Slightly Fawlty

Woe betide the editor who moves the crossword: this is an axiom you will hear repeated in the corridors of power at every British newspaper. Decades ago, the Tribune reprinted the entire leaked text of a speech by Khrushchev denouncing Stalinism; as well as being one of the most highbrow scoops in history, it also took up literally half the paper, displacing ads and other stories left and right. We asked the Tribune’s current editor whether he would consider doing the same today. He responded: “Can you imagine what the readers would say? ‘Where’s the quick crossword?'”

It is also a tense moment if there’s ever a mistake in a crossword clue, and I cringe in sympathy every time one appears in the corrections column. Puzzlers are a vocal and demanding clientele. But when this one appeared last week, I honestly couldn’t work out what was wrong:

Did you get the answer? I did, or I thought I did: the same for both clues. But do you see the reason for the correction? I could only assume it must have been a “tone” thing. Some objection to invoking Mrs Fawlty because of the resonance of Basil’s “yes, dear” disparagements? An unpalatable resonance of 70s sexism as entertainment? But no, it’s more simple and practical than that. It’s because, even though they derive from the same word, Sybil, as in Fawlty or Thorndike, is spelled Sybil, and sibyl, as in female Roman oracle, is spelled sibyl. The problem isn’t political correctness: it’s because spelling 18 across as the name makes it impossible to get 14 down (“Disgusting” (4 letters); answer: “icky”).

Sibyl, then, joins the (I like to think short) list of words I’m not quite sure how to spell. Bill Bryson tells the story that he got his job on the Times subs’ desk in London by correctly betting his interviewer that he was the only one in the building who could confidently spell “Cincinnati”. At one time, I couldn’t spell it either, but I’m there now, after diligent memorisation (one n, two n’s, one t). I can hope to do better in future this time too, if not actually prophesy it.

Also, googling round the subject seems to suggest that puzzle errors are not as rare as one might suppose. In 2006, the high-profile crossword editor of the New York Times, Will Shortz, published a list of all the mistakes that had appeared on his watch to that point (he started in 1993 and is still in the job today). Some of them are simple factual errors, but some of them are just the kind of semi-concealed mistakes that any sub-editor would be proud to spot. These two are my favourites:

Full list here. (I also enjoyed the tubular/cylindrical nit-pick, but that clue about the Uzi would be impossibly vague even if it were correct.)

I’m a believer

Don’t you think it looks just like them? What, you don’t?

In an embarrassing incident in the Tribune’s news section recently, this picture was sent through by the picture desk to illustrate a story about Monkees memorabilia, went to the sub, who didn’t notice anything wrong, then into revise for me, who didn’t notice anything wrong, then to the production editor and duty editor, who didn’t notice anything wrong, then to the newsstand, whereupon almost everybody immediately pointed out that – yes – those aren’t actually the Monkees.

This always happens on large pictures on page three, doesn’t it? Never to little ones in the Nibs. Anyway, these are the four lead actors in Daydream Believer: The Monkees Story, a now little-seen and modestly rated biopic that came out in 2000.

I can’t even claim to have not looked at the picture. I was totally fooled by Davy Jones (George Stanchev), thought Michael Nesmith (Jeff Geddis)’s body language looked convincing, then stared at LB Fisher on the right of the group and thought “wow, Peter Tork looks young”. Not a trace of doubt in my mind. (In my defence, even Variety, while not very taken with the film, was reportedly impressed with the “close replicas of the original Davy, Mike, Micky and Peter”.)

Admittedly, once the inquest has begun, you immediately notice that Dolenz (Aaron Lohr) is perhaps a little less of a lookalike than the others. Also, there’s a distinctly modern-looking car in the background of the picture. Also, if you’re going to get seriously forensic about it, that shop in the background appears to be a branch of the convenience chain Rabba, which operates almost entirely in Ontario. (Although no reason, I guess, why the “prefab four” – as I discover they were wittily known – shouldn’t have been in Canada in the 1960s).

The BBC once broadcast footage of Bob Dylan that turned out to be of a Bob Dylan impersonator. I used to think that might have been because the person who chose the footage was one or even two generations younger than the fans who would notice. But I watched The Monkees myself when I was growing up, for heaven’s sake. All together now, as this blog has said many times, not least to itself: captions have a shorter path into print than any other component on a page.

