• "T" is for "typo"

    Tim de Lisle, the deputy editor of Intelligent Life magazine, has pointed out to me that there was, until this morning (I fixed it just now), a typo in the standfirst to our Philip Pullman interview online.

    What should have been a "thought" in the first sentence lost a "t" and appeared as a "though". Nothing surprising there: typos that don't get picked up by spellcheckers have a much better survival rate than those that do.

    What surprises me now is that the piece was read by at least 45,000 people here on our site, attracted a comet's tail of comments, and yet Tim was the first to point out the typo—alerted by the author of the original piece. Was the author the first to notice it, or the first to mind?

    I assume we read less fixedly online, because the screen is harsher on our eyes (at least until our Kindles arrive); and that this helps us to skate over typos. I also guess that readers (other than authors) mind typos less online, unless mistakes are so intrusive as to destroy sense.

    I would go on to guess that readers mind less, because they're sympathetic to the greater degree of improvisation that goes with small-scale online publishing; or (my approach, I think) they are more tolerant because they know mistakes can be fixed easily at any time, now or later. In absolute terms, they matter less.

    But for whatever reason, context has a huge effect. A typo like that in the print edition of Intelligent Life would have been the cause of long faces all round.

    Over lunch on Friday—Emily Bobrow and I took Enid Stubin to the Morgan Library dining room, but the dining room was overbooked, so we ended up in the café—Emily cited the story of an internationally famous violinist who had busked for a lark in the New York subway, and found that nobody had paid him any special attention.  read more »


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