Typos and headlines
It seems to me that the web has been rife with misspellings and typos lately, even more so than usual, often but not always in professional publications of various sorts. Here are some examples, plus a couple of entertaining non-typo headlines.
- My favorite misspelling in recent weeks: two different people referring to "ad homonym" attacks in an argument in LJ.
- Quasi-relatedly, the NPR article about the newly discovered small humans called them "hominims"! (And the Sydney Morning Herald piece linked below does the same thing.) Presumably they meant hominids. . . . That discovery has been remarkably fertile ground for headlines and typos:
- Tech News World asks: "Could Hobbit-Like Creatures Still Live on Earth?" (They've since changed the headline to "Three-Foot-Tall 'Hobbit': A Living Fossil?"; either way, the connection of Homo floresiensis to hobbits, made by a variety of news agencies, amuses me, especially in conjunction with the artist's-impression illos that don't really look remotely like any description of a hobbit I've ever seen.)
- The Sydney Morning Herald article goes even further, referring to Homo floresiensis throughout as "hobbits" and using the headline "It's a small world after all." (Okay, this is weird: that URL works fine inside DEVONthink, but from Safari it takes me to a registration page.)
- The Jakarta Post, meanwhile, notes: "Archeologists divided over 'Home floresiensis'." I'm guessing that's the version you can keep around the house, as opposed to "office floresiensis" and "car floresiensis."
- The Washington Post seems like it's been particularly prone to typos lately, though perhaps that's just 'cause I've been reading more articles there lately than usual:
- A relatively uninteresting one: in the article headlined "64-Year Old American Pleads Guilty to Deserting," the following line appears: "He said he feared his hazardous duty on the tense Korean peninsula, and wanted avoid being redeployed to Vietnam." It seems to me that the word to unintentionally disappears from sentences in this kind of context more and more often these days.
- Much more entertaining is a bit from an article that's subsequently been modified. An article about the election used to include the following comment: "The largest percentage turnout in recent decades was in 1960, when about 63 percent of voters participated in an election in which John F. Kerry narrowly defeated Richard Nixon." A remarkable victory for a 16-year-old, I gotta say. Sadly, the article was revised later, and the paragraph containing that sentence appears to have been removed entirely. I wish I'd taken a screen snap.
- There's a fairly common typo that still generally amuses me whenever I see it. Latest instance (which has been corrected since publication) is from a brief Celebrity Cafe article about Tarantino's plans for his next film: "The unnamed film will stay true to the original Japanese cinematic form, complete with shaky shots, classic marital arts and even Mandarin Chinese dialogue." Ah, those classic marital arts.
- Finally, my favorite headline in recent weeks isn't a typo; I suspect it's just a case of a headline writer being unable to resist temptation. The headline, from the Casper [Wyoming] Star Tribune, goes: "Gay unseats Gentile for House seat." The article explains: "[Republican Gerald] Gay, 48, beat Rep. Liz Gentile, D-Casper, by a narrow margin Tuesday, much as he did four years ago." It's almost as good a headline as that old classic "Normal boy marries Oblong girl."