All sorts of things can go wrong. The agency caption might be ambiguous. The agency caption might be wrong. The agency caption might be right, but nobody has read it closely enough. The revise sub is probably the last person who will read it closely before the readers do. So when you’re revising them, you can’t just be a believer. You’ve got to see their faces.

Pity and error

The Tribune has been running a headline competition in recent months, and with the self-effacing reticence that characterises our profession, I have been showing off shamelessly trying to win it. (Not entirely successfully: because you have to be nominated by your peers to get in, not all one’s efforts bear fruit. On one story about enfant terrible Jake Chapman’s first solo art exhibition without his sibling Dinos, I wrote the kicker “Art brother, where are you?” and sat back in proud expectation, only for it to pass through the revise queue without comment and vanish from sight.)

You would think such competitions would be the pinnacle of a sub-editor’s career – that success would be like winning an intra-office Oscar. But of course they aren’t: copy-editors are not naturally born to triumph. The yardstick that really measures our lives is a much more negative and sobering one: the corrections column.

Perhaps there are some of us who never feel the need to look at them, or read the daily email of shame from the readers’ editor, but on the Tribune’s business desk, the Production Editor and I are riveted to the corrections. They appear on our Visual Planner software on Friday afternoons in the Comment section, at which point work fairly soon stops and we click to view. Even before calling up the preview, you can see on the little page thumbnail how many corrections there are from the size of the box: just a few inches deep, with a reader’s letter underneath? Phew: not too many this week. Filling the whole depth of the column? Uh-oh.

Then we begin reading, nervous of seeing a subject or headline we recognise. “In our recipe for sourdough batons…” Nope. “Mussorgsky did not, as we stated last week…” Nope: Review section. “In our story on British technology startups …” Oh shit. Crushed again by a misconverted currency or even a reporter’s error that we could have discovered with a little more effort, we confess to each other our sins.

My own career low point occurred when an entire corrections columns ended up being filled with errors perpetrated in a piece I had edited. Written by a famously bohemian correspondent in New York about former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, it arrived from the desk very late and full of vaguenesses, writerly flourishes and unrebutted hearsay. Foolishly, given the hour, I thought to myself “I can save it!” and tried to fudge or cut as much as possible of the dubious stuff so as not to miss deadline. (MEMO: Never do this. No matter how late it is, if a piece is obviously undercooked and substandard, send it back and have a row with the desk. You can’t “save it”.) Brown rightly complained and it emerged that, in the chaos, I had even contrived to miscalculate her age.

None of our anxiety about corrections is relieved by the emerging phenomenon of what we might call Readers’ Editing as Performance. This blog has fulminated before about corrections columns that have fun picking apart the editorial cartoon or making erudite jokes about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s all great fun for the people who haven’t made the mistake: and when it isn’t really a mistake at all, even those jokey “corrections” still rankle. That’s why, despite the cock-up being as good as this one – because, you know, the irony – you can’t help feeling a pang for the person who missed it.

(h/t Joe McNally at Horny Handed Subs of Toil)

Zeroes and ones, part 6C (43F)

Journalism and maths – the adventure continues:

Although in fact, here the issue is not really numeracy: it’s a more abstract one of conceptualisation – confusing a temperature of 2.5C with a difference in temperature of 2.5C. A sum has been calculated correctly; it’s just not the appropriate sum. (If global temperatures rise by 36F, even air conditioning isn’t going to help.)

And I’m afraid, at the Tribune, this has happened quite often:

It’s not clear why we struggle with temperature like this when we navigate other conversions successfully and, as has been said elsewhere, sub-editors are capable of making much finer distinctions than this when it comes to language. I think it may have something to do with the fact that the zeroes on the two scales are so far apart and signify different things (whereas, for example, 0 mph and 0 kph signify the same thing, and the scales diverge after starting at a common point).

