Regret the Error

In a Feb. 22 "Slatest" item headline, Meredith Simons accidentally omitted the letter o from the word account, which resulted in an unfortunate typo. Link  Report an error

Via Talking Biz News, an embarrassing front page typo ("Mortage") from the Monday Chicago Sun-Times: Thanks, Jon!  Report an error

In the Feb. 7 Slatest, Sonia Van Gilder Cooke misidentified the Green Bay Packers as a Florida team and misspelled Pittsburgh in a headline. Link  Report an error

In the Feb. 7 "Spectator," Ron Rosenbaum originally transposed the words former and latter, inadvertently suggesting that the Allies used Hitler to defeat Stalin, rather than vice versa. Link Thanks, Hannah!  Report an error

In his final column, outgoing Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander writes that the Post … has become riddled with typos, grammatical mistakes and intolerable "small" factual errors that erode credibility. Local news coverage, once robust, has withered. The Post often trails the competition on stories. The excessive use of anonymous sources has expanded into blogs. [...]

Well, this is definitely an embarrassing front page typo: Charles Apple blogged about the error and also noted the front page correction that followed the next day: Thanks, MJ!  Report an error

The holiday season is supposed to be a time of happiness, but there has been little cheer from readers upset about a chronic Post problem: a lack of quality control. The past few years have seen a crescendo of complaints about typos, grammatical errors and minor factual mistakes. In recent weeks, a string of lapses [...]

No doubt Bill Cash MP has occasionally felt ill at some aspects of the European Union, but it is unlikely that he could be accurately described as an "ultra-Euroseptic" as he appeared in a political briefing examining rightwing politicians (Centrist politics is in vogue – but will it be all right on the right, 9 [...]

An obituary of John Bulloch, the Independent and Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent, suggested that among his qualities was an "obelisk stare". He was physically a big man but it was more a basilisk stare that he deployed when "confronted with roadblocks or recalcitrant guerillas, or naive young journalists" (Obituary, 6 December, page 34). Link  Report [...]

Tina followers went to town on a caption that appeared in early editions of Saturday's paper (Wealthy Swiss threaten to leave if their taxes are raised, 27 November, page 32). Among the examples: "I am pleased to read today that Tuna Turner may be seeking a move from the land-locked tax haven of Switzerland . [...]

In the Feedback item "Current Home Loan Bank System Works," on page 8 of the Nov. 17 issue, an editing error caused the omission of the word "not" in this sentence: "While these are worthy goals, they should not be done at the expense of the mission the banks serve so well today." Link  Report [...]

In Thursday's front page story about Betty Gusler surviving the loss of her mother and son in the flood of 1985, a quote should have read "The death of a child is not something you're supposed to go through. You should not outlive your children." The word "not" was omitted from the second sentence of [...]

Bell councilman: In the Oct. 13 Section A, a profile of Lorenzo Velez, the only Bell City Council member not charged with a crime, described Bell as "a city dominated by blue-color Mexican immigrants like himself." It should have said "blue-collar." Link  Report an error

When we said that an issue "exorcised a number of black people in the (theatre) audience" what we meant was exercised. An area "now ridden by social deprivation" should have been riven (The joke's not funny if only wealthy white people laugh, 18 September, page 30). Link Reminds me of this classic.  Report an error

Note the headline (click for larger): Thanks, Deann!  Report an error

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself. The end came quietly [...]

A very troublesome typo is in the last sentence of this screen grab (click for larger): Thanks, @PostmediaNews!  Report an error

Homophone corner, describing Rupert Murdoch: "a consummate deal maker, famous for his faints and his crafty and arguably underhand strategies" (Change the goddamn law, 6 September, page 4, Media). Link  Report an error

A headline on page 5C Thursday misspelled the word "furry" as "fury." A copy editor made the error. Wednesday's edition contained two malapropisms. A Best Bet item on page 2B about the TV show True Blood should have used the expression "exact vengeance" instead of "extract vengeance." The company that supplies the feature made the [...]

Romenesko spotted this apology from the editorial board of the Independent Florida Alligator student newspaper after they printed an unfortunate typo. From the apology: We’re sure you’ve heard about Wednesday’s front-page nightmare of a typo — and if you haven’t, we aren’t going to repeat it. Despite the overwhelming urge to pretend it never happened [...]

Peaches and plums are often used metaphorically to connote happiness and good fortune, a recipe said, giving a cricketing example: “That was an absolute peach of a ball, got him plum LBW.” The fruity pun didn’t work in this case, because the word needed is plumb (Perfect plumming, 7 August, page 44, Weekend).  Report an [...]

A CNN typo spotted by Gawker and TVNewser: Thanks, Daniel!  Report an error

An item in the July 12 News of the Weird column about police confronting beachgoers incorrectly reported what the beachgoers were doing. They were not flouting their breasts, they were flaunting them.” Thanks, Mary!  Report an error

An article about maths busking said that finding a solution to turning a waistcoat inside out while wearing handcuffs involved topography. It is more likely to involve the mathematics of topology, unless, as a reader noted, we meant that in the topography of London passersby might rush to one’s aid and assist in the struggle [...]

An article on July 13 about new research on the role of microbes in the human body misstated part of the name of a bacterium linked to skin infections in babies delivered by Caesarean section. It is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, not “multiply resistant.” Link  Report an error