Disign* (for Design*)

Hand gestures often designate different things to different people, especially different people in different countries. For example, the affirmative "OK" sign and the supportive "thumbs up" signal used here in the United States may, on the other hand, be seen as the most offensive of expressions abroad, a downright digital diss. We could always try and design a universal set of symbols to obviate such international incidents, but unspoken words, like spoken ones, are generally unruly and resistant to orchestrated change. In the meantime, it would behoove travelers and others who interact with foreigners on a regular basis to apprise themselves of these local connotations. However, just to be on the safe side, I might endeavor to keep my hands in my pockets, a smile on my face (happily, this one seems to mean the same thing all around the globe), and a small translating dictionary at my fingertips. Typos are often not what they seem either, so try and stay vigilant regarding any "variant," foreign, and antiquated spellings you may find in your search. Not accounting for those possibilities, we found 21 cases of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 695 in WorldCat.

(Photograph by Rondal Partridge, 1917, of hitchhikers from Oakland, California: "A professional job of 'thumbing' ... these two boys travel together from one construction job to another all over the West ... the careful costume of the thumber with clean shirt, collegiate jacket, and polished shoes is as typical as the city limit sign ... these boys said that their ambition was to settle down to a steady job, preferably civil service." From Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Beautf* (for Beautif*)

You know how for some reason a lot of hair salons like to use wordplay in their names? Shear Magic, A Cut Above, Hair Today Gone Tomorrow? (Well, maybe not that last one quite so much.) But what's weird is that this sort of thing apparently goes on all over the world, so it's not just the fact that English words for hair, etc., happen to have a lot of homonyms, homophones, synonyms, and so on, thereby lending themselves to such facetious nomenclature. By contrast, the one shorn here (I mean shown here) is located in downtown Albany, and I have to say I really love it. It's so innocent and guileless, so simple and direct, so utterly without irony. It's like a nice cool drink of water after a big banned bottle of soda. And honestly, who needs another hoary pun when you can have beautiful hair instead? Still, I wonder if people ever stop outside this establishment for a minute, scratching their shaggy heads, thinking: "I don't get it." For our part (get it?), we got 14 hits on Beautf* in OhioLINK, and 96 in WorldCat. One was for the record The beautyful ones are not yet born, by the Branford Marsalis Trio, with an added title entry: Beautful ones are not yet born. The first instance apparently was misspelled intentionally, but I can sort of see the genesis of the second. I picture the cataloger, like a confused passerby, pausing mid-word over that unexpected Y, drifting off for a second, and then snapping out of it and adding a final F-U-L before moving on.

(Picture from personal collection.)

Carol Reid

Editd (for Edited)

You can have a lot of fun with photos. The one pictured here shows a street sign in San Francisco, edited (though not cropped) in such a way as to now read "Edit" rather than Edith. Another "Edith" made famous through photos was the eponymous doll in the series of children's books by Dare Wright, published from 1957 through 1981. Dare Wright was an author, photographer, and fashion model, born in Ontario, Canada, in 1914. In her "Edith" books, she dared to dispense with the need to write (for the most part) and let her photos do the talking instead. This was a rather innovative technique, it would seeem, especially in the world of children's lit. Edith in many ways appeared to represent the author herself: both were pretty girls with straight blonde hair, wide-set eyes, gold earrings, and rosebud lips. Dare was a sort of "lonely doll" as well. Her parents divorced when she was young and she spent most of her childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, with her mother, the portrait artist Edith Stevenson Wright. She and her brother Blaine (who had himself been raised by their father, a theater critic) did not meet again until Dare moved to New York City in her twenties. In 2010, The Guardian named The Lonely Doll one of the "10 Best Illustrated Children's Books" of all time. Today's typo was found 41 times in OhioLINK and 249 times in WorldCat.

(Picture by P. I. King.)

Carol Reid

Billl*

Here's another "threebie" for you in honor of the actress Carroll Baker's birthday today. Baker was born in 1931 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and was the daugher of a traveling salesman. She attended community college and briefly worked as a magician's assistant (why is this starting to sound like sort of a joke?) before she began pursuing an acting career. The infamous billboard image of Baker sucking her thumb in a provocative nightie was like a campy sci fi creature taking over Times Square when the Elia Kazan movie Baby Doll was released in 1956. (Another gargantuan girl tripping Freudian fear and fascination in the fifties was Allison Hayes in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, although Baby Doll came out two years earlier and the poster was even taller!) Despite the fact that the loungewear in question actually gave rise to the term "baby doll pajamas" and their subsequent popularity, apparently a lot of people were losing sleep over this film. Kazan was reviled by both the left and the right at that time: everyone from the National (Catholic) Legion of Decency, which "banned" the film," to the the blacklisted writers and directors in Hollywood, who could not forgive him for cooperating with the House Un-American Activities Committee by "naming names" in 1952. While I was hoping (of course!) to get some hits on Billbroad* in either OhioLINK or WorldCat, sadly none turned up. So I turned instead to Billl*, which generated seven in the former and 164 in the latter.

