Littt* (for Little, etc.)

According to Google's graphic arts team, May 9th marks what would have been the 76th birthday of British children's author Roger Hargreaves, who was born in 1939 and died in 1988. (Check out the doodles, which change with each click, on the Google home page today.) Hargreaves was the prolific and highly successful creator of the "Little Miss" and "Mr. Men" series, the latter of which was also made into an animated television program on the BBC. His first book, Mr. Tickle, was conceived in 1971 in reply to the question by his young son Adam (who later took over the writing of the series after his father's death): "What does a tickle look like?" In less than twenty years' time, Hargreaves produced over a hundred titles, including the Timbuctoo series of 25 books, half a dozen or so "John Mouse" books, a couple of "Roundy and Squary" books, and, of course, his 46 "Mr. Men" and 33 "Little Miss" books. Twentieth Century Fox has apparently got a movie in the works as well, although it's not yet been decided whether any female characters will be featured in it. Tell them not to leave Little Miss Shy and her distaff sisters behind! We found seven cases of Littt* in OhioLINK and a little over 200 in WorldCat.

(Roger Hargreaves holding a copy of Mr. Tickle on his lap, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Psychotherp* (Psychotherap*)

Sigismund Schlomo (otherwise known as Sigmund) Freud was born on this day in 1856. There is always a great deal to say about the "Father of Psychoanalysis," but somehow this quote from Wikipedia strikes me as the funniest and most Freudian thing of all: "Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs...." I mean, I know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar—and an eel is just an eel—but still, you gotta admit, that's funny. Maybe that's where he first came up with the idea of penis envy, no? We came up with six examples of Psychotherp* in OhioLINK and 65 in WorldCat today. Incidentally, I once had the pleasure of hearing Freud's granddaughter Sophie give a talk at the University of New York at Albany. She was a professor of social work at Simmons College, specializing in the use of bibliotherapy or "empathetic reading" and could actually recall sitting (and most likely being read to) upon the knee of her famous grandpappa. Happy Birtherapy, Sigmund Freud!

("Sigmund Freud Hanging," by the Czech artist David Černý, now also famous/infamous for his installation at the Council of the European Union, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Wht* + Whit* (for White, etc.)

A search on Wht* + Whit* brings up 179 hits in WorldCat and 16 in OhioLINK, but only about half of the latter are typos for the word/name White*. Some contain the gloss "sic," while others are acronyms (like radio station call letters) or parts of a URL; still others are typos for words like what and why. Elwyn Brooks White (more commonly known as E. B. White) was born in 1899 in Mount Vernon, New York, and graduated from Cornell in 1921. He settled in New York City in 1924 to take a job with the New Yorker, where he wrote magazine pieces for 11 years. In 1929, he married Katherine Angell, the New Yorker's literary editor, and in 1939 they removed to a farm in Brooklin, Maine. White was the author of the children's classic Charlotte's Web and its several sequels, along with numerous books of poems and essays, such as the wonderfully titled Quo Vadimus? Or the Case for the Bicycle. In 1959, he resurrected and revised The Elements of Style, a writing manual that had been privately published by his old English professor William Strunk in 1919. In his essay Here Is New York, White rather eerily seems to presage the attack of September 11, 2001, when he writes: "A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions.... Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

(E. B. White's Cornell University senior photograph, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Girl* + Gril (for Girl, etc.)

Personal computers had not yet been invented in the 1920s, but telephones had been, and Brooklyn-born Clara Bow was the recipient of a great many calls and letters: she was the notorious IT Girl of her day. Based on a Cosmopolitan story by Elinor Glyn in 1927, "It" was a bit more nuanced than you might think, being "that strange magnetism which attracts both sexes ... a purely virile quality ... belonging to a strong character ... full of self-confidence ... indifferent to the effect ... uninfluenced by others." "Beauty is unnecessary," continues Glyn. "Conceit or self-consciousness," however, "destroys 'It' immediately." Despite an impoverished and difficult childhood and a youthful career filled with exploitation and ridiculous innuendo, Clara proved to be both tough and rebellious; she had what "It" took to survive. There were five cases of today's compound typo in OhioLINK and 36 in WorldCat.

(Picture of Clara Bow at age 16, taken after she won a movie magazine contest in 1921, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Porpert* (for Property, etc.)

There seem to be only a few English words that begin with the letters P-O-R-P. Next to porpoise, it's basically just porphyry, "a hard Egyptian rock having red and white feldspar crystals embedded in a fine-grained, dark-red or purplish goundmass." (Porphyry can also refer to a philosopher, a bishop, a vineyard, an island, and a system for dividing the horoscope!) Porphyry is Greek for "purple," the traditional color of royalty. "Imperial Porphyry" was a deep purple igneous rock with large crystals of plagioclase and was used in the building of monuments and other structures in Imperial Rome and beyond, for example in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and in the "Porphyra," the official delivery room for pregnant empresses in the Great Palace of Constantinople. Napoleon's remains are buried in a porphyry sarcophagus as well. The word now refers more generally to any igneous rock with similar properties. There were eight cases of Porpert* in OhioLINK and in 337 in WorldCat.

(Ancient Roman bathtub in Egyptian red porphyry, transformed into the baptismal font of the cathedral in Milan, Italy, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Exerpt* (for Excerpt*)

Exerpt* is sort of an excerpt of the word excerpt, if you get my meaning. An excerpt is a part extracted from the whole. And, speaking of parts and wholes, this might be as good a time as any for me to get on my high horse and inveigh against the ubiquitous misuse of the word comprise, which means "consist of." Given that definition, you see, there can really be no sensible meaning to the all-too-common usage "comprised of" since that would have to mean "consisted of of." Here's how to remember this: the whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole. Okay, so back to Exerpt*, which is really more of a misspelling than a typo. The word excerpt comes from the Latin excerptus, past participle of excerpere, from ex- + carpere, meaning to gather or pluck. Its first known use is from the 15th century. It's such a common misspelling these days that a Google search on "exerpt*" returns 1,640,000 hits, or more than one misspelled search term for every hundred spelled correctly. There were 75 examples of this typo in OhioLINK and too many to count in WorldCat.

(An excerpt from The Tempest on the Berkeley Poetry Walk in Berkeley, California, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Fredrick* + Frederick* (for Frederick* or Fredrick*)

Frederick Law Olmsted shares the title "Father of American Landscape Architecture" with Andrew Jackson Downing and is responsible for a great many municipal parks, arboretums, and other such natural enclaves across the country, including Central Park in New York City. Olmsted was the designer of city parks in Boston, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, N.Y., and is often mistakenly credited with the creation of Washington Park in Albany as well. He was hired in 1869 to design such a park here, but did not in fact do so; his creative vision, however, was closely hewed to in its eventual execution, including the idea of damning the Beaver Kill in order to make a grand lake. (As a point of interest, Olmsted, who was an opponent of slavery, helped cofound The Nation magazine in 1865.) There were 238 hits on today's compound typo in the OhioLINK database, and too many to count in WorldCat. Some of them are sure to be false hits (i.e., references to two or more people who do not spell their names the same way), but most are most likely typos. Sorting through them all may not be a walk in the park, but it should certainly be worth your while.

(Portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent, 1895, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid