Devember (for December)

"Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November..." Most of us know the drill by now, but I have a colleague who, in spite of his numerous and manifold intellectual endowments, claims never to have mastered this useful numerical mnemonic. (I don't know how he minds his days!) In any event (and forgetting about February for a moment), the month of December—being one of "all the rest"—has 31 of 'em, but the last one is really known more for its nights. I don't know what any of this has to do with Devo, the great devolving rock band from the 1980s, exactly, but I do hope you all have a very happy New Year... And a happy New Year's Eve. Devember was uncovered three times in OhioLINK and 44 times in WorldCat. If you should find this deviation in your own library's database, you know what to do. Whip it. Whip it good!

(Devo, American New Wave band, May 31, 2008, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Beleiv* (for Believ*)

Although Wikipedia, as well as most Americans, refer to him as "Leif Ericson," the name of the explorer who discovered the Americas (almost five hundred years before Columbus did) is spelled a number of different ways by our neighbors to the north. In Old Norse, it was Leifr Eiríksson; in Icelandic, Leifur; in Norwegian, it would be Leiv. Let's leave that be for now, however, and talk a bit about the man. Leif Ericson was born circa 970, most probably in Iceland. He was the son of Erik the Red and his wife, Thjodhild. Leif's father, who had been born in (and banned from) Norway, established the first permanent Norse settlement in Greenland. Leif first sighted Vinland (what later Europeans called the "New World"), after being blown off course en route to Greenland, where he intended to bring Christianity to its inhabitants. (He was able to convert his mother, but not his father.) It's believed that Leif and his crew built a small settlement in what is now Newfoundland. The painting shown to the right was commissioned for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and later given to the National Gallery of Norway in 1900. Beleiv* was discovered 25 times in OhioLINK and 433 times in WorldCat this morning. So remember: it's "I before E except after C"—except for when you happen to be a 10th-century Nordic explorer. Or all of the other times it isn't. Believe it or not.

(Christian Krohg's painting of Leiv Eiriksson discovering North America, 1893, held at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Pengiun* (for Penguin*)

In 1998, staff at the Central Park Zoo presented a black and white case for the existence of gay penguins. Roy and Silo were two male Chinstraps who had been observed "performing mating rituals." They also tried to "hatch a rock" in 1999. Later on the pair proved capable of hatching an actual egg from a penguin who didn't seem to have the knack for it, and the resultant little one was named Tango. (I guess in this case, it took three, or technically make that four.) Tango soon followed in the waddling footsteps of her two dads and paired up with another female, known as Tanuzi. Then you've got Robert Benchley, a humorist who wrote for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair during the early decades of the 20th century. Benchley was a member of the Algonquin Round Table and an occasional movie actor. (He appeared in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, among other films, and his own MGM "miniature" called How to Sleep won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1935.) In 1936, he published a book of humorous essays entitled My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew (an apparent pun on the title of the popular children's book The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew). One piece was called "Penguin Feud" and concerned boon companions Admiral and Jake. These two penguins did everything together, until one day they simply stopped speaking, as it were. Before this, they had been inseparable and thoroughly compatible. Benchley even uses the word "intimate," without quite calling them gay. Though like Roy and Silo, Admiral and Jake eventually parted ways, it nevertheless makes for a heartwarming tale on a cold winter's day. We've blogged about this and related typos on one or two other occasions, but I couldn't resist a shout-out to the prescient Robert Benchley, and to all gay penguins everywhere. There were eleven examples of Pengiun* (for penguin*) in OhioLINK today, and 245 in WorldCat.

(Robert Benchley in Vanity Fair, exact date unknown, pre-1920, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Sufac* (for Surfac*)

On the hurried run-up to the number one Christian holiday, and in the absence of high anxiety over too many mundane tasks, a certain surface tension will often suffice. Such a desire to break free of secular concerns and find some inner peace, however, knows no religious boundaries. Like most spiritual folk, Sufis pursue a reality that goes far below the surface. They do this by means of various spiritual techniques, such as study, prayer, meditation, ecstasy, asceticism, etc. The frequently banned and censored Order of the Whirling Dervishes also engages in the athletic dancing associated with this Muslim sect. Sufism is defined as the "inner, mystical dimension of Islam." The inner is made outer in this beautiful dance, as it should also be in the many gifts that are given from the heart this season. Surf your databases for today's typo and save face by fixing any of these that surface there. Sufac* (for surfac*) comes up 30 times in OhioLINK and 619 times in WorldCat.

