, and our beautiful colorful maple trees, for example, will soon become ex-maples. Or at least, leafless, dormant ones. Maple trees make delicious syrup for pancakes and fun little whirlygig-type seed pods that we kids used to split open and attach to our noses with the sticky resin found inside. Apparently, we weren't the only ones. We also had a lovely Japanese maple tree, which sat low to the ground and had nice, smooth limbs that were perfect for sitting in and reading a book. It was like a giant's chair with a ruby-red canopy. The Latin word for maple is Acer, which means sharp (cf. acerbic), a reference to the pointed sides of its leaves. Another autumn memory involved selecting the prettiest, most recently fallen ones and ironing them between pieces of waxed paper: Voila! Acer art, refrigerator-ready. My sister has since elevated this pressing activity into one wherein she rolls ink over various leaves (and other things of nature) and then stencils them onto articles of clothing. All hail, the marvelous maple! Enjoy it while it lasts. There were four examples of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 37 in WorldCat.

(Picture of "delicate autumnal leaf veins," taken in Canada on November 20, 2004, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Pedestrain* (for Pedestrian*)

2011-09-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

September 22 is World Car-Free Day, a day that "promotes improvement of mass transit, cycling and walking, and the development of communities where jobs are closer to home and where shopping is within walking distance," according to the Washington Post. (And, according to my favorite cyclist and eagle-eyed scout of the "Relative Absolute," who just spotted another egregious example: "By and large, the bike is 100% original.") Melvil Dewey was also a bike aficionado, reportedly supplying each of the women in his library school with one. Speaking as someone who can drive, but prefers not to, I wish every day was Car-Free Day. When it comes to planes, trains, and automobiles, I'll pick taking the train, or better yet, just being a pedestrian. There were only two instances of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 157 in WorldCat. But let's take it one step at a time.

(Car Free Day in Austria, 22 September 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Excut* (for Execut*)

2011-09-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Another possibly innocent person is slated for execution today, this time by lethal injection in the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was convicted of murdering a Savannah police officer in 1989, but he has always maintained his innocence. There is no DNA evidence linking him to the crime and prosecution witnesses have now claimed they were coerced and recanted their testimony. Davis has many supporters around the world, including Pope Benedict and Desmond Tutu. Even Georgia's former governor (and our former chief executive) Jimmy Carter has doubts about Davis's guilt, but no real clout when it comes to imposing the ultimate punishment. Nevertheless, he says, "this case illustrates the deep flaws in the application of the death penalty in this country." The Christian Science Monitor states that the case raises serious questions about whether or not what's known as "executive clemency" is an "adequate fail-safe for assessing death-row innocence claims." Troy Davis is scheduled to die at 7:00 tonight, unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, which is highly unlikely. However, the Court did get involved in the Davis case in 2009, when it required the Georgia district court to examine new evidence and make a finding of fact concerning guilt or innocence. According to Cathleen Burnett in the book Wrongful Death Sentences: "It may be that a majority of the Supreme Court justices are now willing to state that the Eighth Amendment bars the execution of the innocent." There were 102 instances of today's typo in OhioLINK, and "too many records found for your search" in WorldCat.

(Paris Die-in, July 2, 2008, in support of Troy Davis, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Tradmark* (for Trademark*)

2011-09-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

Trad is usually short for the word "traditional" and is often applied to the realm of folk music as a way of distinguishing it from contemporary folk music, although what is currently "contemporary" will eventually become "traditional," it seems. (The difference may also have to do with whether a musician is performing original material or "traditional" material.) Alan Lomax, who was born in 1915 and died in 2002, was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist, following in the footsteps of his father, John A. Lomax, with whom he started out recording the songs of prisoners and sharecroppers in the Deep South. Lomax was a musician himself, as well as sort of a musical philosopher, contributing theories known as Cantometrics, Choreometrics, and Parlametrics to the academy. However, he really made his mark on the world of folk music by becoming a prodigious "field collector" of both songs and oral histories, ultimately contributing, along with his father and other collaborators, over 10,000 recordings to the Library of Congress, where Lomax was "Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song" from 1937 to 1942. Among the now-famous musicians he thus conferred archival immortality upon were Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Woody Guthrie, Margaret Barry, Jeannie Robertson, and Harry Cox. There were six cases of Tradmark* (for trademark*) in OhioLINK today, and 62 in WorldCat.