The classic formula for converting an actual temperature in celsius to fahrenheit is

(<temp in C> x 1.8) + 32 = <temp in F>

and it’s that addition of the constant, the 32, that causes the trouble when you are trying to calculate a difference in temperature. If you subtract 32 from all the erring totals (where given) in the corrections above, you get the right answer (or close to it, given some of the original fahrenheit totals have been rounded). So the correct C to F conversion for a difference in temperature is simply

<temp difference in C> x 1.8 = <temp difference in F>

and similarly the other way, for a difference in temperature:

<temp difference in F> x 0.5555 = <temp difference in C>

In such a critical decade for climate change policy, we may find ourselves needing to do these sums more and more often.

With thanks to the Tribune’s chief revise sub for spotting this one – a man who has seen too many improbable-looking pound-to-yen conversions (really, that many zeroes?) to let any figure in parentheses pass unscrutinised.

Culture clashes

Oh for goodness’ sake!

I’m sick and tired of these basic errors about Diphilus of Siphnus slipping through. (Diphilus of Siphnus? You know, the Cycladean physician of the third century BC, notable chiefly for being quoted in the writings of Athenaeus of Naucratis).

As this blog has previously observed, if you’re not sure whether you’re reading a broadsheet or a tabloid, a correction like this will tell you. In this case, the distinction is even more obvious when you read the footnote in the context of the paragraph that precedes it:

Only a broadsheet – perhaps only the Tribune – could manage to mention Diphilus of Siphnus in a tart recipe.*

Indeed, the arts and lifestyle pages always seem to bring out the best in a broadsheet corrections column. Away from the legal deletions and mis-spelt names of the news section, the patient erudition that is the hallmark of the readers’ editor can shine through:

At last someone in the building has got a grip on the Queen Mary’s Marriage Act (passed 1554; not repealed, presumably out of an abundance of caution, until 1863).

And along with that historical discernment comes a talent for diplomacy, born of years of placation and mediation between the opinionated. For instance, why say “due to an editing error” when you can signal culpability as gracefully as this?

“Restore” – smoothly done. (You can imagine a puce-faced music critic bellowing down the phone: “Do you think I don’t know the difference??”).

Elsewhere in this elegant intellectual landscape is the cryptic crossword. As these are an almost exclusively broadsheet phenomenon, readers’ editors in the quality press are alone in being required to tackle the rarefied mistakes they throw up:

Very disappointing for all concerned, especially the setter; whereas 9pm is very much in the heart of TV primetime, 11pm is not. It still works as a clue, but you know – it’s not as clever.

It’s only when popular culture – alas – intrudes into the arts section that the spell can be broken. Let’s hope nothing goes wrong when we review that notoriously scabrous animation about foul-mouthed Coloradan schoolchildren:

Oh dear: television always spoils things. Perhaps we’ll have done better with a more middlebrow show about one of America’s founding fathers?

Oh dear.

*Actually, on further review, doesn’t the maths in this correction seem a little odd? If the error is a simple question of confusing the third century AD with the third century BC, how is it that Pliny’s writings can be one century later in the first instance, then three centuries later when corrected? I think there’s a word missing: it should probably read “… three centuries later, not one century earlier.“

More anon

This blog has always had an eye for an odd correction, and this one certainly seems a bit odd:

As we were discussing last time, social media, and the anonymity it affords, is starting to have a noticeable influence on the tone of traditional journalism. One aspect of this is that news is starting to sound slightly less serious, as substantial stories are sourced from revelations published by Twitter users with silly names. But in another respect, the prevalence of pseudonyms on web platforms – including, in most cases, news organisations’ own sites – means that news is also becoming more profoundly anonymous.

Of course, this is hardly a new concept for journalism: some of the biggest stories ever broken have relied on unidentified informants, from Deep Throat to the person who sold MPs’ expenses data to the Telegraph. But in cases like those, although the reader did not know who the source was, the reporter did: and the organisation always had some opportunity to weigh up its informant’s bona fides. In the old days, anonymous sourcing worked because of an implicit assurance offered by the newspaper: we cannot name this person, but you can trust them because we trust them.

The crucial difference between then and now is that, in the case of an online commenter or social media user, it is not always possible to offer that assurance. Indeed, it is likely in many cases that nobody in the news organisation – not the journalists, and probably not even the website administrator – really knows who they’re dealing with. Typically, to log in to a newspaper website and make a comment, you need only give a name (not necessarily your own), an email address (not necessarily one that identifies you), and a date of birth, which hardly narrows things down. Everything you need to join the debate can be arranged from scratch in five minutes without ever making a personal revelation. This is no vox pop conducted on the street, when a reporter stops you and asks you how to spell your name. In this new, deeper anonymity, whether below the line or on social media, your identity is well protected even from the journalist who is quoting you.

