Neice* (for Niece*)

My exceedingly nice niece is an excellent writer and very good speller and necessitates precious little advice from me. However, she recently slipped up and signed off a letter with the nicety: "Your loving neice." In spite of the not-infallible* rhyming rule "I Before E Except After C," I must admit I've made this mistake myself, and so, it seems, have at least a dozen other catalogers. There are 18 instances of Neice* in OhioLINK, but six of them refer to proper names, i.e. (so to speak), five surnames and one given name.

* See the first word of our painting's title and this discussion and list of English-language exceptions to the rule.

(l'Ancien Port de Nice by Isidore Dagnan, 1794-1873, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Lewis Carrol, Lewis Caroll (for Lewis Carroll)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll wrote "Jabberwocky" on a lark, purportedly as a parody of bad poetry. It's now regarded as the greatest "nonsense poem" in the English language. "Jabberwocky" was published in 1871 in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, although the first verse was originally printed in Mischmasch, a magazine the young Charles Dodgson (Carroll's given name) had put out for the entertainment of his family. Carroll provided definitions for some of the words that appear in the poem; about others he claimed ignorance. A few of his inventions are "portmanteau words" and have since entered the lexicon ("chortle" is a combination of chuckle and snort; "galumphing" an amalgam of galloping and triumphant). Scholars have had a field day with "Jabberwocky," about which Alice herself remarked: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are!" Though the words in "Jabberwocky" may be hard to spell, our typo today is for the author himself. Lewis Carrol comes "whiffling through the tulgey wood" (i.e., OhioLINK) nine times, and Lewis Caroll twice.

(Portrait of Carroll by Victorian art photographer Oskar Gustav Rejlander, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Partick, Patick (for Patrick)

Today is St. Patrick's Day and 'tis sure to turn up a few patsies crying in their beer, without any green. (Partying like it's 2009.) We also just passed the Ides of March and are fast approaching April Showers and Tax Day. Who knows, perhaps you'll get lucky and stumble upon a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Symbolizing good fortune, today's graphic is the "four-leaf clover," that rare configuration of Trifolium or "shamrock"—the trademark of Ireland itself. The green-wearin' Girl Scouts of America (resembling nothing so much as the "wee folk" of Celtic legend—elves, leprechauns, and brownies) have adopted the "trefoil" as their own symbol. In 2007, we blogged the typo Partrick for Patrick, but have since found a couple of other variants in OhioLINK: Partick with 22 hits and Patick with seven. Here's hoping the next fiscal year finds you in the clover, which is to say "living a carefree life of ease, comfort, or prosperity." (But, if not, remember the "luck of the Irish" and stock up on potatoes.)

(Scan of a four-leaf clover at 600 dpi "for an international digital herbarium," from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Compliment* (for Complement*) and occasionally vice versa

Complimentary medicine is a common spelling error for complementary medicine and a keyword search in OhioLINK gets 11 hits (ten typos and one case where the two words are correctly spelled and unrelated in the text). Searching on Compliment* + Complement* finds 33 records (one with an [i.e.], several where the former, not the latter, was intended, and another too ambiguous to be sure of either way). A number of these are for The Academy of Complements, published in the 17th century. But it all puts me in mind of an old family story in which my great-grandmother, who prided herself on the correct use of English, once greeted the doctor during a house call with the query: "Aren't I good-looking?" She had obviously meant to say, "Aren't I looking good?" but there was apparently nothing in the doctor's little black bag to cure her resulting chagrin. Still, I can't help wondering whether medicine perhaps should be a bit more complimentary. In an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry decides that "God bless you" is a silly thing to say after a sneeze and that "You're so good-looking!" would be preferable. I'm with him and feeling much better already, thanks.

(Julie Christie, in my good-looking mother's favorite movie, Doctor Zhivago, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Cementery (for Cemetery)

“I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: ''Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.'' I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have.” This was said by Harry S. Truman. We try to maintain a level of factuality on these pages, and that caused us to check the provenance of this information. This was done because we have been to Tombstone a number of times and never seen such an epitaph. It turns out that Truman really said this, but no tombstone can be found with that inscription at Boot Hill. Cementery is in the E list of Typographical Errors in Library Databases, meaning that it brought up only 1 hit in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. This probability is reinforced by checking WorldCat, where 52 hits for cementery were found this morning. Once again, the counts in Google seemed perplexing. If you search for "Cemetery," "Cementery," "Cementary," or "Cemetary" you always get roughly 40,000,000 hits. Since nobody has two lifetimes to spare checking these numbers, we'll have to take Google's word for it, but something here doesn't add up.


Today's photo shows a cemetery on Valentia Island in County Kerry, Ireland, where the occupants have a spectacular view of Dingle Bay. The original can be seen at www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/35840347
With that, we wish you a happy Friday the 13th and a pleasant St. Patrick's Day next week.

Mediaval (for Medieval)

"He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of Nature. . . . Besides the stars that are established, there is yet another -- Imagination -- that begets a new star and a new heaven." This was spoken by the medieval alchemist Paracelsus. Medieval is likely one of the most butchered words in the English language. Searching Google for "Midevil" brings in more than 90 million hits, although some of those are surely deliberate. Today's word Mediaval brings to mind an image of journalism in the middle ages - that would have been the town crier. It brings in a mere 5 million records in Google. OhioLINK is much more rigorous, so only 3 of these made it to their catalog. That qualifies for the 'D' or, low probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases.

Today's picture shows the spectacular walls of the medieval city of York in England. We were there at the height of spring in 1975. The original can be found at www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/77741958

Newyork (for New York)

"It is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal. Its politics are used to frighten children. Its traffic is madness. Its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it-once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no other place is good enough." This was written by John Steinbeck. A hundred years before that, a young Samuel Clemens, traveling as a journeyman typesetter wrote his sister: "I have taken a liking to the abominable place." In every movie I've ever seen located on the streets of Manhattan, you can't go 10 seconds without hearing sirens from ambulances and fire trucks. As I write this from my 7th floor office on Worth Street, I can testify that this is something that is only true in movies. I could go on, but I do need to get down to business here. It's not hard to see how this typo occurred. Someone was in such a hurry that they neglected to add a space. This is found in the B, or high probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases. This morning, there were nearly 50 hits for newyork in OhioLINK. There is a good chance that newyork is in your catalog even if your library is in Nevada.

Today's photo shows a new building being constructed at Leonard and West Broadway in Tribeca. Later this spring, it will house the library where I work. It is the first stop in a blogging and geotagging project that I've begun to photograph every block in Manhattan and add each shot to Google Earth. At my age, it's a race against the clock. The original can be found at
http://www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/109668714