BS: The Importance of Proof Reading

Subject: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Rapparee
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 05:23 PM

Oops. And no, this is NOT a political comment!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A House Republican bill is designed to freeze major government regulations until the unemployment rate reaches 6 percent or below. An error in drafting the bill, however, turns that goal upside down.

The bill debated Wednesday says the freeze should stay on until the employment rate equals 6 percent or less. That means there would be a freeze until the unemployment rate reached 94 percent.

The mistake was pointed out by Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who opposes the bill. Chairman Darrell Issa of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the bill's chief supporter, said the mistake was made by professional staff without any partisan motive.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 05:43 PM

Ah yes - the importance of proof reading ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18971686

London 2012: Westfield Arabic banners 'incoherent'

Westfield Stratford is displaying huge banners welcoming visitors from all over the world

A London shopping centre has created Arabic signs that are "completely incoherent" to speakers of the language, a cultural organisation said.

Apparently the printers used the wrong font set.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Janie
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 07:53 PM

Back in 1974 there was a huge and sometimes violent controversy in Kanawha Co., West Virginia over public school text and library books. At the center of the controversy was an ultra Christian Conservative school board member by the name of Alice Moore. Alice had campaigned and won on her opposition to sex education. The day after a large public meeting about the issue, the front page headline of the Charleston Gazette read, "Alice Moore Attends Pubic Meeting."

The paper swears it was a typo.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Greg F.
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 08:13 PM

I don't think its a mistake at all, since the TeaPublicans don't want and have never wanted any government regulations whatsoever.

Issa's bill was probably meant exactly as written.

And that's not a partisan statement, but a description if reality.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,999
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 08:54 PM

Gotta love it!

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Joe_F
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 09:11 PM

The worst typo that I have intercepted in my career as a copyeditor was in a paper on mathematical modeling of the spread of AIDS. It referred to "viral counts", except that I had to supply the o.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Bobert
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 09:33 PM

Purdy messed up when a typo sets back the entire nation and no one can fix it... Sad commentary on just how messed up the Republicans have made our Congress...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Rapparee
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 09:37 PM

It probably wouldn't have been quite so embarrassing if a Democrat hadn't spotted it first.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Janie
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 09:51 PM

LOL!

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Bobert
Date: 25 Jul 12 - 10:05 PM

Yeah, Rap, but once the Dem made the mistake the Repubs decided,"WTF, lets pile on"...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 03:14 AM

sometime back in the late 90s the Govt Agency I worked for removed the Publishing Section as everyone can do their own desktop publishing.

First realisation that this could be a mistake was a call from a concerned member of the public, a retired former Prime Minister (top politician in Oz), who courteously informed us that there were a few mistakes in our flagship publication.

Person who updated it didn't change the dates on some page templates, which meant the current year's data appeared under the previous year.

oops, fortunately he was not the type to ring the shock jocks or contact the gutter press.

sandra

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: dick greenhaus
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 12:16 PM

Bac, when I was an engineer, someone wrote a report on The Rheology of Polypropylene Compounds to be circulated to upper technical management. No problem until a secretary corrected all the "rheologies" to "theologies".

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 12:28 PM

A related story, tho perhaps not strictly relevant. I had a well-meaning but not enirely tuned-in colleague teaching English, the department of which I was head, in a secondary school in 1963, who, in a pupils' essay on her favourite music, corrected 'Beatles' to 'Beetles' at every occurrence!

~M~

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Mo the caller
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 03:17 PM

Ah, teachers who know less than the pupil whose work they are correcting.

Even more off topic - by son was taught 'General Science' by a biologist.
His exam paper asked him
Q1 to draw circuit diagram showing 1 bulb connected to a battery
Q2 ditto 2 bulbs connected to a battery.
The next question asked how bright the second bulbs would be compared to the first.

She 'let him have' a mark for the Q2, even through it wasn't the diagram on her crib sheet. But she marked his next answer wrong and complained to us at parents evening that he hadn't accepted it. (He knew the difference between bulbs in series and bulbs in parallel, even if she didn't)

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Gurney
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 05:05 PM

Er, proofreading. One word.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 05:18 PM

Not proof-reding? I plead guilty. I have posted more than my share of material that I wish I had proofed.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 05:26 PM

"oops, fortunately he was not the type to ring the shock jocks or contact the gutter press."

What was fortunate about that?

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Rapparee
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 05:59 PM

One other person caught that (deliberate) error; he mentioned it in a PM.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Joe_F
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 06:24 PM

Dick Greenhaus: That is a grave danger when dealing with MSs in a specialty that is not your own. At The Physical Review we once had a new secretary who thought that "positron" was an obvious typo for "position"; and I myself once *almost* corrected "planform" to "platform". If innocent of physics, you may congratulate yourself on having learned that a photon is not a proton, and then further discover that "phonon" is also a word, and may even occur in the same MS! Fortunately, these days Google will always provide a definitive answer to the question "Is this for real?", provided you have the wit to ask it.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 06:49 PM

But Google won't tell you whether a particular occurrence of a word like phonon is a case of an unusual word being used, a neologism, or a typo.

For exampe, if someone writes about the Brutish Empire is that a typo or a political comment?

