Homeless, Not Hopeless: Part Three

Well, I didn’t expect this news to be Part Three of the saga, but I should know by now that expectations often miss the mark.

I was just informed that the cat I introduced you to earlier this week—this Adopt-A-Less-Adoptable-Pet Week—has modified the spelling of his name to reflect the proper Spanish. Carbone is now Carbón.

As much as I’d like to honor this change, Google and I are currently battling for dominance over my blog and I am unable to alter the spelling. I’ll try again later, but at least I’ve managed to acknowledge the correction.

By the way, visit the Facebook page of Hope Springs Resort to see additional pictures of Carbón posted by hotel guests.

WordGazing: You Say “To-may-toz,” and I’ll Say…

I wasn’t looking for typos on a recent Saturday afternoon, but this banner jumped out at me.

I suppose the perpetrator could argue that the punctuation mark is a stand-in for the omitted e. To which I’d rebut, “Why not just slip the e in there? There’s plenty of space for it.”

But more than likely, the perpetrator also has trouble distinguishing its from it’s and boys from boy’s. More than likely, possessives, conjunctions, and plurals blend together with all the other foggy memories of grade school in the perpetrator’s gray matter.

Sigh.

WordGazing: George Clooney on Drinking and Spelling

Have you seen the latest Time magazine? George Clooney is asked whether he follows Twitter. He answers:

“No, because I drink in the evening and I don’t want anything that I write at midnight to end my career—‘You can kiss my ass,’ all spelled wrong.”

Don’t you just love a man who worries about his spelling?

The Kind of Day Today Is

"[Y]ou can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count."
—From The House at Pooh Corner, by A. A. Milne


[Photo: Original toys that inspired the legendary Pooh tales.]

WordGazing: It's Only A Letter

Years ago, I had a publishing client whose boss—the owner of the publishing company, no less—thought proofreaders unnecessary. As a former journalist, he believed writers should be held accountable for their writing mistakes; that is, writers shouldn't make any mistakes. Hence the reason this publisher had no staff proofreaders.

What the owner failed to consider, aside from the fact that precious few writers are perfect, were the myriad goofs and glitches that can occur over the course of production: Copy moves, falls away, gets rekeyed by designers, changes fonts—you name it, I've seen it happen.

This all came back to me this morning when I opened an old issue of ARTnews magazine. Staring at me was this ad copy:

If the world tresures it, Huntington T. Block insures it.

The company was announcing its six new staff members—most of them vice presidents, none of them proofreaders. The copy is Block's slogan and is probably on all of the company's marketing materials.

Now most of us can be forgiving and see the typo for what it is: a mistake. After all, only one little letter dropped out, and a fairly useless one, at that (Andrew Carnegie would have been proud). We can still comprehend the meaning of the sentence.

However, there will be others who take the typo as a sign of how their art might get treated by Block: carelessly. The insurer will never know how much potential business it lost from this one omission.

Clearly, details matter. I bet no one at Huntington T. Block would dare suggest that proofreaders are unnecessary.


[Black Iris II by Georgia O'Keeffe.]

Everything New Is Old: The State of Spelling

I’ve developed a habit of writing down ideas, overheard comments, interesting news, films to see, and reminders on the nearest piece of paper. I carry teensy notebooks in my pockets and have unused page-a-day calendars around the apartment for this purpose.

Today, the clumps of papers cluttering tabletops, journals, and books confronted my brief but victorious decluttering agenda. On one scrap of paper was this:

light spelled “lite” in Victorian collage album

Ah yes. I saw this at the Art Institute in an exhibition called “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.” It stood out to me because I’ve listened to so-ooo-oo many people bend my ear about the appalling influence advertising and lazy writers have had on our language, especially during the Hippie ’60s era. Yet contrary to the etymology given in dictionaries, here was a variant spelling used, with perfect penmanship, by an educated, well-read noblewoman of the Victorian era.

Another scrap of paper held this piece of a speech (“The Alphabet and Simplified Spelling”) by humorist Mark Twain:

“[S]implified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.”

He was addressing industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was a proponent of a movement to reform our spelling to match our pronunciations: “enuf” for enough, “bizness” for business. Carnegie was even willing to fund it. But Twain took him to task, calling it a piecemeal approach. He proposed, instead, an entire overhaul of our alphabet—which he believed was the source of our confounding language.

You see? Our language is ever-shifting. Some people want it to stand still, while others can hardly wait to reshape it into alignment with their own interpretations of language principles and societal needs. The “Mad Men” of mid-century America weren’t the first to play around with spelling.

Carnegie would have appreciated today’s texting/IMing culture and the practical truncation of words. He wouldn’t have had to fund the change much today; it’s happening on its own.

Spellbound: Art and Letters

What happens when visionary art meets a poor speller?

Mistakes! That's what happens. Errors for eternity.

Any time I walk into a gallery or museum and notice words on a canvas, I grow tense. What stupid homophone will have tripped up an artist this time?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a Miss Thistlebottom who complains to her local news station that the news anchor ended a sentence with a preposition. I don't redline friends' letters to me and send them back as a "teaching moment." Nor am I the kind of editor who fusses over split infinitives in a campaign speech that's supposed to sound conversational. (All true stories, unfortunately.)

But I'm friends with enough visual artists to know that, for many of them, spelling is not their strong suit. And I suspect they know this about themselves as well. So why in the world do they take chances—mingling type and visuals—without allowing a wordsmith to give the work a once-over?

Case in point: The Ad Reinhardt cartoon above was in a book I was reading recently. (Visit Hilary Pfeifer's blog for a larger version.) I intended to take time reading every little bit of it, but first I scanned it. And where do you think my eyes fell first? On the misspelled surname of Georgia O'Keeffe. I wasn't looking for it; it jumped out at me.

Maybe I'm alone in my frustration. Maybe I'm cursed with an affliction. Let's call it spellbound: to be caught and transfixed by misspelled words. (Is this usage in the OED?)

Perhaps this is a side biz for me. I'll charge a flat fee to give my editorial seal of assurance to artists that the words in their work won't embarrass them. That they've used the right word with the right meaning and the right spelling.

What do you think? Ridiculously inconsequential idea? Or entrepreneurial path off the dole?