(Photograph of the Times Square poster for Baby Doll, from the Hollywood Elsewhere website.)

Carol Reid

Desert* + Dessert* (for Dessert* or Desert*)

Are you a fool for dessert? Or just a dried-up dieter in a desert of culinary choices? In any event, a fruit fool sounds like the perfect ending to a summer meal (and at least the fruit part's got some vitamins and fiber in it). The original fruit fool was made with gooseberries and debuted in the 15th century. The first recorded recipe for it appears to have come a couple of centuries later. Here is a more recent one for Ginger and Rhubarb Fool, calling for rhubarb, whipped cream, Greek yogurt, and crystallized ginger pieces. I'll have to try this with some rhubarb I just planted in the garden (a "family heirloom" of sorts as it came from an expanding patch of rhubarb that an elderly relative has kept going for several decades or longer now, it seems). All this foolishness allows for nearly endless variations, but the essence of it is this, according to Wikipedia: "A fool (obsolete spelling foole) is an English dessert generally made by mixing puréed fruit, whipped cream, sugar, and possibly a flavouring agent like rose water." There were 27 cases of our combined typo in OhioLINK today (around nine or ten of which were false positives like "Desert Sand Cookies," "Turning the Desert into Dessert," and "Dessicated Desert Desserts") and 341 in WorldCat.

(Raspberry fool, 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Wright* + Wirght*

Dammit. Something is just not right around here. An essential part of my hometown is missing. Albany, N.Y., it seems, was once awash in beavers, as was a good portion of the rest of the United States. However, according to an article in the current Atlantic, the British Hudson's Bay Company in the 1820s decided to declare war on them, while employing the dubious argument that there would be little incentive for Americans to continue exploring the West without the siren song of beaver pelts to lure them. Within twenty years, the animals were all but eliminated from the Pacific Northwest, pretty much run out of town on a rail, as it were. Nevertheless, for a quite while, beavers defined the capital of New York State. The city's second-largest park, now known as Lincoln Park, was originally called Beaver Park. Alice Morgan Wright, who is pictured to the left, was an Albany sculptor, suffragist, and animal rights activist. I'd love to see a sculpture of her holding that beaver in Lincoln Park someday, along with a copy of the Louis Slobodkin statue of Abraham Lincoln, "The Rail Joiner." (Slobodkin, of course, was another prominent Albany artist). Yet another Albany sculptor, Gertrude Lathrop (sister of Dorothy Lathrop, who received the very first Caldecott Medal in 1938), honored both the beaver and Albany's Dongan Charter (the oldest surviving city charter in the country) on a commemorative coin in 1936. In fact, Albany itself, while under Dutch rule in the 1600s, was for a time called Beverwyck (or Beverwijck), loosely translated as "beaver district." We found five examples of today's typo in OhioLINK, and 37 in WorldCat. Get busy today and do the Wright thing, restoring this typo to its proper spelling in your own library's catalog.

(Alice Morgan Wright and beaver, from the Smith College, Sophia Smith Collection website.)

Carol Reid

Capenter* (for Carpenter*)

Writing about Catcher yesterday has put me in mind of another Salinger story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. And calling it Catcher has put me in mind of a couple of movies I greatly enjoyed, The Good Girl with Jennifer Anniston (Justine: "Whatcha readin'?" Holden: "Catcher in the Rye ... I'm named after it." Justine: "What's your name? Catcher?") and Down with Love, in which Renée Zellweger's love/anti-love interest is the publishing mogul "Catcher Block." Catcher in the Rye, you've got to admit, is a very catchy title for a book, and so is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. The latter is named after a "fragment" of a poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, after whom lesbianism itself was named! The titular line goes: "Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man..." In the Salinger novella (paired with another one, Seymour: An Introduction), Seymour Glass, the Manhattan family's most mysterious and evolved savant, turns out to be a no-show at his own wedding, where his intended, Muriel (a lovely if rather pedestrian "good girl"), patiently awaits. Capenter* (for carpenter*) was found ten times in OhioLINK and 81 times in WorldCat. I won't carp on it, but it'll be a feather in your cap if you can manage to catch a few of these in your own catalog today.

(Fragment of the painting Sappho by Charles Mengin, 1877, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid