18 October 2007

Booking Through Thursday: Typography

You may or may not have seen my post at Punctuality Rules Tuesday, about a book I recently bought that had the actual TITLE misspelled on the spine of the book. A glaring typographical error that really (really!) should have been caught. So, using that as a springboard, today’s question: What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?
I can’t, off the top of my head late at night, think of anything too horrible (certainly not a misspelt title!). I think most of the errors I’ve seen have been the mixing-up of homophones: ‘yolk’ and ‘yoke’, ‘allude’ and ‘elude’, ‘peak’ and ‘pique’, etc. They always annoy me, though, especially when there’s a lot of them in one book, because I always see them and wonder how anything so obvious got overlooked. Outside books, but still in the realm of published writing, a column in the Courier-Mail recently referred to a group of comedians ‘poking fun of’ the Opposition leader.

And then there’s the one I once saw in a Human Cell Biology lecture. A slide came up featuring a schematic of the digestive tract and something about the regulation of apatite. I spent several very confused moments trying to fathom why some poor person would have a white crystalline mineral in their stomach before I realised he meant the regulation of appetite. (Well, it was an 8 a.m. class!)

6 comments:

  1. Now that I've posted my answer, of course, I just thought of another error that amused me---in one book I finished reading last night a character was "raking" his brain rather than "wracking." What a painful image!

    Too many errors in one book does serve to pull me out of the story, because I'm noticing the writing rather than being buried in the events.

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  2. This meme post made me recall a lecture I attended last May. It was a seminar for Mathematics teachers and we were discussing common errors made by students.

    A slide came up showing common mistakes made by students in Mensuration.

    The thing was, instead on Mensuration, it was written Menstruation on the subject title.

    Need I say more?

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  3. "peak" and "pique" are also on my pet peeve list.

    Happy BTT!

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  4. Errors can lead to funny misunderstandings. Happy BTT.

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  5. allude and elude or peak and pique are one of those mix up I have seen....

    Happy BTT! Hope you have a good weekend ahead :)

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  6. My sister's favorite example? A "Golden Book" she'd gotten for my niece when she was little, about Poky the Puppy (or something like that). The first sentence of the book? It started "Oky the puppy...."

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Header image shows detail of A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, c. 1776