Adventures In Pointed DVR-Pausing
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on January 11, 2011 – 8:39 PM30 Comments
The entire purpose of your flimsy-looking contraption is to strengthen the abdominals. AbdomiNals. Not one of the artistes responsible for either the ’80s-vintage illustrative graphics or the pornishly loving footage of the positively ropey-looking “after” version of the models’ stomachs noticed that the most important word in the ad is spelled incorrectly? Unbelievabe.
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Tags: Adventures In Pointed DVR-Pausing inexcusable spelling our friend English
When your abs look that good, you don’t need to know how to spell!
Hee. I see what you did there.
Thaks!
I really despair at the rising tide of typos all around. Handwritten signs are one thing — but I’m starting to see them on TV. A caption on “The Fashion Show” on Bravo (I know, I know, don’t judge) said something about “being in jeopordy.” This was not closed-captioning, which can have some hilarious misspellings — this was a subtitle added in post production. But the worst — the worst! — was in _Sum of All Fears_, the Ben Affleck movie (I know, I know, don’t judge.) There are some narration-subtitles at the beginning of the movie (what do they call those, really? like the crawl of introductory text at the beginning of _Star Wars_?); anyway, one of them said, “In 1973, Egypt launched a suprise attack against Israel.” Yes, *SUPRISE*. This was in a major studio film — NOBODY caught it? Nobody FIXED it when GLOBAL AUDIENCES viewed this film? I was nerdy enough to pause the DVR and take a picture of the TV screen. If I had a place to host it, I would link the image.
Our national broadcaster – which really, really should know better – managed to misspell “disaster” yesterday in the news bulletin about the Queensland flooding. Which is just embarrassing really.
Same here, Prof. I swear I am about two typo-ridden books away from studding a hardback with pissy Post-Its and mailing it back to its publishing company all THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE WHYEEEE DO YOU DO THIS TO MEEEE.
If I am recalling correctly, this has something to do with publishing houses doing away with proofreading positions as a cost-cutting measure and relying instead on the person who made those mistakes, the author, to proofread her own galleys? Or I’ve heard that? Maybe the voices in my head said it, I don’t know?
We have a car lot commercial running here where I live and there are words that flash on the screen along with a voice “reading” you the info and while he is saying Choose…what we are seeing is Coose. Not once but 3 times! Too Funny!
@lsn: Do I want to know how it was spelled? “Disasster” would at least be amusing to us five-year-olds…
Hope everyoe’s all right dow there.
I had to buy a textbook a couple of weeks ago, and the Amazon thumbnail of the book cover had “Librarians” spelled “Librarian’s.” The damn thing cost $100. My Facebook post about it was one of my most heavily trafficked ever, so there was an upside, since I live for that kind of attention. (No, I don’t really.) (Well, maybe a little bit.)
Luckily, when the actual book arrived, the cover was typo-free.
@Em – it would make you even madder if you, like me, were unemployed for six months last year because no one wants to hire proofreaders who would catch simple errors like that.
Years ago, my dad (who is kind of That Guy about these sorts of things) told me he read somewhere that archaeologists mark the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire by the number of typos that were chiseled into monuments. Food for thought.
As I pointed out to friends a while back, there was briefly a commercial on television for “TRON: LEGACY” that made use of a quote from a critic that included, on screen, the word “spetacuclar.”
Salon.com just popped up an ad for The King’s Speech starring “Geoffery Rush.” Sigh.
Being a graphic designer and having a few typos go to print myself I am more sypmathetic to this issue. I get people to sign off on the graphics, I tell them to “read” it, (I read it too, but it’s easy to glaze over typos and correct it in your head) and it happens more often than I would like (it has yet to be a main title or anything, just a typo in the body copy or something). Also, rushing a job or doing last-minute edits make it worse.
Proofing is an underrated job, that’s for sure.
I drive my friends and family mad with the typo-spotting. They are EVERYWHERE. It’s tragic.
There’s a Lexus dealership in my city called “Germain Lexus of ___” (they have two locations). In a recent local commercial, they had, stacked on top of one another:
Germain Lexus of ___
Germin Lexus of ___
#1: The names are stacked right on top of one another. The discrepancy is IMMEDIATELY evident to anyone with eyes. And #2: IT’S THE NAME OF YOUR COMPANY.
Publishers (the big commercial ones, anyway; academic and small presses are a different story) do still hire proofreaders, at least the two big commercial ones I’ve worked for. (Mostly freelance proofreaders, though in-house production editors and managing editors also do a fair bit of proofreading, especially on covers.) However, there are still a couple of fairly common reasons why (hideous) mistakes slip in, above and beyond sheer incompetence (which must be acknowledged; there’s really no excuse for a book I read last year that spelled the author’s name wrong on the TITLE PAGE).
