Maude + Maud (for Maud or Maude)

Maud Lewis (1903–1970) was a Canadian "folk artist" whose homely reputation continues to grow despite her death over forty years ago. Born and raised in meager circumstances and stricken with a childhood disease that was apparently either polio or rheumatoid arthritis, Lewis simply ignored what in a lesser person would have been both crushing poverty and a crippling disability, in her cheerful quest to paint every single surface of her tiny house, including "pulp boards (beaverboards), cookie sheets, and Masonite." Her husband, Everett, a "taciturn fish peddler," encouraged his wife's budding talent and bought her her first set of paints. She began by creating Christmas cards, which the enterprising couple would take door to door along with the day's catch. As word gradually spread, the two started selling Maud's paintings for a few dollars each out of their home in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia. Maud Lewis pieces currently fetch close to twenty thousand dollars. Not to be "maudlin" about it, but it's a very touching and heartwarming story. There were 48 examples of this typo in OhioLINK today, most of which were of the expected sort. However, the first hit was for a title by someone called, oddly enough, Maud Maude (actually, "Mrs. Maud Maude"), the author in 1890 of A Handbook of Pyrography, which apparently addresses yet another form of "folk art." We got 465 hits on this typo in WorldCat, some of which may also occur on records containing both forenames correctly spelled (i.e., for two different people).

(Maud Lewis, from the Folk Art Canada website.)

Carol Reid

Crysan* (for Chrysan*)

A constant reader and typo contributor from the Netherlands wrote us the other day to say that she had found 705 cases of Chrystal* in WorldCat, adding that this typo does not yet appear on the Ballard list. She's right, it doesn't, although we did in fact blog on the combined typo Chryst* + Cryt* (for Crystal, etc.) back in 2009. Since I'm currently in the process of memorizing the poem "The Dormouse and the Doctor" by A. A. Milne, I have decided today to feature the contrasting Crysan* (here the H is mistakenly omitted, rather than added to the word in question), a typo for chrysanthemum*. I loved this poem as a child, despite (or maybe even a bit because of) the fact that I was totally unfamiliar with delphiniums, and only vaguely aware of geraniums. And I'm pretty sure I didn't know what a dormouse was either, though I knew that one figured prominently in the book Alice in Wonderland. The Milne poem attempts to answer an age-old, if garden-variety, mystery by concluding: "And that is the reason (Aunt Emily said) / If a Dormouse gets in a chrysanthemum bed / You will find (so Aunt Emily says) that he lies / Fast asleep on his front with his paws to his eyes." In this poem the unctuous yet clueless doctor prescribes for his patient "Milk and Massage-of-the-back," along with "Freedom-from worry and Drives-in-a-car," but mostly insists upon chrysanthemums (yellow and white). We found nine cases of today's typo in OhioLINK (six of which were for the expected errors, with two for various surnames and one for "Crysand Press"), plus 177 in WorldCat.

(Chrysanthemums, c. 1875, by James Tissot, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Nigth* (for Night*)

Once again, Gawker is totally on top of the day's Big Apple-oriented typo news. A trendy (i.e., "brand new and still retro") Manhattan disco called XL had decided to hand out "membership" cards to potential customers. But in true too cool for school fashion, they misspelled the word night in the URL crawling discreetly up the side of the card. Back to the drawing board with this one, boys! (Gawker in fact suggests a bit of karmic retribution in that the disco's designer/promoter once instituted a color-coded card system ranking patrons according to physical attractiveness, and speculates that "maybe the uglies with the white XL card aren't pretty enough to visit the real website and they're just throwing them off the scent.") And while we're dishing the dirt here, let me just add that I saw an interview with Maurice Sendak the other day in which he brazenly and somewhat bizarrely took exception to a bunch of people including Salman Rushdie and Gwyneth Paltrow, but perhaps most notably his fellow kidlit icon Roald Dahl, of whom Sendak said it was "nice" that he was dead. (An interview well worth reading, I might add if this weren't already plainly apparent.) There were five cases of Nigth* (for night) in OhioLINK this morning, and 418 in WorldCat.

(Cover of the award-winning and controversial In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak.)

Carol Reid

Matrial* (for Material* or Martial*)

Arizona Donnie Clark was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, in 1873. Infamously known as "Ma Barker," she was the luckless mother of four crooked kids (Herman, Lloyd, Arthur, and Fred, aka the Barker-Karpis Gang). Like a good many mothers probably would, she did whatever she could, as Wikipedia puts it, "to protect her boys and to keep them out of jail." Although she herself was never accused of a crime, or otherwise hauled into court, her children were her trials. Herman committed suicide in 1927 after a lengthy shootout with police. By 1928, her other three sons were all in stir in either Kansas or Oklahoma. Their father, George Barker, had loyally stuck by his family, holding down various jobs throughout the years, but he finally left "Arrie" holding the bag full of his bad-seed boys. The common belief that "Ma Barker" was a criminal mastermind (found with a Tommy gun in her hands after being shot by federal agents, along with her son Fred, in 1935) is now considered to be a complete myth, promulgated by the FBI in order to justify the killing of a relatively innocent old woman. "Kate" Barker, of course, knew what her offspring were up to most of the time (although they would often "send her to the movies" during the commission of a crime), she was never much more than a mere accomplice, providing a certain sort of cover for them as their mother. OhioLINK is sheltering our typo of the day to the tune of 14 hits today, mostly for material*, with a couple for martial* thrown in there. Amazingly enough, we also found 1,184 cases in WorldCat. (I'm not really sure, but some of them might be Russian or Polish words, correctly spelled.)

