Boosk (for Books)

A boosk, says Urban Dictionary, is someone who "steals your answers during a standardized testing session." Hmm. I'm not quite sure where they get this stuff, but let's go with it for now. A surprising 95% of students admit to some form of cheating, according to a survey by Rutgers University, and 58% to plagiarism—both of which are facilitated by the Internet. However, technology also makes these things easier to spot, with all sorts of software available to teachers and administrators. It kind of makes you pine for the good old school days when the quickest way to catch a thief was simply to look around for the nearest boosk. We found seven examples of today's typo in OhioLINK, all of them in publication fields. Although the 260 is a transcribed field, it's fairly safe to assume such typos were introduced by the cataloger. However, if you've got the time and don't want to cheat at this, even a little bit, you should go to the shelf and take a look at the publisher imprint on the boosk—er, books—in question.

("Illustration for Cheating" by Hariadhi, 2007, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid