Word Play: To err Is human

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, June 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: Word Play for the month of June, inspired by a slip-up in last month’s edition. Here’s George Grant.

GEORGE GRANT We live in a fallen world. All is awry. We are all prone to foibles, blunders, glitches, missteps, slip-ups, gaffes, and bloopers—even the most fastidious of us. Mistakes are our common lot. As Alexander Pope famously declared, “To err is human.”

Newspapers have long been plagued by misprints. Ian Mayes, a journalist for the London Guardian, quipped, “If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.” As if to prove his point, his own “Corrections and Clarifications” column in the paper misspelled “misspelled,” not once, but twice! A few weeks later “typographical error” was also misspelled. The paper published a recipe for spaghetti with fennel, and rosemary but failed to include any spaghetti, fennel, or rosemary. On another occasion it offered an advice column for those suffering from “Irritable Bowl Syndrome.” It once reviewed a new production of “The Taming of the Screw.” On another occasion Mayes confessed, in his “Corrections” column, “The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than a sudden onset of accuracy.”

Of course, such typos are not limited to newspapers. Veteran broadcaster Harry von Zell once referred to the then president as “Hoobert Heever.” He immediately tried to correct himself saying “Humbert Hevor.” Thoroughly flustered and tongue tied, from there it just kept getting worse.

A 1631 edition of the King James Version Bible inadvertently left the word “not” out of the 7th Commandment, thus printing, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” In 1653 another printing promised that “the unrighteous will inherit the kingdom of heaven,” and a 1702 edition had King David complaining of “persecution by printers,” rather than “persecution by princes.”

NASA’s Mariner 1 space probe had a single errant symbol in its guidance code. The software glitch scuttled the entire mission. Science writer Arthur C. Clarke called it “The most expensive hyphen in history.”

And have you ever noticed the typo in the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital? On the north interior wall of the chamber the president’s second inaugural speech is carved into the limestone. But the word “future” was engraved as “euture,” with an “e” instead of an “f.” The flub was eventually covered over, but you can still see the error.

In 1870, German scientist Erich von Wolfe while measuring the iron content of spinach, misplaced a decimal point: recording 35 grams rather than 3.5 grams. The mistake was not discovered for more than half a century. As a result, an entire generation grew up thinking that spinach was an iron-rich super food—and thus was born the legend of Popeye.

Despite taking every precaution with copy editors, managing editors, and production editors, even here at The World and Everything in It, we can blunder our way into erratum and errata. Thankfully, while it is true that, “To err is human,” it is equally true that “To forgive is divine.”

I’m George Grant.

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