(Kate Barker, ca. 1930, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Carol Reid

Wordworth* (for Wordsworth*)

Wordsworth is a word worth spelling well. In an article last week in the New York Daily News concerning the relative literacy of New Yorkers, based on an annual survey of U.S. cities (New York City placed a surprising 22nd, in a "statistical dead heat with Lexington, Kentucky"), the word literate was initially, and ironically, misspelled as "literatre." (This seems just as likely to be a typo for literature, but here the author clearly meant literate.) In defense of the typo, he wrote: "The reason that I made that mistake was because, while writing up my post, I was also reciting Wordworth's [sic] 'Tintern Abbey' and translating Proust into Sanskrit." Which he was then forced to follow up with: "Damn, and I misspelled Wordsworth. This is getting very bad. The truth is, I was watching YouTube videos of dachshund puppies, okay? Cleveland, you won fair and square." (I like his last-ditch choice of the word dachshund there as that's a notoriously hard word to spell.) Since I'm all about coincidence lately, let point out that yesterday's nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll was said by one reader to be "a remix of poems by Tennyson and Wordsworth," although it's apparently a direct parody of "Alice Gray" by William Mee.) There were 28 occurrences of this typo today in OhioLINK, and 402 in WorldCat. Some of these, however, were proper proper names or intentional "words" like wordworthy. You might do better, depending on the size of your catalog and the number of hits you receive, to do a combined search on Wordworth* + Wordsworth*, which returns a more manageable 18 results in OhioLINK and 218 in WorldCat.

(Wordsworth on Helvellyn, by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Perseveren* (for Perseveran*)

Dan Savage has dubbed Newt Gingrich the reluctant, right-wing poster boy for polyamory (or "honest nonmonogamy"), based on allegations made by his second ex-wife. In a similar vein, I'd like to nominate the poem "She's All My Fancy Painted Him" by Lewis Carroll its absurdist anthem. ("Don't let him know she liked them best / For this must ever be / A secret, kept from all the rest / Between yourself and me.") A friend and total Lewis lover commended this poem to me the other day and I quickly fell head over heels. It has a nice bouncy rhythm and pleasing rhyme, although it's not an easy one to memorize, with its almost promiscuous plethora of personal pronouns. Nevertheless, I shall persevere. (One website goes out of its way to assure a questioner that "yes, this is a nonsense poem ... so there are no typos here.") Coincidentally, as I sat up reading it later that night, I managed to catch another classic Dick Van Dyke Show episode (and yet another Peter Pan collar!) called "The Return of Edwin Carp." The retired and retiring radio performer is coaxed back onstage, this time on television and without his customary glass of elderberry wine to calm his nerves. (Edwin's elderly mother calls him a "naughty wino" and he's resolved to quit drinking.) Richard Haydn, who played the voice of the Caterpillar in the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland, is masterful here and his poetry is sublimely facetious. In "Perseverance" (his tongue-in-cheek spoof of "It Couldn't Be Done" by Edgar Guest), he burbles: "So he buckled right in, with the trace of a grin on his face—if he worried he hid it—and he tackled that thing that couldn't be done ... and he couldn't do it!" I believe that Lewis Carroll would have been proud of Edwin Carp. Make me absurdly proud of you by tackling today's typo, which turned up 31 times in OhioLINK and 277 times in WorldCat.

(Richard Haydn in "The Return of Edwin Carp," The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

Carol Reid

Fashon* (for Fashion*)

I was pleased to read an article on Slate recently stating that "Peter Pan collars" are currently back in vogue. Although I was never a boy and grew up ages ago, I still think they're the cat's pajamas. And I had a sort of funny little coincidence while thinking about that the other night. I was escaping into après-dinner TV nostalgia and reflecting on how I really like Mary Tyler Moore in black and white, but prefer Marlo Thomas in color, because her outfits on That Girl (Miss Thomas' Fashions by Cardinali) were so Sixties-style awesome and had such a saturated color palette. (Although, in fact, when the show originally aired, 1966–1971, I had to watch it in b&w, so maybe I'm simply enjoying it in color for the first time.) Just as this fairly frivolous thought was flitting through my head, a promo for MeTV popped up in which Thomas's character, Ann Marie, says: "Watch me in color or in black and white, but just watch me!" And then an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show came on and here comes Laura Petrie in the most fetching at-home ensemble consisting of black pants and top with large white buttons down the front and a cunning Peter Pan collar with white piping. (She must have been rather partial to the PPC as well, since she appeared sporting a similar look the following evening too.) There were 18 cases of Fashon* (for fashion) in OhioLINK today, and 103 in WorldCat.

(Mary Tyler Moore in "How to Spank a Star," The Dick Van Dyke Show.)

Carol Reid