Of course, this article was only the Guardian’s “Comments of the Day” roundup, not a major investigation. And of course, many arguments have been advanced about the benefits of anonymity in online forums – the speech tends to be freer and the focus stays for longer on the ideas, rather than the people propounding them. And of course, it’s not factually correct to say LearningIsLife said something when he or she didn’t. But still, the sense of strangeness doesn’t entirely dissipate.

Sometimes, assigning the wrong quotation to the wrong person does make a big difference to understanding, as in this example:

But the correction of attribution between upwthitimustput and LearningIsLife is something that could only really matter to the contributors, not the readers. The audience can hardly be any the wiser as to the authority of the comment, or more informed about its antecedents, if both the contributors concerned are anonymous. And it’s even slightly difficult to understand what’s in it for the commenters themselves: if you’ve opted for anonymity, what does it matter if someone gets your alias wrong?

The one thing you notice

This armchair-continuity-expert thing is getting addictive. Moving on from The Crown to Netflix’s excellent Manhunt:Unabomber – the birth of forensic linguistics in eight parts, featuring Paul Bettany in a beard, Sam Worthington in a suit and Chris Noth in giant ’90s spectacles – the following subtitle screen appears:

Like the costumes and the hairstyles, it all seems redolently in-period. That’s the old San Francisco airport control tower, not the new one that was opened in 2016. The 747 on the right looks convincingly retro in Air China’s old-fashioned livery.  But what about that plane on the left?

The lettering says “United”, but the logo on the tail, an outline globe over a blue background, is the mark of Continental Airlines – or it was, until United and Continental merged and decided, unusually, to adopt United’s name but use Continental’s livery on all its planes from then on. That merger took place in 2010: which means that this pleasingly period-looking footage cannot be more than eight years old.

How did I notice that? Just by chance. As a frequent flyer to the US, I eagerly hoard my airmiles. The obvious way to do that is by always flying with the same airline: that way, the free flights and upgrades come quicker than they would if you were slowly accumulating credit with multiple carriers. The airline I flew with repeatedly over the years was Continental: so I heard about the merger in customer emails, saw the name change on the website, nervously logged on to United’s loyalty programme to check that my airmiles had been transferred.

I had no idea that San Francisco had built a new control tower: I haven’t been there for years. I didn’t know that Air China was painting its planes to look like that well into the 2010s: I discovered those facts on Google. Now that I look into it, I’m not sure that the flowery logo on the 747’s tail is correct for the period either, or that that model of United Airbus was even around in ’95. But all this would have been a closed book to me before. I’m not an expert on civil aviation: the logo on the tailplane was the one thing I noticed.

And editing can be alarmingly like this as well. Internal inconsistencies in copy – variant spellings, bad maths, impossible chronologies – are obvious from the text. Names, dates and places can all easily be checked with other sources. But even with the highest levels of professionalism and diligence, some errors will only be spotted because you happens to know something.

Sometimes, it would need a baby-boomer editor to tell the difference between Bob Dylan and a Bob Dylan impersonator before broadcasting footage of the latter on the BBC. Sometimes, it would need a Gen-Xer to know where Luke Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenobi first met (hint: not in the cantina). These are the kind of facts that have to be known, rather than checked: there is scarcely time in a daily news routine to compare photographs of musical pioneers or rewatch Star Wars, just in case.

And sometimes, you might need a youngster – someone who understands that users change their names on Twitter for all sorts of reasons – in order not to trip over something like this:

The artist Cowabunga

If you’re not sure if you’re reading a broadsheet or a tabloid, check the corrections column. If you see a correction like this, you’re reading a broadsheet:

We confused the endings of two Bresson films in the article above when we said that the donkey hero of Au Hasard Balthazar died to the accompaniment of Monteverdi. The soundtrack to Mouchette’s suicide in the film of that name is Monteverdi, while Balthazar dies to the accompaniment of a Schubert piano sonata. This error has been corrected.

