Monday, February 2, 2009

Archael* (for Archaeology , Archeology, etc)

Typo of the Day for Librarians
Archael* (for Archaeology , Archeology, etc.)

It's surprising what you find when you dig around. Such was the case in 1989 in Newark, Ohio, when excavators expanding a golf course, unearthed some fossils of mammoth proportions. Okay, it was not a mammoth, but rather a mastodon, aka Mammut americanum. Although not a mammoth, the mastodon was quite large in its own rite. It's amazing the sort of organic material peat will preserve. I attended an academic presentation on the "dig". And recall the speaker saying, that a leaf unearthed with the mastodon, aged (to put it mildly) right before their eyes upon exposure to air. While not organic in nature, preserved for far too long is today's typo.

Digging around a bit found 189 occurrences of Archael* in OhioLink. Archaeolgy does have an alternate spelling, that is to say, of Archeology. So, while the "a" is optional, the "o" is not.

A link to all things mastodonial from the Academy of Natural Sciences.

This typo is in the A category of highest probability in the typographical errors found in online library catalogs (http://terryballard.org/typos/typoscompletealllevels.html)

Extracted, for AUTOCAT, from Typo of the Day for Librarians at
http://librarytypos.blogspot.com/. If you have comments about the
words selected, how they are selected, or the way the items are written,
please contact Terry Ballard .

Cary Daniel

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