There are certain typos I can’t stand, and am appalled with when they show up in my writing—like using the wrong “there” or “your,” but some of them just make me laugh. This morning I wrote a serious scene and ended a paragraph with “… like an avenging angle.”
It made me laugh, got me distracted enough to take a break and write this. One of my favorites, by the way, in my first read-through of one of my manuscripts a few years ago, was a missing “u” in mouth… which for a romance novel is a little awkward if his “moth” is doing things his “mouth” should do.
In the true spirit of procrastination, I decided to learn more about typos themselves. With the official launch of my book, Circle of Dreams, I’m thinking more about the meta details—at this point everything is pretty much set, from font to cover art. When the first copy of my first book arrived in hand it felt like a treasure – the crisp pages, the smell of ink, the glossy cover. The thought that I would be sending this out into the world was thrilling, and that so many people had entered my Goodreads contest was a thing of wonder. But then arose that little worm of doubt about the typo that eluded me. I had gone over the text what felt like hundreds of times. It has been vetted by my editor, and then by another copy editor, but still… would there be a typo that I missed? In most books that I read there is at least one typo, sometimes more. In a novel, especially one that is engrossing, it’s challenging even for professional copy editors to find every typo. The accuracy of the spelling and grammar, as simple a topic as it may sound, can have a huge impact on the understanding of a story.
In my search I stumbled upon a great little article on the history of the typo.
“The history of early printing suggests, very strongly, that authors and printers weren’t pursuing a kind of perfect text,” said Adam Smyth, an English literature fellow at the University of Oxford who specializes in the instability of early modern texts.
In the earliest days of the book, writers and readers gathered around mistakes as a means of discussing the work. They compiled “errata” (lists of errors or typos and their corrections inserted, usually on a separate page or slip of paper, in a book or other publication, according to Dictionary.com). “Errata were early versions of the comment section—places where revisions were made and ideas were exchanged. They were ‘confessional spaces’ and ‘emblems of a new culture of accuracy,’ [as well as] a way of seeing books as a collaboration between reader and writer, rather than just the one-way broadcasting of a set of ideas… What we’ve lost, in many cases, online, isn’t the integrity of print, but the traceability of its weaknesses,” Adrienne Lafrance, a journalist of The Atlantic wrote in an article entitled, “A Corrected History of the Typo.”
Adrienne continues, “But more than giving a window into the physical process—the actual making—of book creation, acknowledging an error is a way of updating a book after its printing, a means by which the text evolves and changes over time. This helps explain some of the efforts to save 19th century marginalia—because a book is not just a reflection of the person who wrote it; but also, sometimes, the impression of its readers. Some readers, of course, leave more indelible marks than others.” Lafrance goes on to talk about modern efforts to preserve errata. Take the awesome site, Newsdiffs, which tracks big name online papers like NYTimes.com and CNN.com. If you wanted to, you could track all the changes ever made on an article to see where misunderstandings happened, when they were cleared, the effects of misinformation.
I highly doubt someone would sit down to discuss the phrase “like an avenging angle” for hours on end, but the sentiment resonated with me clearly since I was inspired to pause and write about this issue. Printed words, particularly in laws and policies must necessarily be precise, an error could have catastrophic consequences. Erroneously printed ones also have the power to amuse.
Here is my go-to site for daily typo funnies. Damnyouautocorrect.com.
After you’ve had a good laugh or two, check out the most expensive typo in legislative history: “In 1872, one misplaced comma in a tariff law cost American taxpayers more than $2 million, or $38,350,000 in today’s dollars.” Use the comma, Luke.
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