(Sufi dancer in Cairo, Egypt, December 2008, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Rebbeca (for Rebecca)

Dame Rebecca West was born Cicely Isabel Fairfield on December 21, 1892. West once wrote that "the main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots." She also asserted, in her novel The Judge: "Since men don’t love us nearly as much as we love them that leaves them much more spare vitality to be wonderful with." I won't presume to define her entire point of view on the matter, but it seems that men spend their lives frantically fending off one another, while women are just attractive distractions (or maybe that's distracted attractions) on the side. Okay, this was 1922, not 2012, and we've come a long way, blah blah blah, but I think we all know what she was talking about. West, who was the longtime lover of H. G. Wells and whom Time magazine called "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947, was a very funny suffragette, and she certainly wasn't the only one. Clementine Churchill, for instance, otherwise known as "One of the Doomed," wrote a letter to The Times of London in response to the opinion of an "eminent bacteriologist" who felt that women were simply too inferior to vote or participate in politics in any way, in which she helpfully wondered, tongue planted firmly in cheek: "Ought women not to be abolished altogether?" The future wife of the British prime minister (who himself opposed women's suffrage) added: "I have been so much impressed by Sir Almroth Wright's disquisition, backed as it is by so much scientific and personal experience, that I have come to the conclusion that women should be put a stop to." Canadian feminist Nellie McClung declared, in a mock debate in 1914 called "Should Men Vote?": "Oh, no, man is made for something higher and better than voting... The trouble is that if men start to vote, they will vote too much. Politics unsettle men and unsettled men means unsettled bills, broken furniture, broken vows, and divorce. Men's place is on the farm... if men were to get the vote, who knows what would happen? It's hard enough to keep them home now!" Actually, there was a fair amount of this going on at the time: sprightly confident women having sport with stuffy terrified men. When it comes to lunacy and idiocy, however, it's debatable which sex predominates. In the movie Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks basically calls the opposite sex "stupid." In the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond, Debra mutters "Idiot!" so often, it starts to sound like a verbal caress. Nowadays, it's a cliche to portray men as simple, uncomplicated creatures—clueless, forgetful, incompetent, or out of touch. Women, by contrast, are driven crazy by such behavior, and some would say crazy to put up with it. In any case, and as always, love is blind, deaf, and dumb, and only lunatics and idiots need apply. Rebbeca (for Rebecca) was found five times in OhioLINK, and 73 times in WorldCat.

(Rebecca West, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Hendrik* + Henrik* (for Henrik* or Hendrik*)

Today marks the birthday of Minnie Maddern Fiske, who was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1865. Her mother, Lizzie Maddern, had been an actress in the theater and Minnie, who began acting professionally at the age of five, seemed to have been born to the boards as well. Baptized Marie Augusta Davey, even her thoroughly-modern-Minnie sort of stage name seemed to have proved a bit much for her fans, as she eventually became known simply as "Mrs. Fiske." According to Wikipedia, Minnie Maddern Fiske was "widely considered the most important actress on the American stage in the first quarter of the 20th century." She led the fight against the Theatrical Syndicate (just as heavy-handed and anti-artistic as it sounds) and is also credited with introducing American audiences to the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen was apparently sympathetic to women and their struggle for equality, having authored the iconic A Doll's House in 1879. Fiske was married twice but had no children, and was "one of the most prominent animal welfare advocates of her era." (Mark Twain wrote the story "A Horse's Tale" for her.) About her idol Ibsen, Maddern herself once wrote: "... even Shakespeare seems easy when compared with the thought that must be bestowed upon Ibsen. The beautiful verse, the wonderful character drawing of Shakespeare furnish solutions of perplexing problems, but Ibsen is so elusive. He fascinates by his aloofness. He is the Wagner of the drama. Wagner struggled for understanding just as Ibsen has struggled." You shouldn't have to struggle too hard to find evidence of today's typo, discovered 59 times in OhioLINK, and "too many..." times in WorldCat.

(Portrait of Minnie Maddern Fiske, by Zaida Ben-Yusuf, entitled "Mrs. Fiske, Love finds the way," from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Sterotyp* (for Stereotyp*)

I don't follow most sports, so I probably tend to stereotype athletes and the games they play even more than most people do. At their (or perhaps my) worst, I tend to think of football players as muscle-bound, brain-damaged, steroid-addled bruisers, and their fans as beer-swilling, wife-beating, out-of-shape couch potatoes. A collection of angry tweets yesterday unfortunately painted them as outrageous racists to boot, after NBC had the temerity to interrupt the first quarter of last night's 49ers-Patriots game in order to air President Obama's address to the nation about gun violence and the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. So yes, sports fans can certainly act dreadfully in lots of different ways, but even though disaffected hipsters pretend to prefer European-style soccer over all-American football, we don't even come close to the "hooliganism" that is how some soccer fans choose to express their enthusiasm. That said, and I hope you'll forgive my blatant stereotyping, I'm kind of pumped to say this one is a "high probability" typo on the Ballard list, turning up 76 times in OhioLINK, and 976 times in WorldCat.

(Cover of Work and Win: An Interesting Weekly for Young America, September 27,1907, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid