Penions (for Pensions)

It’s retirement season at my library. We will be losing two excellent colleagues at the end of June (the close of our fiscal year and therefore a popular time), and several more in the next few months. Oddly enough, none of them seem to be expressing regret over leaving us. In fact, some have been observed conspicuously counting down the days.

However, did you know that retirement is actually a fairly new concept? It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that pensions became common, and the United States didn’t create Social Security until 1935. Here’s hoping that pensions are not as scarce as hen’s teeth in the coming years, but we can at least take comfort in the fact that penions is a low-probability typo. There are 2 instances in the OhioLINK database, and only 26 in WorldCat.

(Official seal of the Social Security Administration, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Dolll* (for Doll, Dolly, Dollar*, etc.)

I dropped off a few bags of clothes and things at my former church a couple of weeks ago. The donation room was in the basement at the end of the hall and as I started to leave, I told myself: "Don't go in the shop, don't go in the shop..." (I didn't want to cancel out the effect of all that decluttering.) But something seemed to be drawing me in. The first thing to catch my eye was a small collection of dolls with a sign saying "$2.00 each." The moment I picked one up, I could see how finely made and potentially valuable it was. Her tartan skirt and slate woolen jacket with leathery little buttons, the fringed boots and Tyrolean-style hat, it was all too perfect. She even had a pair of lacy knickers on underneath, and her stockings had seams up the back with two tiny holes in them, which may or may not have been part of the original design. The body itself felt "real"—solid and weighty in my palm. I was totally smitten with my new Peggy Nisbet doll (as I found out she was called from the tag still attached to her wrist). When I got home I immediately started looking up both doll and dollmaker. One thing I learned is if your doll's tag (which looks like a little black book) is blank on the back (mine is!), it means it's of an "early vintage." (Which I think means that she, like me, was born in the 1950s.) A very dear friend of mine was in a dreadful bicycling accident that same day and I brought "Peggy" along with me to visit her at the hospital. So far, I'm pleased to report, our English "Lady in Tweeds" has proved to be a cheering influence on everyone she meets. We met three cases of our typo Dolll* in OhioLINK today, and 44 in WorldCat.

(My Peggy Nisbet doll.)

Carol Reid

Annver* (for Anniver*)

A friend attended a family reunion recently where a couple had just celebrated their 20th anniversary. A large sheet cake had been ordered, but when it was served, a few of the guests were confused by its message. "Happy 20th Ann, Dan, and Deb," it read. "Who's Ann?" one of them asked worriedly. (It turns out that the man's former wife had been named Margaret Ann; the only thing that might have made it funnier is if her name had been Ann-Margret.) Clearly, however, this "Ann" was intended to be an abbreviation for Anniversary, which is really rather odd on a cake, I would think ("Happy Birt, Bert"??), but perhaps a little more kosher when followed by a period and not a comma. And what is up with that second comma there, separating the long-married husband and wife? It's almost like the baker were doing it all on purpose, somehow, insidiously trying to promulgate polygamy through pastry! There was one case of Annver* (for anniver*) in OhioLINK today, and 92 in WorldCat.

(Cake for celebration of opening anniversary, Maple Street Book Shop, New Orleans, "Fighting the Stupids Since 1964," from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Cosiderat* (for Considerat*)

Do you sometimes feel like a slippery letter S as you sleepily slump down onto a city bus stop bench? If so, I've got just the sign for you. It reads: "BE CONSIDERATE OF OTHER S THAT MAY NEED TO USE THE BENCH." That fourth word was obviously supposed to be others, but something about it looked a little off to me; there seemed to be a tad too much space between the R and the S. On closer inspection, I saw that the word had originally been rendered as OTHER'S; apparently someone had simply filled in the recessed apostrophe area with some blue ink from a pen. Replacing poorly designed signage is not a thing the State of New York can really afford to do right now and the budget crisis at the State Library is probably among the worst of all its agencies. But as we were told at a staff meeting earlier that day (after also being informed that we need to somehow cut $2 million from our budget), this is nothing new. Melvil Dewey, who was NYSL's first library director, once wrote a letter to a local physician, begging him for donations and citing our fiscal woes. This was a little over a century ago. "Dear Dr. Ward," he wrote, "You have kindly given the state library five journals at the end of each year. You know how badly the legislature has crippled this library and how anxious I have been to get it on its feet. I hammer at them in each report for their failure to do what was agreed. Please tell me what you think about these five journals. If we could save the copies we are now paying for we could put the total amount into other books or journals for which we now have no money, but this plan would keep these off our shelves till you send them in at the end of the year. Possibly you might feel like sending them in quarterly and so release just so much money for other books or serials. I am anxious to do what will please the physicians best and no one can judge better than yourself. Yours truly, Melvil Dewey." I hope the good doctor was considerate enough to cooperate with Mr. Dewey. It takes a village of OTHERS to raise a library. Cosiderat* turns up 15 times in OhioLINK today, and 119 times in WorldCat.

(Photo of ill-considered sign outside the New York State Library. Click to enlarge.)

