I have a hard-won empathy for writers who make mistakes because I’ve made my share. A brief overview of My Life in Error would include misidentifying the former publisher of The Boston Globe, and miscalculating the age of my great hero, Prince Charles.
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An officious doctoral drone once chided me for misspelling Zlatni Pyasatsi (“Golden Sands”), the name of a famous-if-occasionally-overlooked Black Sea Bulgarian beach resort that I had grown used to calling by its Russian name, Zolotye Piski.
If you want to avoid mistakes, it’s best to avoid names generally, e.g., Dan Aykroyd or Edgar Allan Poe, whose names the Times has misspelled, collectively, over a hundred times. A former Globe editor used to obsess about the correct spelling of the late Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, who read the paper while summering on Martha’s Vineyard.
Inevitably, we blew it once or twice by spelling her name with an extra “e.'”
I have always had a jaundiced view of journalistic accuracy because my first paying job in journalism was fact-checking for Newsweek magazine. On occasion, “facts” proved to be pretty much whatever the Newsweek editors wanted them to be. Maybe I should have attended journalism school instead.
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Many years ago, I ascended my private Everest of Error, misspelling former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent’s name —“Faye,” omigod. Then, in the ensuing correction, I called him the “late” baseball commissioner, prompting yet another published climb-down.
Vincent, who read the Globe for its excellent baseball coverage, could not have been more gracious when I contacted him to apologize. “That’s why pencils have erasers,” he said.
Most books contain a few errors, and it’s always hard to figure out how they got there, given that dozens of editors and subeditors graze over the text. A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, “Eugene Onegin” (I know, I know), and a mistake crept in.
A professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a “theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems,” according to Wikipedia, alerted me to my mistake:
“In your description of the masculine and feminine rhymes on page 73, I believe you have an extra ‘m’: it should be fmfmffmmfmmfmm, rather than fmfmffmmmfmmfmm.”
Darned if he wasn’t right! I sincerely promised to include the correction in the paperback edition, tentatively scheduled for publication in the year Never.
Back in the dawn of time — 1996, to be accurate — I wrote an article for Slate magazine that misplaced the US-Canadian border at the 48th instead of the 49th parallel. Slate was one of the very rare online magazines at the time, so I helpfully suggested that we rearrange a few pixels, change “48” to “49,” and no one would be the wiser.
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But the then-editor, Michael Kinsley, saw a chance to make Internet history. We will publish the first-ever online correction, he declared. Naturally, I was honored to take my place in this hastily convened digital Hall of Shame.
The article is still easy to find, but the first-of-its-kind correction has sunk under the shifting sands of time. The error remains in the text. If only they had listened to me. But that is the story of my life.
Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.
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February 03, 2020 at 03:00PM
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Often in error, never in doubt - The Boston Globe
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