Nutitio* (for Nutrition, Nutritious)

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*)

"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)

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*)

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)

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*)

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*)

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*)

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*)

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*)

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*)

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)

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)

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*

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

Paiting* (for Painting*)

On the day after so much was lost in an instant ten years ago in New York City, it's strangely reassuring to remember how much was recovered on a chance encounter, 71 years ago today, in the caves of Lascaux, France, when paintings now estimated to be 17,300 years old were unearthed by four teenage boys spelunking with their dog Robot. The cave paintings comprise approximately 2,000 figures: animals, people, and abstract signs, some of which are now considered possibly astrological in nature. Sadly, sightseers have hastened the deterioration of these paintings and promoted the growth of various molds and fungi. In the 2010 3-D documentary by Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the Chauvet cave in southern France is cinematically explored. This particular cave is carefully preserved and does not generally admit visitors, which presented numerous challenges for the filmmaker and his crew. There were eight examples of Paiting* (for painting*) in OhioLINK, and 303 in WorldCat.

(Photograph of Lascaux animal painting, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Bureac* (for Bureauc*)

Richard Titmuss (1907–1973) was a British academic and researcher. He established the field known as "Social Administration" (or "Social Policy" as it later came to be called) and held the founding chair in that subject at the London School of Economics. According to his obituary, Titmuss was "fascinated by the problem of making large social service bureaucracies humane and sensitive to individual human need." His most influential work may have been his last, a book entitled The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Along with trying to navigate their way through and around the brambles and thickets of actual bureaucracies and bureaucrats, many people also encounter difficulties when attempting to spell these words: one of the commonest blunders is omitting the second U. We Americans do not seem to love our U's as dearly as the English do, at least with respect to words like color (colour), honor (honour), favor (favour), and neighbor (neighbour). And perhaps this is why, once we've maneuvered past those first few vowels (the U, the E, and the A), we wearily find ourselves wanting to skip over that second-in-command U. Don't do it, though—it'll only produce a lot of red tape. Or, at any rate, a lot of red squiggly lines in your word document. There were 22 cases of Bureac* in OhioLINK this morning, and 277 in WorldCat.

(Richard Titmuss, from Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Crativ* (for Creativ*)

A bureaucrat is defined as "an official of a bureaucracy" or, perhaps a little more judgmentally, as "an official who is rigidly devoted to the details of administrative procedure." Somebody who isn't just attentive, but rather rigidly devoted, to a boring office job doesn't really seem like one who'd appreciate a jaunty nickname; however, it does appear that some bureaucrats are actually called 'crats, to judge by this "crappy" T-shirt. (Crat sounds to me like a cross between "crap" and "drat," but either way you cut it, it does sound like kind of a drag.) Some people tend to get rather creative when spelling words like bureaucratic (too many vowels, I guess), whereas others prove a bit hasty when it comes to things like creativity. There were 30 cases of Crativ* in OhioLINK last time I checked, and 948 in WorldCat. Look all your spelling over carefully today—and don't be a "crat" and make your secretary do it!

(Caution sign by Michael Wilson, York, U.K., 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Recrod* (for Record*)

Beryl Burton, the U.K.'s greatest female bicyclist, was born on May 12, 1937, in Leeds, West Yorkshire. As a child, Beryl was beset with chronic health problems, including rheumatic fever, and spent over a year in a convalescent home. She got married in 1955 and her husband, Charlie, introduced her to cycling. Typically Taurean, she stubbornly persisted at it; two years later she took home her first medal, put the pedal to the metal, and never looked back. At the age of thirty, she set a new record for the women's 12-hour time trial, which surpassed the men's record at that time, and she sustained this distinction for the next two years. According to Wikipedia: "While setting the record she caught and passed Mike McNamara who was on his way to setting the men's record at 276.52 miles and winning that year's men's British Best All-Rounder. She is reputed to have given him a liquorice allsort as she passed him. Apparently, McNamara ate the sweet." As if to sweetly press the point even further for the distaff side, in 1982 Beryl and her daughter Denise set a British 10-mile record for women riding a tandem bicycle in 21 minutes and 25 seconds. A couple of other distinctly feminine notes also grace Burton's legacy: a memorial garden in her hometown of Morley; and the "Beryl Burton Cycle Way," which allows cyclists to travel the 2.8 kilometers between Harrogate and Knaresborough without using the A59, considered to be England's most dangerous roadway. There were 11 records in OhioLINK containing the typo Recrod* and 140 in WorldCat.

(Beryl Burton, from the LENOR blog.)

