Even the English Are Not Immune

My eye was drawn to a Daily Telegraph article about "embarrassing questions" asked by tourists to the stately homes of England.

However embarrassing the tourists' questions might have been, the Telegraph itself should be embarrassed by a repeated typographical/spelling error in the article.

After first spelling "Isle of Wight" correctly not once, but twice, the article later misspells it as "Isle of White" -- not once, but twice.

See for yourself:

A young visitor to Queen Victoria's summer palace Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, was told that she had nine children and asked: "Did they all have the same dad?"....

"Is this where Sharon and Ozzie actually live?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of Wight....

"Did they all have the same dad?" – a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White, who learned of Queen Victoria's nine children....

"How long does life membership last?" - a visitor to Osborne House, Isle of White

Newspaper Writers Know

Writers for major newspapers are as aware as anyone of the absence of sufficient numbers of (or sufficiently talented) copy editors.

Here's an item from Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in The Washington Post, published on August 6:

This deplorable error in an Associated Press wire dispatch Monday is surely the result of the demise of copy editors in the news business. The wire carried news of conservative political commentator Robert D. Novak -- who, by the way, was always gracious and helpful to us, despite his cranky public persona -- and his retirement from the biz after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

And then a terrible gaffe: "Novak has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for decades. He announced late last month he has a brain."