GOOD BOOKS,
BAD MISTAKES
Even the best editors can miss a typo now and then, and that includes the folks who worked on these famous books. (Please don’t hold it agenst them—it could happin to ennyone.)
•An editor at Merriam-Webster noticed in 1939 that there was a word in the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition that had no etymology… and that nobody on staff had ever actually heard of. That word: dord, supposedly from the worlds of physics and chemistry, and meaning “density.” An internal investigation revealed that the word had been submitted for addition to the dictionary back in 1931 by Webster’s chemistry editor, Austin Patterson. He’d intended to add “D or d” to the dictionary, referring to acceptable abbreviations of density. Patterson tended to make his letters a little too close together, and another editor read “D or d” as “dord.”
•Jeni Wright’s 2007 cookbook The Pasta Bible included recipes for all kinds of Italian-inspired noodle dishes. The entry for “Spelt tagliatelle with sardines & prosciutto” was a bit confusing for home cooks. Publisher JG Press later blamed an overly aggressive automatic spellchecker for why the ingredient list included “salt and freshly ground black people.”
•William Shakespeare introduced a lot of words to the English language—eyeball, manager, and swagger, to name just a few—as well as names. “Jessica” first appears in The Merchant of Venice and “Imogen” comes from Cymbeline. But that one was a mistake. The play is based on historical events, and includes a character Shakespeare called Innogen. In the first printings of his plays—and all of them after—the “nn” in the name looked like an “m” and entered the language as Imogen.
•Spellcheckers and editors are more likely to catch misspelled words than they are to catch homonyms—words that sound alike but are spelled differently. Think “fair” vs. “fare,” or “sea” vs. “see,” or “fleas” vs. “flees.” The first two additions (sorry, editions) of Pearl S. Buck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1931 novel The Good Earth fell victim to that problem. On page 100, Buck describes a wall lined with crudely crafted huts. “It stretched out long and grey and very high, and against the base the small mat sheds clung like flees to a dog’s back.”
Lose weight and brain cells! Banging your head against a wall burns 2.5 calories a minute.
•Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could lay claim to the title of “Great American Novel,” or at least “first Great American Novel,” a best-seller and instant classic when it hit bookshelves in 1885. It’s a bit difficult to read at times, as Twain wrote large portions of the book phonetically, imitating dialects spoken in the South and Midwest. But there’s one odd use of English that was entirely unintentional. A character says, “I took the bag and ripped a hole in the bottom of it with the was.” What’s a “was”? Twain accidentally wrote “saw” backward.
•The very first Harry Potter book was published in 1997 in the UK under the title Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (It was changed to Sorcerer’s Stone for the American edition.) There’s a lot of “world building” in the book, establishing the rules and details of author J. K. Rowling’s universe of wizards and witches. When Harry first learns he’s a wizard and prepares to ship off to Hogwarts for training, he has to make a stop for magical school supplies. His list of requirements in the first edition of the book contains a mistake. It says he needs “1 wand, 1 cauldron, 1 telescope, 1 set brass scales, and 1 wand.”
•Karen Harper specializes in historical romance fiction, and strives for accuracy, which means she probably didn’t mean to refer to Chinese food appetizers in her 2010 Tudor–era novel The Queen’s Governess. When describing Kat Ashley, a lady-in-waiting awoken by criminals in the night, Harper wrote, “In the weak light of dawn, I tugged on the gown and sleeves I’d discarded like a wonton last night to fall into John’s arms.”
•Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) was the scientist and mathematician’s crowning achievement, and created the foundation of modern science. (Newton describes such important concepts as the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.) His proof of how the world literally goes ’round comes in the form of extensive mathematical equations, and, amazingly, one of his calculations was wrong. (The solution gave him “11” instead of the correct “10.5”—close, but close doesn’t count in high-level math.) More amazingly, apparently nobody noticed Newton’s error for more than 300 years. In 1987, 23-year-old University of Chicago physics student Robert Garisto figured it out.
Rebecca, a raccoon, was supposed to be served at Thanksgiving dinner at the White House in 1926…