Carol Reid

Apolg* (for Apolog*)

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima ... oh, forget it! Katt Williams issued the classic "non-apology" over the weekend when he was called to account for an extended anti-Mexican rant he permitted himself, in the style of Michael Richards several years ago, after being heckled in a comedy club. "If I said anything anti-Mexican," he told CNN, "I apologize for its anti-Mexican-ness." And even worse: "I apologize for the fact that the word 'anti-Mexican' is being said to a black guy in America." (It kind of gives new meaning to the phrase "a sorry excuse" ... Sorry, but that's a sorry excuse for an excuse!) However, insincere apologies have become de rigueur in show business and pretty much anyplace else where there are people to take offense. In any event, I too have been warned that I might've gone a bit too far in Monday's blog post about not wearing white after Labor Day. So if I said anything inappropriately anti-anything yesterday, I apologize for its possibly inappropriate anti-anything-ism. And I'm also sorry to say, but there were 11 hits on Apolg* in OhioLINK today and 129 in WorldCat.

(Katt Williams, 10-23-2008, courtesy of New York Daily News and Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Whiteman + Whitman (for Whitman or Whiteman)

Today is a day off from working for the man—and you may be sitting around in your jammies having a nice, if cash-poor, "staycation" or, like me, laboring to clean out the basement or something. Although if you're actually planning to get dressed and go somewhere, you might also be thinking of the hoary etiquette rule: don't wear white after Labor Day. But where is the sense in that? Most of us assume it has something to do with snobbery (if not actual racism: "That's mighty white of you!") and the fact that summer clothing is generally "lighter" than the heavy black and blue of conventional workaday wear. In truth, however, winter is a far whiter season than summer, with its pale gray skies, denuded trees, and slumbering flowers under blankets of snow. Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass, in answer to the question what is the grass: "...I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic ... sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, growing among black folks as among white..." So cast off your shackles and wear whatever colors you like, whenever you want, because ultimately death comes to us all. As Walt also wrote in "Reconcilation": "...I draw near, bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin..." We uncovered 13 cases of Whiteman + Whitman in OhioLINK and 83 in WorldCat. You may not care a whit about typos today, but this could be a good one to get you back into the drab routine of working tomorrow, regardless of what you'll be wearing.

(Girl in a White Dress by William Orpen, 1878-1931, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Archtyp* (for Archetyp*)

One morning in 1916, newspaperman Don Marquis (pronounced MAR-kwiss) came into his office at the New York Sun, where he had left a fresh sheet of paper in his typewriter, to find a large cockroach on it hopping from key to key. This was the genesis for the work he would become best known for, The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel. It's a book of "vers libre" composed by an insect with the "soul of a poet." It describes his philosophy of life and assorted adventures with a cat named Mehitabel, who grandly lays claim to a previous incarnation as Cleopatra. "Toujours gai," she would say, "Toujours gai." Archy painstakingly produces copious copy for his "boss" every night, though always in small letters and minus punctuation since it was too hard for him to hold down the Shift key. This was not his actual preference, however; as E. B. White puts it in the introduction: "He was no e e cummings." In fact, in the poem entitled "CAPITALS AT LAST," he rejoices in a happy accident in which the Shift key had become temporarily locked. We sometimes see TyPoS like that ToO, but like Archy, can't do very much about it since our search mechanism doesn't discriminate between upper and lower case. We found 15 cases of Archtyp* in OhioLINK today, and 354 in WorldCat.

(Cover of my copy of The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, by Don Marquis, with illustrations by the great George Herriman.)

Carol Reid

Kindergarden* (for Kindergarten*)

Mell Lazarus is the creator of the comic strip Miss Peach, a chronicle of the fictional fount of learning known as the Kelly School, named after "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly. It debuted in the New York Herald Tribune in 1957 and continued to run for 45 years; it was syndicated in 300 newspapers worldwide. It featured the eponymously peachy Miss Peach and her fellow teacher, the unretiring octogenarian, Miss Crystal; the school principal, Mr. Grimmis; and the gym teacher, Mr. Musselman. But the real show-offs of the show were the kindergarten kids themselves: the irrepressible Freddy, Marcia, Ira, Arthur, Francine, and Lester, plus a few other tots who would pop in from time to time. Publisher Al Capp wrote the introduction to Miss Peach, where his doting admiration of Lazarus is made clear: "... although I was, for that moment, the boss, I hadn't discovered the priceless secret of our art that he had—that if you were a humorist with more understanding than most other humorists, you could fill emptiness with delight and silence with wit. This is Mel's genius..." We discovered 20 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK and 413 in WorldCat. Watch out for this one, though: while kindergarden is generally considered to be a misspelling of kindergarten, it might well appear that way on the piece itself, being the German word for "children's garden."

(Cover of my own copy of Miss Peach, 1958. Click pic for a closer peek.)

Carol Reid