Atticus Finch is the fictional lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. We called the book How to Kill a Mockingbird in The Quiz, page 118, Weekend, November 22. Link
Malapropism in The monks who keep coming to blows, page 3, G2, November 11: “On Sunday, brawling priests and Israeli paramilitary police careened through the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem”. We meant careered. Careen: (1) to sway or cause to sway dangerously over to one side; (2) to cause a vessel to keel over to one side, especially in order to clean or repair its bottom (Collins). 
We wrongly quoted Kaylene Johnson, who has written a biography of Sarah Palin, as saying about her: “People were disgusted that she allowed herself to be portrayed as a radical Republican.” In fact Johnson said people were disappointed, not disgusted. We described Johnson as a neighbour of Palin’s. She is a fellow resident of Wasilla but had not met Palin before writing her biography (’We feel about her the way you feel about the Queen’, page 6, G2, November 10). 
In an item headed Council forces burial of baby dead for 21 years (page 15, November 8) we misspelled the name of the baby’s father, Steve Blum, as Steve Crum. 
A good starting point for a job in confectionery would be to spell the word correctly, which we did not in an article headed So you want to work in confectionary, page 21, Work, October 25. 
We were wrong to say, in an article headlined 
In the Life, etc., section Tuesday, the headline on a story about a young woman with Down syndrome wrongly referred to people with the syndrome as patients and sufferers. No one in the story was a patient in a medical facility, and no one in the story was suffering. 
We should not have described Down’s syndrome as causing mental retardation, a phrase proscribed by our style guide (Researchers devise safer Down’s syndrome test, page 8, October 7). 
Tesco has accepted a formal offer of apology by the Guardian in relation to the reports “Tesco’s £1bn tax avoiding plan - move to the Cayman Islands” and “Every little bit helps: tax free pot of gold at end of Tesco’s rainbow” (pages 1 and 27, February 27) and a related editorial and podcast. In these articles we reported that Tesco had created an elaborate off-shore corporate structure to avoid paying up to £1bn in UK corporation tax on profits from the sale of its UK properties, and that it had already successfully avoided corporation tax on the £500m profit it made from its first two property sales. We also suggested that this corporation tax avoidance was hypocritical, having regard to Tesco’s public stance on social responsibility, and that Tesco’s response to the charge had been evasive.
In common with much of the media we regularly describe the president of Georgia as the “Harvard-educated” Mikheil Saakashvili - “a poor advertisement for a Harvard education”, a columnist called him on Wednesday (Bush rebuking Russia? Putin must be splitting his sides, page 29, August 13). He wasn’t at Harvard: his degree is from Columbia University. 
The price of broccoli: some readers have questioned the discrepancy between the picture of a piece of broccoli on page 3 yesterday (Food and fuel prices send inflation to new high as City fears interest rate increase) apparently showing a price rise of 11%, and that of another piece on page 2 of G2 (Beat rising food bills - follow the inflation-proof diet), which showed its price falling by 20%. The first piece of broccoli was there to represent price changes on vegetables overall, as monitored by the Office of National Statistics. The G2 broccoli price change was based on a shopping basket compiled by the Daily Mail - which in fact indicated a fall in price of 50%, not 20%. 
Over this weekend, we predicted yesterday, eager astronomers would be scanning the night sky in the expectation of seeing the Perseid meteor shower (How not to miss this weekend’s meteor shower, G2, page 3). Yesterday, however, eager astronomers were scanning the accompanying photograph, which was captioned “meteors lighting up the night sky”, and telling us the objects across the sky were not meteors. A wrong caption had been attached to an agency time-delay photograph of stars tracking across a night sky. 
