Suject* (for Subject* or Sujet*)

During a grammar spot on Sunday Morning yesterday, Bill Flanagan tried to set the record straight on the vexing subject of "I versus me." He quoted a few solecisms involving the use of "I" as an object ("Are you coming to the movie with Madonna and I? Won't you join Oprah and I for dinner? The Trumps are throwing a party for Barack and I") and added: "It's embarrassing! At least people who mess up the other way—'Goober and me are going to town'—sound folksy, colloquial, down-to-earth. But people who say 'I' when they should say 'me' sound like they're trying to be sophisticated and they're getting it wrong." A former country bumpkin myself, I still employ the occasional hayseed-ism too, whether intentionally, ironically, or even rather cluelessly. (Although I think I might be inclined to prefer "Me and Goober" over "Goober and me" for some odd reason.) But it's like that old Beatles song says: "I me mine, I me mine, I me mine." I before M, people ... alphabetical order, the easiest mnemonic in the world! So remember now, it's "I before ME, except after..." Well, there are some execeptions, actually, but this is an object lesson we're being subjected to here. We found 48 cases of Suject* (for subject* or sujet* in French and Spanish) in OhioLINK, and 1167 in WorldCat.

(Photo of Andy Griffith and George Lindsey from The Andy Griffith Show. This is the "talking dog" episode where Goober believes he's found a dog that can talk and tries to convince everyone else of it. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Satist* (for Statist* or Satisf*)

Excel spreadsheet on the wall, who's the satist* of them all? I can recall taking statistics back in library school and it really did make me feel sort of sad—when I wasn't feeling bored, frustrated, mystified, or terrified. My professor was a whispering wisp of a man, though he may as well have been a hulking sadist, given the emotions this dry-as-dust, yet slippery-as-an-eel discipline engendered in me. (It was the only C I ever received in grad school, but all things considered, I felt satisfied with my position on that particular bell curve.) I was relieved when the class was over, but I've often wished I'd understood it better, especially considering how easy it is to misinterpret all the studies forever being touted to advance public agendas. Mark Twain once wrote, "There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians," and he wasn't the only wag to wax philosophical on this topic. Some of my favorite quotes include Jorge Luis Borges' "Democracy is an abuse of statistics"; Rex Stout's "There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up"; and George Bernard Shaw's "It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics." Perhaps the best advice comes from the brilliantly named Marilyn vos Savant, who writes: "Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument." Today is the birthday of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, whom some have anointed the "father of statistics," despite there being numerous contenders for the title. Danish statistician Anders Hald once called Fisher "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science," while Richard Dawkins claims he's "the greatest biologist since Darwin." Speaking of statistics, there were 25 cases of Satist* (for statist* or satisf*) in OhioLINK today, and 906 in WorldCat.

(R. A. Fisher, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Adance* (for Advance*)

Tap has always struck me as a dance tailor-made for women: snappy, bouncy, and leggy, but also a chance to put one's foot down, hard. We tend to think of Fred Astaire as perhaps the ultimate practitioner of this art, but I'm reminded of the line by cartoonist Bob Thaves: "Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did ... backwards and in high heels." Another beloved American icon to advance the form was Shirley Temple, who died today at the age of 85. I suspect that tap may have gotten a bit of a boost in the 1940s, shortly after Temple burst on the scene with her chirpy good cheer and amazing ability to follow in the footsteps of whatever costar she was paired with during the otherwise depressing Great Depression. Her most notable partner in that regard was Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, her dance teacher and long-time friend, with whom she performed the famous staircase number in 1935's The Little Colonel. I'm not going to dance around the fact that there were six occurrences of this typo in OhioLINK, and 132 in WorldCat, so please take the necessary steps to find out and then tap out whatever corrections may be needed in your own catalogs today.

(Tap dancing class in the gymnasium at Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa, May 1942, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Klu Klux (for Ku Klux)

According to an article in the New Yorker around ten years ago, almost anything can be made funnier with a "hard C" or a "K" sound. Even if that's true, though, it's pretty hard to imagine the Ku Klux Klan being a rich vein of minable humor. (The Exalted Cyclops in the Mason-Dixon Dining Room with the rope and a burning cross? Klue, the new board game for bigots!) While searching for Klu Klux in OhioLINK, however, I came upon a record for a record called Oh! Oh! Canada, Eh? by a band known as the "Brother's-in-Law." (Brother's is a typo for another day, of course, and probably another blog as well, since search engines tend to ignore things like apostrophes.) According to the bib record, this album includes a song entitled "The K-K-Klu K-K-Klux K-K-Klan," which is clearly the work of a satirist, not a racist, although as with the notorious "N word," seeing the KKK referenced in a facetious way like that is initially rather unnerving. The Brothers-in-Law also send up the (birth control) Pill, the new Canadian (maple leaf) flag, and the automobile (in a "hymn" to Ralph Nader) on this 1970s compilation of the band's greatest hits. Obviously, that so-called Klu in the library record is a typo for Ku, but it should also give us a clue as to how common this error really is. We found 11 of these hiding in plain sight in the OhioLINK database, and 169 in WorldCat.