This is mother lode for a broadsheet readers’ editor: French directors, baroque composers, fine distinctions.  It can’t always be that way: too often, this level of expertise is lost in the quotidian struggle to correct homophones and pacify libelled entrepreneurs. But when there’s the slightest glimpse of home ground – a classical reference twinkling in the morass – that unique combination of erudition and patience comes to the fore:

In a feature about the return of the TV series Robot Wars, we said the first season “featured … robots with names such as Killertron and Recylopse”. The correct spelling of the latter is Recyclopse, being a play on the facts that the robot was made almost entirely of recycled material and featured one large eye, like the Greek mythical giant Cyclops

And you need patience, because some people’s grasp of 15th century art just makes you roll your eyes:

A film review on Friday about “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” referred incorrectly to the turtles’ names. Three turtles are named for Renaissance artists whose major works included paintings, not four. (Donatello was a sculptor.)

Prescriptivnik

For a moment, I wasn’t entirely clear what was being corrected here:

Was this going to be a discussion about “refusenik”? In fact, it soon becomes clear that it isn’t: the quote is merely provided as context to explain why the non-standard noun “copyrighters” has become confused with “copywriters”. But perhaps we do need to talk about “refusenik”; because current usage is moving it rapidly away from what it used to mean.

“-nik”, (“-ник”), as imported from Russian and added to the end of English words, has become a gloriously compact morpheme for creating agent nouns (as well as a way of adding an implied hint or criticism about the subject’s politics): beatnik, peacenik, no-goodnik. But it’s so compact that it actually leaves the precise relationship between the noun and the agent unclear. A beatnik is someone enraptured by the Beat movement; a peacenik is a proud pacifist. Similarly, a “refusenik” is now someone who chooses to boycott something as a protest. But historically, the word meant something very different.

The original term, “отказник” (“otkaznik”), was applied to minorities in Cold War Russia – often Soviet Jews – who were being denied permission to leave the USSR and emigrate (in the Soviet Jews’ case, to Israel; in the case of other minorities, to join diasporas or seek asylum on religious grounds). The policy, which prompted an international human rights dispute, came to a head for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s before bans were lifted for a period. So the original refuseniks were not people who had refused to do something; they were people to whom something had been refused; would-be refugees who were being prevented from travelling to any other country. They were victims of refusal, not proponents of it.

In these post-Soviet days, that usage is rarely heard. Many of the major dictionaries still record it, for example, Oxford, American Heritage and Merriam-Webster –

– but Collins already describes the original, political meaning  as the “former” definition:

and it’s clear that a word that could once have been a synonym for “detainee” is now well on the way to being a synonym for “dissident”.

Usage has radically changed the word’s meaning and laundered it, willy-nilly, of its political gravity and history. One might feel that this has not been language-change’s finest hour, although the compressed ambivalence of “-nik” as a suffix probably made some confusion inevitable. Now, as is the case with “enormity”, the new meaning of  “refusenik” has overwritten the old to such an extent that it’s no longer safe to assume the original usage will be understood.

But it can still be jarring to see the new meaning employed in text. And of course, one doesn’t have to use it; one can probably be a refusenik – I mean a dissident – about that for a while longer.

Zeroes and ones, part three

One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist is that when a howler appears in the paper, all your friends know exactly who to call. Especially when they’re highly qualified science and maths graduates, and especially when the howler in question is a pretty glaring failure to check the sums.

So when this the first paragraph appeared in an article from the US office:

Followed by this information in the third paragraph:

Followed by this handy graphic as an explainer:

It wasn’t long before this appeared on my Facebook page:

Fortunately, because they’re all highly qualified science and maths types, when the bumbling former English student has questions, they have the explanations ready to hand:

So, for future reference: any percentage increase from 0% to any higher percentage is an infinite increase; but any percentage-point increase from 0% to a higher percentage is as simple a sum as can be: <higher percentage> – 0.

Meanwhile, the web news production editor has just sent this chastening email round to all subs:

Hi

A common error has popped up again so I just wanted to remind everyone that converting differences in temperatures is different to converting actual temperatures.

For example:

A temperature of 2C is 35.6F

but …

a difference in temperature of 2C is 3.6F.

 Thank goodness my friends didn’t see that story before it was corrected.