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Armand D'Angour's avatar

I always enjoyed the mistyped version of Bulwer-Lytton's ringing phrase 'The pen is mightier than the sword', after the printer ran the second and third words together.

And one of my favourite stories about an editor's error is the last line of Nabokov's short story 'Bend Sinister', which to his annoyance was turned from "A good night for mothing" into "A good night for nothing". What you might call the mother of all misreadings.

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Pauline McKelvey's avatar

Miller's Book Review, "Typos in James Joyce") I can't help editing and proofing as I read anything and everything. It seems to be a mental tic with me. Advanced education in Latin, English and linguistics studies may be the cause. Hence in a long reading history I've (reluctantly) had to track (inevitable) evolutionary changes in the denotations of words. There's one of my least favourites in this piece - "honing in". Originally, "homing in". To hone: to sharpen a tool. To home in: to focus more closely on as target. Well, it's too late now to salvage that particular word. Thus a little more of the linguistic precision I treasure declines to fuzziness in everyday usage. (cf use of "to beg the question" when "to raise the question" is intended - very fuzzy).

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