Recidivist Guardian: despite previous corrections and/or stylebook warnings, we referred (page 11, August 1) to an accident on the road to the Sandbanks peninsular, instead of peninsula; we misspelled the former French president Mitterrand, calling him Mitterand (French politicians accused of assisting Rwandan genocide, page 15, August 6); Joint European Taurus (caption to picture with an obituary for Nicol Peacock, page 34, August 7) should have been Torus; and on August 8 (Credit crunch: live the crisis, see the movie) we again turned the financial analyst Warren Buffett Warren Buffet. Restaurateurs, a frequent Guardian casualty, became restauranters (Today’s picks, page 2, July 31). Fresher errors in recent days have included: “As a US serviceman he was in charge of martialling photographic evidence at the Nuremberg trial” (Still a contender, page 26, G2, 30 July) - that should have been marshalling; on August4 we quoted the Archbishop of Canterbury as calling for a “moratoria” on same-sex blessings and the consecration of gay clergy” - he’s more likely to have recommended “a moratorium”, or “moratoria” without the indefinite article; while the “cut-glass annunciation” of a female pony club luminary (King’s event is thrilling, not just heir-raising, page 12, Sport, August 7) is more likely to have been an enunciation. 
In a report on the Barry George case (A loner and fantasist but not a calculating killer, page 4, August 2) we mentioned a relative who we said had died after swallowing her tongue during an epileptic fit. Epilepsy Action, formerly the British Epilepsy Association, assures us that it is not physically possible to die from swallowing your tongue during an epileptic seizure. It is possible for the tongue to fall back and block the airway after the seizure has stopped. To prevent this, the person who has had the seizure should be put into the recovery position so that the tongue falls to the side. Under no circumstances should anything be put in the person’s mouth. 
In our account of an interview, conducted in English and in Japanese through a translator, with members of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (Back to the future, Film and Music, page 13, July 4), keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto was quoted in a way which may have implied that he found the presence of black people at a filming of the Soul Train TV show in Hollywood in 1980 “intimidating”. Sakamoto denies having said this, and our interviewer confirms there was nothing in their conversation that could have suggested that Sakamoto held racist views. 
Geographical aberrations: California is not the biggest US state (Schwarzenegger lays off 10,000 California workers, page 20, August 2); Alaska and Texas are bigger. The Seine estuary opens into the English Channel, not the Atlantic (Discovery of sea trout in Seine shows success of river clean-up, page 19, August 2). Zoological aberration: a rabbit is not a rodent (Quick crossword, page 32, G2, August 1) Collins dictionary defines it as one of various common gregarious burrowing leporid mammals. And a mathematical lapse: we quoted an economist at the Centre for Economic and Business Research as saying the Olympics could cost Britain up to £600,000 in lost productivity (Britons limber up for the main event - the long lunch, page 26, August 2). A fact box nearby said the cost in hundreds of thousands of pounds would be 600. That figure should have been six. 
Contrary to a statement in a column yesterday (Since when did trying to have your photograph taken constitute a threat to national security?, page 5, G2) the Metropolitan police do not require professional photographers operating in central London to hold a police permit and wear a radio-linked ID tag. The material on which this part of the column was based was a hoax. We apologise for its use. 
An article headed Lock ‘em up, in the Guide, page 17, June 14, used the example of the British film The Escapist to make the point that in contrast to American films, British films fail to convey the harshness of prison life. The author of the piece wrongly believed he had seen The Escapist; in fact he had confused it with another film. 
The caption to a photograph in G2 (Say cheese!, page 6, July 29) of the Labour politician Clement Attlee, who subsequently became prime minister, and his wife Violet on holiday in 1938, said it was “a nice touch” to have the wife at the helm. The phrase “at the helm” implied she was steering, whereas in fact, as the picture showed, she was wielding the oars, propelling the boat rather than steering it. The steering would have been entrusted to one of the women in the bow of the boat, possibly the one in the picturesque hat. 
A recent leader comment (
We misspelled and misused the word bellwether when we called Swindon a bellweather town. A bellwether is a sheep that leads the herd, usually wearing a bell (Our next prime minister?, page 4, G2, July 16). 
We misspelled the first name of the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk as Thelonius in a CD Review of Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Advance (page 10, Film& Music, July 11). We referred to a composition of Monk’s as Bemsha Monk; we meant Beshma Swing. -
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