(Two children wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods stand on either side of Dr. Samuel Green, Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, at an initiation ceremony in Atlanta, Georgia, July 24, 1948, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Forzen (for Frozen)

One time on The Big Bang Theory, Leonard went to the North Pole and brought Penny back a snowflake suspended in "a one percent solution of polyvinyl acetal resin." Penny goes: "Oh, my God. That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me that I didn’t understand!" A coworker and fellow fan points out that the only geek gesture arguably more romantic on the show was when Howard gave Bernadette a star necklace, then took it back so he could take it to the International Space Station, then returned it to her so she could say her star had actually been in space. (It could be that great distances and cold temperatures don't imply ardent coupling as much as they do the preservation of long-term relationships—if not exactly "eternal love.") This morning I had to take the bus to work and it was six degrees below zero. After I got on board, I was wiping my glasses off when I noticed a frozen tear stuck to one of the lenses, like one of those candy "dots" from our childhood. I popped it off and into a baggie I had in my purse, pressing it up against the windowpane, for some reason desperate not to let it melt. Which, of course, it did anyway, with relative dispatch. The moral of the story? Don't cry over chilled, um, eye water? Saline solution? Lachrymose liquid? (I know, I know. I really shouldn't milk a joke like that.) All I know is I felt a bit weepy when I got to work with only a tiny wet splotch in a plastic bag. As Lemony Snicket, who knows all about unfortunate events, once said: "The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history." Utterly ephemeral, constantly renewable, running both hot and cold, a mark of both sorrow and joy. For zen's sake, let me put it to you this way: Frozen tears, like certain typos, are not very long for this world. Forzen (for frozen) was found three times in OhioLINK, and 57 times in WorldCat.

("The tree is crying for the ruined snowpeople," Toronto, Canada, 7 February 2008, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Truner* (for Turner*)

Music in the Sixties was hip, boss, cool, fab, and groovy, to say the least, but the culture vultures out in Hollywood seem to have struggled uneasily with the times. Movies about that decade's rebellious youth tend to come off as particularly peculiar, menacing, one might even say fey. (Hey, did I use that word correctly? It's kind of hard to say. I always have to look it up and I can pretty much guarantee you it doesn't quite mean what a lot of you probably think it does.) In any case, The Big Cube, released in 1969, has got to be one of the trippiest hippie movies of all time: it's almost like the film is both about and on drugs. Though it definitely isn't a celebration of them. Sample dialogue after a fey/gay cross-dresser (played by Mexican actress Regina Torné) makes the scene: "Who's that girl? / She's known as the Queen Bee / That's one of her drones she's dragging along / But who is she? / She's the last stop on the line. Once you get down to her, there's no place else to go / Oh yes, but she's a drag doll. Poison, the end, suicide!") Lana Turner plays a stage actress who plans to quit the theater after a successful Broadway swan song. By contrast, this far-out freak-out flick was apparently Turner's "ugly ducking ditty," if you will, much like the aforeblogged Trog was Crawford's. Truner* turned up three times in OhioLINK today, and 85 times in WorldCat.

(The Big Cube poster containing the words: "Johnny was a medical student who did it all with his chemistry set. And the things he did weren't very nice... weren't very nice ... weren't very nice... weren't very nice." Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

Appilcat* (for applicat*)

To "upset the apple cart" means to cause a disturbance or create a difficulty. The first known use of this phrase was by Jeremy Belknap in The History of New Hampshire, 1788: "Adams had almost overset the apple-cart, Belknap wrote, "by intruding an amendment [to the Constitution] of his own fabrication on the morning of the day of ratification." So why apples, you might ask? Well, I expect it's because apple carts were such a common sight in 18th-century New England, but I also think apples are rather apt here. A cart heaped with hay, say, might be as hard to clean up as a needle is to find; a cart bearing bananas could end up a funny and painful pedestrian hazard; a cartload of oranges would roll quickly into the ditch. But only an overturned apple cart would produce a truly chaotic scene worthy of the metaphor. In the adorably pro-Cubist tune "Paul Cezanne," we're told that "his melons look like footballs and his apples look like dice." I first heard this song in a video by the Special Guests (who had met as students at Columbia during the early eighties, and later changed their name to 5 Chinese Brothers) on the very wonderful PBS series The 90's, which very few people seem to remember. I just discovered another and much more recent video of Tom Meltzer, down in North Carolina this time, reprising his rollicking hit about "the original Father of Cubism." I'm not sure if this group of art-loving musicians is even still performing together anymore, much less taking applications, but frankly I can't picture a more fun gig. Appilcat* (for applicat*) turned up three times in OhioLINK, and 71 times in WorldCat. You might get a few more hits by truncating it just a bit, but don't upset the apple cart by taking it too far. (And speaking of taking things too far, I just realized I've already blogged this typo, back in 2012. Unlike Cezanne, my "oeuver" may not be "in the Louver," but recalling all its constituents can be, if not a political football, at least a somewhat dicey proposition at times!)

(Still Life with Apples and Oranges, by Paul Cezanne, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid