Syndrom (for Syndrome)

Bats are scary, right? After all, they’re really just mice with wings. Most carry rabies. They’re blind, so they could fly into your hair and get tangled up. And some are even blood-sucking vampires just waiting to feed on unwary humans! Such is the mythology that commonly surrounds bats.

In truth, bats have more to fear from us than we do from them. A case in point: White-Nose Syndrome (WNS). Scientists are still struggling to understand the nature of this threat, but according to Bat Conservation International, it’s killed more than a million bats in 14 states and 2 Canadian provinces since first being discovered in 2006. Those affected commonly exhibit a white fungus on the nose or wings that causes them to awaken early from hibernation and freeze or starve to death. Humans can contribute to the spread of WNS–which often makes big leaps in its progression from site to site–so caves and abandoned mines in many parts of the country are being closed to visitors.

Why should we care? If compassion for a fellow creature isn’t a good enough reason, these winged marvels have an important role to play in keeping the insect population under control. A single bat can consume its body weight in bugs each night!

Syndrom is a low-probability typo on the Ballard list. By my count, there are currently 10 instances of it in the OhioLink database for materials coded as English-language. But this one is a little tricky to tease out, because “Syndrom” is the German counterpart, and it sometimes appears in records for English translations, bilingual titles, and works that simply refer to a particular syndrome by its German name.

(Townsend’s Big-Eared Bat, or Corynorhinus townsendii, from Wikimedia Commons)

Deb Kulczak

Lanscap*, etc. (for Landscap*)

In a nice confluence of the digital revolution (in which "everyone is a photographer now," according to a coworker) and the economic depression (in which cultural institutions can barely afford to stay open anymore, much less spend money on new exhibits), the New York State Museum has exhibited some creative juice of its own in its latest installation, Not Just Another Pretty Place: The Landscape of New York. This is the "first exhibition of landscape art to be completely culled from the State Museum’s vast collections." As a corollary, it has also invited members of the public to submit their outdoor snapshots, vacation photos, and other pictures of New York State for display in the museum. This initiative, called Wish You Were Here, has been a smashing success and these wonderful images are now available for viewing on Flickr. We found 21 cases of Lanscap*, six of Landcap*, four of Landsap*, and one of Landcsap* all littering the landscape in OhioLINK this morning.

(Photograph of the Olana Mansion, Columbia County, New York, home of Frederick Church, father of the "Hudson River School" of landscape painting, by Rolf Müller, June 2007, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Writng* (for Writing*)

Yesterday was "National Day on Writing," a fact that had escaped my notice until I showed up at a local book talk last night by Scott Rosenberg, co-founder of Salon.com and the author of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. Scott gave an interesting lecture about the history and significance of blogging, deftly fielding complaints (from audience members and critics in general) that blogging is too ephemeral, too casual, too personal, too anonymous, too impolite, too narcissistic, too shallow, too un-serendipitous, too unpublished. Basically, that it isn't really writing. Scott is living proof, though, that it is. He blogs about writing and writes about blogging. And, while there are fundamental differences between books and blogs (the combination of the two even has its own predictably ungainly wordform now: blook—coming soon to a dictionary near you!), at bottom they both speak to the same human impulse: to express one's thoughts in unspoken words and to do so publicly among a community of readers. There were eight cases of Writng* (for writing*) found in the OhioLINK database, and in 97 in WorldCat.

(Scott Rosenberg and his new book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters.)

Carol Reid

Puctu* (for Punctuat* or Pictur*)

Sounding like a philatelist's paradise, the PUC, or Postal Union Congress, is the international meeting of the Universal Postal Union. The congress is held once every four years (though the meetings were cancelled during both World Wars—some things are more important than postage, I guess) in different cities around the world. Members discuss postal services, legislation, politics, and anything else affecting or relating to this sticky issue. The first PUC was held in Bern, Switzerland, in 1874, and drew delegates from 22 nations. Customarily, attendees are presented with stamp albums from each participating country, covering the years since the last congress. We collected six examples of Puctu* in OhioLINK, two for words like picture, and four for words like punctuate. So let's all get together and stamp out this typo today.

(Postal Union Congress £1 stamp, designed by Harold Nelson, 1929, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Iceburg* (for Iceberg*)

Hamburgers may be getting bigger these days (especially those honking hunks of meat, wrapped in yet more meat, piled atop additional meat, by Burger King and its icky ilk), but lettuce or no lettuce and try as they might, they will never match the sheer enormousness of your average iceberg. (Although, when it comes to enormity, that's kind of a different story.) We uncovered eleven of these typos in OhioLINK, seven of which were for the "Carson-Iceburg Wilderness" in California. (One was the intentional "Joke: Iceburgers & Snowball" from the album A Child's Christmas by Susie Tallman and friends.) Thanks to itinerant typo correctors Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, who served up this excellent example from a restaurant menu ("Iceburg Lettuce") in a recent profile by Bill Geist on CBS News Sunday Morning.

(An iceberg at the edge of the Baffin Bay's sea ice is just one of the many sights three airmen from Thule Air Base, Greenland, witnessed recently during a six-day dog-sledding expedition. From Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Gaurant*, Guarent* (for Guarant*)

I can't always guarantee you a pun-tastic post here; there are days when I simply can't make (non) sense of the typo in play. Guaranty, guarantor, guar gum, sure. But GAUR, GAUR, what begins with GAUR? (And why am I starting to sound like Dr. Seuss?) The truth is, very few words that are not proper nouns begin with the letters G-A-U-R. So few (just two, by my count: gaur, meaning a wild ox; and gaura, meaning a plant from the Evening Primrose family) that it's a bit surprising this particular typo gets made at all. There were only three occurrences of it in OhioLINK (all for the same title) and 55 in WorldCat. Still, that's no guarantee you won't find it your own catalog. (And as proof that it's worth it to keep poking around, even in seemingly barren ground, we eventually turned up 18 cases of Guarent* as well.)

(Gaur at the Toronto Zoo, October 15, 2006, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Phyci*, Pysic* (for Physic*)

What's not to love about a sitcom that features a card catalog as part of the set design? Or where Rock-Paper-Scissors isn't geeky enough for the four young physicists—they have to play a more advanced form of the game called "Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock"? The geekiest of the group is undoubtedly Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons; Sheldon was recently outed as a person with Asperger's syndrome. However, this theory has been disputed by the show's creator, Chuck Lorre. "It would be a lot of responsibility and it would put up some barriers," Parsons commented. "He is Aspergian, but that allows more freedom." (I think "Aspergian" means he has Asperger's, but I won't tell him if you don't.) There were 23 cases of Phyci* and 20 of Pysic* in OhioLINK last time we checked. These may be typos for a variety of words, though, so be careful when making any corrections.

(Johnny Galecki as Leonard Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory.)

Carol Reid