Tag Archives: typos

Fun With Typos and Other Mistakes

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When I was editing magazines, the thing we feared most was typos. I know that autocorrect has introduced as many typos as it has autocorrected (It’s never duck!). But back then, any typo was on us. (I was the proofreader as well as an editor, so usually it was on me. But I digress.)

Since it was also an educational magazine, the typo we feared most was in the words “Public School.” Losing that first L would have been the kiss of death. We were successful in keeping it in the right place. (Once I caught a bilingual mistake made by our senior editor, a lady we all suspected was at least 110. She used to send in manuscripts on scraps of paper and toilet paper rolls. I got to say to her sweetly, “Oh, you do want it to say ‘Mi casa is su casa.’” But I digress again.)

Another kind of word boo-boo involves the sense of hearing. It’s called a “mondegreen” (which I’ll explain if you ask me to, but this post is long enough already) and occurs in the context of misheard song lyrics. The most famous is probably either “There’s a bathroom on the right“ or “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” though I’m partial to “I can see all the popsicles in my way.”

(Once I thought I heard “Jack of Orkin” in a song and took it to refer to a British nobleman of some kind. It turned out to be “Jack Kevorkian.” (Why was there a song about Kevorkian, you may wonder. The song was really about James A. Moon, a Hoosier who invented a personal guillotine-like device, which, come to think of it, isn’t much better. The song compared him to both Kevorkian and Joseph-Louis Guillotin) But I digress at length.)

Then instead of misheard words, there are misread words. Recently, I saw the word “podcasts” and thought it was “podcats.” This reminded me of a book I read in which kittens grew on trees. Hint: Don’t pick them before they’re ripe.

I also recently thought I heard an ad on TV that I thought said, “No going backpacking,” which I thought was a curious PSA. It was really a political ad sponsored by “No Going Back PAC, Inc.”

Speaking of politics, once an acronym almost got the government in trouble. It was during the Second Gulf War in the early 2000s. (It was also called the Iraq War.) Since every war has to have a name, and every name has an acronym, someone in government suggested Operation Iraqi Liberty, which sounded fine until someone noticed that the acronym would be OIL, which would be too spot on. They quickly changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom. (I guess they could have named it Operation Arab Freedom, but again the acronym would be appallingly appropriate. But I digress some more.)

Then there are unfortunate web addresses. The one I remember was supposed to say “Ski Mad River,” a local ski slope, at least when it was snowing or their artificial snow machine was working. But their web address came out to skimadriver.com. I inevitably read it as skima-driver. It made me wonder whether a Skima was an Eastern European car that no one in the U.S. bought or an unfortunate successor to Zima, a beverage that no one drinks anymore and probably shouldn’t have in the first place. (I guess you could have a Skima drinker driving a Skima car, but that would present other problems. By the way, I looked up translations of “skima” because of course I did and found that in Icelandic, skima means “glimmer,” which still has nothing to do with skiing. I suppose a glimmer driver would mean someone who has faulty headlights. But I digress even more.)

Do you have any favorite typos, mondegreens, or language fox paws? Feel free to share them in the comments section. Maybe I’ll use them in a future post!

The Wacky World of Proofreading

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I’ve done a lot of proofreading in my life. I’ve worked as a writer-proofreader-editor for a small publishing company – so small that I sometimes had to fill all those functions to get an issue out. I’ve bartered proofreading academic papers for someone who offered guitar lessons in exchange. And, God help me, I’ve had to proofread my own work, which is by far the worst kind of proofing.

Now I’ve entered into an entirely new version of the practice.

It started like this.

While working on my novel (still unpublished), I needed a gig to make a little money (very little money, as it turned out). So I turned to a transcription service. This company did not transcribe medical dictation or court cases, as many think when they first hear the term. Rather, it involved transcribing mostly business meetings and occasionally interviews or podcasts. As you might guess, when the pandemic hit, business picked up because so many businesses were teleconferencing rather than talking in person. In fact, I wast kept quite busy four days a week, and sometimes extra jobs on the weekends or holidays if there was additional work that needed doing.

(When I talk about this, people sometimes think that it sounds terribly interesting. It isn’t. I hated business meetings and conferences when I had to attend them, let alone listen to them over and over as I transcribed audio files. I privately gave awards for “the world’s longest run-on sentence,” “the most ‘you knows’ and ‘I means,'” and so forth. But I digress.)

Of course, the company employed proofreaders, too, to check the work that the typists had done. But typing paid more per minute of audio than proofreading did, so despite my truly crappy typing, I signed on as a typist. (I never took typing in high school, and back then, they didn’t have keyboarding. Typing was considered a “business” or “secretarial” course at the time, and I was on the college track. Entering college as an English major, I soon learned the error of that way of thinking. English majors are required to write – and, of course, type – dozens of papers per semester. But I digress. Again.)

Two phenomena threw the typing arrangement into disarray. First was the (perhaps ill-advised) resumption of in-person business meetings. The other was the progress made in AI audio dictation software. I once used a dictation function to transcribe an interview that I did. The output was mediocre at best.

Dictation transcription software was supposed to have gotten better since the early days. And I suppose it has – but not enough to make proofreading obsolete, for which I am profoundly grateful.

What I do now is listen to the audio and edit the computer-transcribed version. It’s really editing, but they still call it proofreading.

And – wouldn’t you know? – all those run-on sentences and “you knows” and “I means” are still in there and need taking out. There are speaker names and company names that the AI attempted to spell phonetically that I need to look up and correct. There are passages from speakers with a foreign accent that aren’t transcribed even close to what the speakers said. The paragraphing is dubious and the punctuation appalling. Once, the software even transcribed “yearend” as “urine.”

All told, it doesn’t take me quite as long as typing it would have, but I usually need to do a first proofing pass and then one or two proofing-proofing passes.

It’s a drag. It still beats proofreading my own writing, though.