(Alan Lomax playing guitar on stage at the Mountain Music Festival, Asheville, North Carolina, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Realtiv* (for Relativ*)

2011-09-19T05:00:00.001-07:00

A friend calls it his "Theory of Relative Absolutes" and claims to have detected three cases of it recently during a single day of television watching: "pretty much exactly"; "slightly original"; and "one of the most unique." Some people would argue that "absolute truth" constitutes a similar solecism (employing a modifier when none is needed), and while I might agree with that, I did once use the phrase "absolute truthiness" in a piece about evolution vs. creationism. (I even did this before Stephen Colbert claimed to have invented the word "truthiness," but that's a story for another time.) Another seeming example of the Relative Absolute is "practically perfect," as in the song lyric from Mary Poppins, who I once dressed up as for Halloween, nailing the look "pretty much exactly." (In any event, I was really sort of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious). On the other hand, it's possible that this is more misguided pedantry than anything else and that, in truth (if not absolute truth), there is nothing wrong with saying "very unique." Given that there are relative degrees of infinity, this point could be debated more or less forever. It shouldn't take you anywhere near that long, however, to find and correct our typo of the day, which turned up five times in OhioLINK and 290 times in WorldCat.

(Logo for the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Sitation, etc. (for Situation)

2011-09-16T05:00:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I wrote about the various meanings of the word lousy and then later experienced this ambiguity in comic form by way of an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Ted is fake-consoling Murray for having produced only daughters and tells him that some men just don't have enough Y-chromosomes in their sperm to make boys. Ted's pretty sure, though, that he's not one of them. "I'm lousy with Y's," he brags. "Or even without them," Murray notes wryly. MeTV is currently airing a raft of "classic" situation comedies—everything from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Honeymooners, and The Beverly Hillbillies, to The Dick Van Dyke Show, M.A.S.H., and Cheers, along with scores of other old TV favorites. Despite the new fall lineup unfolding on every channel, I'd wager to say that where it's really at is on Me. (Or at least that's what Maynard G. Krebs might say.) There were four cases of Sitation*, three apiece of Sitution* and Situaton*, and one of Situatoin* in OhioLINK (with correspondingly larger numbers in WorldCat). Sit yourself down today and check out the situation in your own catalog concerning these classic typos.

(Photo of Les Brown, Jr. and Marlo Thomas on the television program "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Lousie (for Louise)

2011-09-15T05:00:00.001-07:00

I hope you're all having a good day today. But to tell you the truth, although I usually love this "Indian summer" time of year (every little breeze seems to whisper Louise), for me it's been an exceptionally lousy month. Everything from a sprained ankle to a pinched nerve, a fainting spell, a bad cold, and a superfluity of mosquito bites ... I suppose I should just be glad I don't have head lice to boot! The word lousy has a fascinating history and a multifaceted definition going back several centuries (it was first recorded in Chaucer's Friar's Tale). I was also rather intrigued to learn that louse land was once a "prejudicial name for Scotland." There were 25 cases of today's typo lousing up records in OhioLINK, and WorldCat is lousy with them as well: 452 for Lousie alone and 279 for Lousie + Louise. I know you're just itching to get started on this one!

(Lousy Watchman, or Anoplotrupes stercorosus, June 25, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Millett + Millet, or Kate Millet (for Millett)

2011-09-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Kate Millett, groundbreaking lesbian-feminist author and political activist, was born on September 14, 1934. Her most famous work (originally her dissertation at Columbia University in 1970) was called Sexual Politics and it was required reading in college women's studies classes at that time. In it Millett compares and contrasts (and basically blasts) D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer; she also includes Jean Genet in the mix, whom she admires for his less sexist and more minority gay perspective. In 1965, she married the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimuro and later wrote about her marriage, as well as her relationships with other women, in the 1974 book Flying. In 1979, she traveled to Iran to advocate for women's liberation and was predictably deported; she recounts these events in Going to Iran. Millett is also a filmmaker and advocate for the rights of the mentally ill. In The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), she describes her experience in various psychiatric institutions, her diagnosis as bipolar, and her decision to discontinue taking lithium. She and her lawyer singlehandedly changed the state of Minnesota's commitment law and Millett went on to denounce "psychiatric torture" before the United Nations in 2005. She has attracted controversy as well due to her belief in the sexual rights of children. Millett was a contributor to the magazine On the Issues and was interviewed there by Merle Hoffman in 1988. There were 21 cases of Millet + Millett in OhioLINK today, and nine of Kate Millet. (In WorldCat, we got 194 and 125 hits, respectively.)

(Kate Millett, 1970, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Compter* + Computer*

2011-09-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to have gone a bit AWOL here recently, but we had a major computer crash on our home PC and I haven't been able to work on the typo blog, or anything else in cyberspace, for over a week now. Sniff sniff. (Actually, the computer and I each seem to have caught a bug that's laying us low.) In any event, the way these Machiavellian machines seem to both run and periodically ruin our lives, it's hard to believe they've only been around for about 25 years. Today's typo is missing a single letter, but sometimes that's all it takes to forever block access to what we want. Compter* + Computer* brings up nine hits in OhioLINK, and 153 in WorldCat.

(One of the first personal computers, from Wikimedia Commons. I love the way this Apple product looks like an early television set!)

Carol Reid