Carol Reid

Esli* + Elsi* (for Elsi* or Esli*)

I said to someone the other day that my late great-aunt and -uncle had been called Elsie and George, and he replied that his next-door neighbors growing up had had the same names. It seems that Elsie, in particular, apparently once popular for girls, has pretty much fallen out of favor, despite its clearly being short for Elizabeth—much like Beth, Betsy, Liza, Lizzie, etc. (A Jewish pal tells me that their version of it is Elisheva.) Or perhaps, more directly, Elspeth, a Scottish name meaning "my god is bountiful" or "god of plenty." This makes sense, given that the famous Borden Dairy Company icon "Elsie the Cow" was created by a Scotsman named David Reid. She was quite the beloved bovine, for those of you who don't recall those Elsie-yon days. She played "Buttercup" in the RKO movie Little Men in 1940 and even appeared on the TV program What's My Line? And she was a huge hit at both New York State World's Fairs. The real live Elsie (she had gotten her start as a promotional cartoon cow) was an appealing seven-year-old Jersey with big brown eyes and the inspired if rather perplexing moniker "You'll Do, Lobelia." She was renamed "Elsie" and was introduced to the public (along with the amazing "Rotolactor") at the 1939 World's Fair. Elsie, who was once described as "a mixture of cow and housewife" (though she also had a "Boudoir" at the Fair), was blessed with a husband ("Elmer" of Elmer's Glue fame; he could be rather bullheaded) and baby named Beulah. Sadly, the original Elsie had been killed in a traffic accident in 1941, so another "Elsie" was found to take her place. Three more calves followed: Beauregard (who was born at Macy's department store!) in 1948, and the twins Larabee and Lobelia in 1957. There was only one case of Esli* + Elsi* (for Elsi* or Esli*) in OhioLINK today, and 19 in WorldCat, but let's milk this one for all it's worth. In other words: "E is for the Energy she gives us ... L is for the Lovely things she does ... S is for the Satisfying moments ... I is for the pure Ingredients ... E is for ..." (Does anybody out there know what E was for?) "Put it all together it spells ELSIE. She's the one that's all the world to me!"

(Commemorative tile on the ground near the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Empoy* (for Employ*)

There are many types of employees (full-time, part-time, salaried, per diem), along with many kinds of jobs (blue-collar, white-collar, pink-collar, etc.). When no other descriptor will do, we call some of these "odd" jobs. On TV recently, I heard someone say he "had been working kind of off and end jobs." I felt like I had suddenly hit the jackpot with a triple-threat "conflated idiom": odds and ends + odd jobs + off and on. In the 1933 film Employees' Entrance, Kurt Anderson (Warren William) pulls every dirty boss trick in the book, taking advantage of an eager new department store clerk played by Loretta Young. As this is a relatively unfettered "pre-Code" movie, it includes a lot of sex and violence, specifically suicide, gunplay, blackmail, backstabbing, and a certain Bill Cosby-like approach to women. There were ten examples of Empoy* (for employ*) in OhioLINK this morning (including a couple of foreign words and "sic" notations), and 326 in WorldCat.

(Film poster/lobby card for the 1933 film Employees' Entrance, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Whitely + Whiteley (for Whiteley or Whitely)

In the 1986 book Fabulous Folks of the Old Northwest, the chapter called "Fabulous Opal—Fact or Fiction?" opens like this: "Opal Whiteley, whose childhood diary, allegedly written in a Northwest lumber camp when she was six years old, plummeted her to fame in the 1920's, is one of the most controversial enigmas in Northwest history." You know, I'll tell you what else is an enigma—that sentence! How is it possible to be so technically grammatical, and yet to read so intractably as though it weren't? I don't know if there are two too many commas in there, or one too many non-restrictive clauses, but there is something not quite right, and yet not exactly wrong about it either. And then there's that word plummeted. Can a person really "plummet" to fame? Which way is fame, anyway? A friend allows that one could possibly plummet to infamy, but probably not to fame. Google searches on "her to fame" and "him to fame" supply a variety of workable verbs in this case (rocketed, launched, thrust, shot, vaulted, catapulted, drove, propelled, etc.), but nothing that would suggest falling rather than rising. "Plummeted" was a poor choice of words there, not only due to the direction it implies, but also because, while one can either plummet or be plummeted, one can't really plummet something else. Another sort-of solecism appears on the next page too, where we're told: "Her unique ability to make all the pieces of her destiny fall into place was uncanny, especially, if it was all contrived." It's hard to know whether that second comma is needed there or not, but it does seem to change the meaning or emphasis of the sentence just a little. At any rate, suffice it to say that this book could have used a good proofreader, perhaps someone a bit more like the precocious and paradoxical Opal Whiteley herself, who first rose to fame, and then plummeted, if you will, to infamy, all in the course of a few short years. There isn't room here to do this fabulous creature justice, but you can read her amazing story in her own words in Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart or The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, as well as in the often contentious words of others. There were 25 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 146 in WorldCat.

(Opal Whiteley, December 11, 1897—February 16, 1992, American nature writer and diarist, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid