Neither breakfast nor lunch but ... Bunch?

HUMOROUS TYPO

Granted, Roger Catlin's Sunday Washington Post Arts & Style piece about TV actors performing Shakespeare is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but writers about popular culture should not make a mistake like this one:

Too bad Robert Reed isn’t around to join Florence Henderson for a turn, by the Brady Brunch couple, in “Macbeth.” Even without him, though, Henderson could take charge of the central story as Lady Macbeth, egging her man on to his deed, in the way she did as Lady Brady, conflating “Miiike!” and“Maaac!” in the process.

Along these lines, how about Eve Plumb, from that same beloved sitcom, bringing her Jan Bradyness on the road in a touring company of “The Tempest” where, when attention always seems to turn to Prospero’s daughter, as it once did to her TV sister Marcia, she can exclaim with her pained frustration, “Miranda, Miranda, Miranda!”

I'll forgive Catlin for apparently forgetting that Robert Reed was a Shakespearean-trained actor who was constantly complaining to Sherwood Schwartz and the show runners about the mediocre quality of the scripts he was given, but to forget that the title of the iconic Friday-night staple of the early 1970s was "The Brady Bunch," not "The Brady Brunch," begs for less leniency.

Of course, maybe the reference to "brunch" is a Freudian slip about Robert Reed's being gay.

Muslim Redundancy

Redundancy

Even the Old Gray Lady, the New York Times itself, is not immune to the lack of sharp-eyed copy editors.

In its opinion section today, we find an article by Efraim Karsh headlined "Muslims Won't Play Together," about the Arab boycott of the Islamic Solidarity Games scheduled to take place in April in Iran.

About a third of the way through the article, we find these two sentences:

It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased.

Doesn't it go without saying that "incessant infighting" will be something that has "never ceased"?

Even Letters Deserve Editors

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

One of the jobs of the editor of the letters page in a newspaper is to check the facts of the letters from readers that the paper chooses to publish and correct errors, if necessary.

The letters editor of the Washington Post fell down on the job the other day. In a letter from Wes Pedersen of Chevy Chase (Maryland) about the origins of John F. Kennedy's enthusiasm for space exploration, we learn this:

In truth, Mr. Kennedy's lunar zeal was pressed upon him by his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who explained the political and public relations importance of a dramatic move that would raise Americans' morale in the wake of the surprise orbiting of the Earth by Russia's unmanned Sputnik. Earlier, as House speaker, Johnson had been the foremost advocate of funding for NASA.

Vice President Johnson may have whispered something in JFK's ear about lunar voyages, but he did not do so as Speaker of the House -- or even as former Speaker of the House.

Washington Post editors should know that LBJ served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate. He had a short term in the House of Representatives but never rose to the post of Speaker.

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."

Senator Douglas Must Be Miffed

Factual Error:

In a Washington Post Book World review of Daniel Mark Epstein's The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, Catherine Allgor writes (on page BW05):

For Mary Todd Lincoln, as for many First Ladies, the most active politicking took place in the years before her husband won the highest seat in the land. While Abraham was a senator, Mary sought patronage posts for him, wrote his letters and used her own correspondence to outline his position on slavery to Southerners.

Allgor is identified as a professor of history at the University of California at Riverside, so surely she must know that Abraham Lincoln never served as a senator.

Lincoln was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and of the U.S. House of Representatives early in his political career, and in 1858 he engaged in that famous series of debates with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas in an attempt to win election to the United States Senate -- but Lincoln lost that time, only to defeat Douglas two years later in the presidential election of 1860.

Perhaps the error is found in the book under review, and Allgor's repetition of it is an oversight. Perhaps she wrote "senator" when she meant to write "candidate."

However it found its way into Book World, however, it was up to the copy editing team at the Washington Post to check this new fact and delete it before publication.

Constitutional Fact Check

(This is cross-posted from my other blog.)

Perhaps it is understandable, if not entirely excusable, when a historian makes a factual mistake in something he writes, when the mistake deals with more recent events than those he is describing.

But one would think that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post would have fact-checkers on staff to make sure that errors do not end up in print, especially on the heavily-visited op-ed page.

In a piece published Wednesday, "Three Cheers for July Second,"Andrew Trees -- who used to teach at a tony New York private academy, Horace Mann School, until a racy roman à clef called Academy X got him in hot water -- talks about the how John Adams predicted that our big national holiday would be celebrated on July 2, the day the Continental Congress voted for independence (two days before the Declaration of Independence was subsequently approved). Trees makes this suggestion:

I propose we make July 2 a national holiday to celebrate the Founders for some of their greatest but least appreciated attributes -- their mistakes.

Irony alert: Later in his article, Trees writes about the originally proposed amendments that led to the Bill of Rights:

The Bill of Rights as we know it also is not what was initially proposed. The original first two amendments, one of which concerned the number of constituents each member of Congress had and one regarding congressmen's salaries, were never ratified by the states. What we think of today as our First Amendment freedoms were actually third on the list.

"Never ratified by the states"? Um, perhaps the first one, but not the second.

What could have been the First (or Second) Amendment eventually became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, ratified on May 7, 1992. It is the most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the one that took the longest path from proposal to ratification. It reads, according to the National Archives:

AMENDMENT XXVII

Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

Trees may have missed this development, focused as he was the "delicious, malicious stuff" (in Jonathan Yardley's words) recounted in Academy X. If he didn't learn about the 27th Amendment while writing his book, The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (could that require another irony alert?), then at least the Post's opinion pages staff should have caught the error.

Or maybe it's just one more mistake for us to celebrate on July 2.

Where Are the Copy Editors?

The newspaper business is going through cataclysmic changes. Readership is down, advertising revenues are down, newsstand sales are down. More people are getting their news from television and the Internet.

As a consequence, newsroom staffs are shrinking. The Washington Post, for instance, recently made a major buy-out offer to its employees, which led to many veteran reporters and editors choosing early retirement. The Post's longtime, low-key executive editor, Leonard Downie, has announced his own retirement, and the newspaper has a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth.

Similar -- and sometimes more drastic -- changes are taking place at other major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times.

As these seismic shifts are being felt, old-fashioned copy editing is falling through the cracks. I am finding more, and more frequent, errors in the daily newspaper than ever before -- errors that normally would be caught before publication by competent and sharp-eyed copy editors and proofreaders.

Don't get me wrong: There are few more admirable miracles than the production of a major daily newspaper. Even before -- or perhaps especially before -- the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the idea that an event could occur at noon, be discovered at 1:00 p.m., a reporter dispatched at 1:30, and a story and analysis written, edited, typeset, and printed by midnight for the early editions the next day is practically unfathomable.

Instantaneous communication -- with any blogger (myself included) able to post audio, video, photographs, and text within minutes after an event and letting the whole world know about it -- has jaundiced our opinions on the press. Reporters and editors deserve a great deal more respect than they often get.

But ...

In my other blog, Rick Sincere News and Thoughts, an eclectic mix of political and cultural commentary that has been on the web since December 2004, I every once in a while pick up on a disjointed word choice or odd sentence that does not, to be kind, serve its author well.

Sometimes I have found factual errors that should never have seen print. (For example, see my blogpost on historian Andrew Trees, who seems unaware that the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified 16 years ago.)

As these items come more frequently to my attention, I want to point them out and ask, "Where are the copy editors?"

Sometimes these items are unintentionally (I hope) funny; sometimes they are embarrassing; sometimes they are just sad. But they need to be identified and corrected.

I have started this narrowly-focused blog to bring these errors, mistakes, and howlers to the surface. I don't intend to be picayunish. I won't, as a rule, wag my finger at simple typos (typographical errors). But wrong word choice, badly constructed sentences, and errors of fact are fair game.

I'm also interested in opening up a dialogue on the question of copy editing. Is it an art or a craft? Is it a lost art, or a lost craft? Is it still necessary in the Internet Age? (I obviously think it is.)

I learned to edit at the feet (metaphorically speaking) of Ernest W. Lefever and Carol Griffith at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the early 1980s. They not only taught me the skills involved in working with a manuscript, but also instilled in me high standards for what constitutes acceptable grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Those standards animate what will follow in this blog.

I don't intend to have any particular targets here. I suspect that the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Charlottesville Daily Progress will be the most frequently cited, simply because those are the newspapers I read in their print editions. Other publications may meet my gaze, but only if I run across an item on their web sites. I may also bring to my readers' attention the comments of others in the same vein.