1) ridiculous rush scheduling: I’ve had projects that needed to go from uncopyedited manuscript to ready-to-be-printed typeset pages in a month or less, which generally means 3-4 days tops for proofreading and virtually no chance of catching any mistakes that get made after the initial proofread;
2) truly inexplicable ghost-in-the-machine glitches creeping in at late stages in the process;
3) acquisition of files from another publisher, often in the UK or Australia, where they definitely seem to have at best a highly peculiar idea of what constitutes competent proofreading and/or copyediting.
Also, if anyone *does* want to send a book back to the publishers with a chirpy note about all its errors, I recommend said note be itself typo-free. I would estimate that of all such notes I have myself received in eleven years as a production editor, approximately 85 percent were riddled with typos or grammar gaffes *much* worse than what the writer was complaining about!
I’m currently reading a book in which the characters are monks, and often their robes and “chords” (which are used to tie the robes) are mentioned. Worse, the book has a character named Cord. I’m really hoping, because this is a sci-fi book, that “chord” is supposed to signify something else and I haven’t caught on yet.
@Georgia: if you’re reading Anathem, which I suspect you are, that’s not a typo, and it signifies a thing that Neal Stephenson made up in his head which will eventually be explained. And there will be many of such things. And you’ll probably appreciate this XKCD: http://www.xkcd.com/483/.
I read a murder mystery where twin Claudine was talking about murdered twin Claudette, and I had to re-read the exchange 3 times before I realized that at one point they just switched the names. A dead person should not be talking! The worst part of that: this was a paperback of a book that had originally been hardback. No changes you wanted to make, guys?
In another paperback I found about 10 misspellings that weren’t grammatical things, just simple typos that spellcheck could have found. Surely “later that ummer” would have been caught?
@Georgia – is that Anathem? I think that ‘chord’ is on purpose, because music as a way of running calculations is mentioned a few times in the story.
Also, the author deliberately plays with close-to-actual words the whole way through the book: ‘anathem’ ‘calca’ ‘theor’ etc.
Man, I love that book and wish Neal Stephenson’s other books weren’t quite so tiresome.
Speaking of monks…Sarah, I think about your story “Dictu” a lot. More than you can imagine. Is there more to that? Did I maybe miss something (like there was more, and I didn’t catch it; or there isn’t more and, there never was supposed to be)? I have wondered many a day, and am just at this moment reminded to ask.
So… walking home tonight past the 92nd Street Y, I saw their great big professionally printed sign promoting their gym. The tagline? “Where Real New Yorker’s Work Out.” (with a little [tm] afterward.)
And then came home to watch an episode of “Mythbusters” showing various cars being destroyed in fun ways. They ran a bunch of shots of the destroyed cars at the end with the title card “In Memorium.”
On FB, I keep a running series of typos I find. Yes, it’s an obsession.
I’ll have to go back and read what I published, and what I wrote afterwards — I’m like Shyamalan, starting these thing and not finishing them. I should finish that one, but this time I will not promise anything.
Profreader, every time I see your name, I have to remind myself, “That’s on purpose. It’s okay. Breathe.”
Jenn — that’s hilarious. Besides being a typo-freak, I’m also a professor (among other things) and a reader … so a little triple-layer pun.
It’s posts like this one that make me glad I’ve found my own people among the ‘Nation. (But what do we call the tribe? “Clan of the Comma Bore”? “People of the (Style) Book”? “Galley Slaves”? What? Besides “People Who Can Actually Read”, obvs.)
@Mimi: Yes to Anathem and the xkcd. I’m glad to hear “chord” is not a typo, ’cause it’s been driving me crazy.
“Chord” grates for me when it pops up in the phrase “vocal chord” (I suppose because people are thinking singing–>music–>chord) It’s “vocal cord” of course — but even more correct is “vocal fold”. However, I don’t expect anyone except my fellow ex-drama-school-geeks to walk around talking about someone’s vocal folds.
I wanted to comment on this one but looking back on my many many many misspellings in past posts, I’ll just shut my mouth and sit quietly in the corner.
I’ve spent the past week proofing a metric tonne of marketing-, AGM- and conference-related documents for my office, and wow, errors galore, ones that I can’t believe were made by people beyond grade school. Colossally effed-up elements were contributed by numerous people from diverse age groups, so it’s not just a few people, or “we learned REAL grammar and spelling back then”, because: apparently not.
I’ve also learned that people don’t use/believe/trust/notice their spell or grammar check squiggly lines, and while I know those are wonky (especially in Canada, because apparently we spell everything wrong, right, neighbours?), they’re at least a clue that something in the construction might be wrong, and perhaps a second look is in order. And again: apparently not.
Sometimes I despair. Other times, I just go with chocolate & a head shake.