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: HuwG
Date: 26 Jul 12 - 09:21 PM

Legend has it that the Guardian, a UK newspaper famous for its typos, once announced that their Night Poof Reader had retired.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 12:33 AM

May not have been a typo.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 12:44 AM

Once saw 'a string of polop-
onies'. In a newsp-
aper. It was most disco-
ncerting.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: YorkshireYankee
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 12:26 PM

Along very similar lines:

"The North Korean women's team walked off after a video introducing their players showed the South Korean flag. They later returned to play the match."

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: TheSnail
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 01:12 PM

A local newspaper did a feature on a couple of newly weds. I think that what the young man may have actually said was "She's the best luck I ever had." but that isn't what got reported.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 04:19 PM

Very recent:


Twitter Crashed

"…at least according to Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter's vice present of engineering …"

At times I may have wished for a nice "vice present" but of course I'd want one that's in good taste. So far, though, nothing in my mail.

John

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: JennieG
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 06:16 PM

Way back in the days when I was young and slender and had just moved from the Small Smoke to the Big Smoke I worked for a well-known international tyre company. I was asked to type a letter, which I duly did. It was checked by me, and by my boss, and by his boss, and by the Big Boss....and it still went off to Akron, Ohio, with one sentence mentioning the "Christmas shitdown" instead of "Christmas shutdown".

I was told it caused great merriment in Akron, Ohio.

Cheers
JennieG

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: HuwG
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 07:37 PM

Someone I once knew worked for the rump of the National Coal Board. Just in time, she spotted a letter which was to be sent to the unfortunate widow of a minor, which stated that her concessionary coal allowance was to be reduced to so many tons, "per anum".

Aren't spell checkers wonderful?

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: HuwG
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 07:38 PM

Ack! ... widow of a MINER. Slap my hand someone!

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,999
Date: 27 Jul 12 - 07:52 PM

Not eye, HuwG.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 01:02 PM

In an account of the UK's opening ceremonies this morning there was this sentence: "The United Kingdom can no longer fool itself that it is not one of the world's most important nations but could take comfort in still being able to welcome the world to its doorstep and put on one heck of a show in the process."

I *think* it is saying that the UK has to accept that it is not currently one of the world's "most important nations" but there is a garble in there someplace.


http://sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics--danny-boyle-s-opening-ceremony-starts-london-games-in-the-most-perfect--and-most-british--way.html

Hmmmm. It won't accept the link.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Bat Goddess
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 03:32 PM

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Several above mentioned reminded me of the weather forecast in the upper right corner of a newspaper: "Shitting winds."

Back when I worked in layout for the Assabet Valley Beacon, the conservative publisher (this was early 1970s) ran the column "Know Your Enemy" by Arthur Elbthal. Arthur Elbthal saw Communists behind every blade of grass. At the end of each weekly column was the exhortation, "Students, Teachers. Save these columns and put them in your scrapbook." Well, one week there was a typo in the last 'graph, the initial letter in "scrapbook" was left out. I KNOW the proofreader saw it and chose to do nothing. So did everyone else in the back shop. It really seemed more appropriate.

Linn

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: Joe_F
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 06:16 PM

McGrath: Of course, *one* Google retrieval is seldom conclusive. You have to poke around -- and even so, it may be prudent to query the author.

*

Folklore in Britain has it that once, in the 19th century, in reporting a dedication ceremony, the Guardian (or maybe it was the Times) printed "Her Majesty cut the ribbon and pissed over the bridge". I dare say she was not amused.

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 06:20 PM

Some decades ago, a new telephone book was issued by the Bell System in Wichita Kansas.

The phone people were then running ads about "Let Your Fingers Do The Walking (Through the Yellow Pages)" intended to promote the idea that you could find any business you wanted in the Yellow Pages.

A "variant" on the theme, that was "innocently" but prominently placed on the first page for "Massage Parlors" (a new thing in Wichita then) said "Imagine 20,000 Walking Fingers" to entice advertisers to place their ads in the Yellow Pages.

While the three or four of us who noticed thought it was brilliant, rumors are that the 'phone people were not amused, and that particular ad did not seem to appear anywhere in the next issue of the Yellow Pages.

John

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,Frug
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 07:59 PM

Well remember an article in the Birmingham (UK)Evening Mail in the early seventies. The article dealt with the prospective publishing of a bible in the Black Country dialect.The report made much of the meticulous proofreading and editing that had to be done in order to ensure that the interpretation did justice to both the source document and to the accurate application of the dialect and its nuances. Apparently a team were involved checking each others work......Unfortunately the article in the paper had 17 spelling mistakes, numerous errors of syntax and the last 4 lines were printed upside down.

Deep Joy.

Frank

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Jul 12 - 11:35 PM

"We apolgise for saying that Inspector Smith is a defective in the police force. We meant of course that he is a detective in the police farce."

Traditonal???

Subject: RE: BS: The Importance of Proof Reading
From: GUEST,999
Date: 29 Jul 12 - 03:39 AM

"The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the
brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other
functions. The hypothalamus controls the "Four F's": 1.
fighting, 2. fleeing, 3.feeding and 4. mating.
- Psychology professor in neuropsychology intro course"

The above is from

http://cfcl.com/vlb/Cuute/Quotes/quotes2.txt

The one you mention is the third down.