You will have read about the drama created recently when a mistake in a University of Otago law exam paper left students with a question which was unanswerable. It was in the Law of Torts exam for third-year law students and if the mistake had been simply a missprint like "Law of Tarts" then the students might have had a quiet chuckle and got on with it, but the error was a missing word and that made the question nonsense.
It all proves the old proof-reading adage that no matter how many times you read a document you won’t capture all the mistakes. In a book of 100,000 words errors are pretty likely but in an exam paper of, say, two pages and 500 words, surely all errors will be picked up, given half a dozen checkers might be involved before the thing is printed.
But in this case, in which a missing word rather than a misspelt one is the culprit, what’s missing makes things harder to correct, if you know what I mean.
The most famous missing word comes in a 1641 reprint of the King James Bible. The word "not" was left out of the Seventh Commandment and "Thou shall not commit adultery" became "Thou shalt commit adultery".
About a thousand copies were printed and all that could be found were destroyed and the royal printers were heavily fined, but about 20 copies are known to exist — one being held at the University of Canterbury, perhaps that institution’s most interesting possession.
That same bible, in Deuteronomy 5, provides a sentence reading: "Behold, the Lord our God hath shewed us his glory and his great-asse". The missing "n" in the last word no doubt aroused amusement or anger among the clerics. In their time "asse" had only the meaning of donkey, but that’s bad enough.
A copy of the "Wicked Bible" sold for $56,250 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018, so perhaps our unfortunate law students can sell their exam papers as collectors’ items.
Almost as famous is a typo in the software coding for a 1962 launch of Nasa’s Mariner 1 spacecraft. The overbar for the symbol R for radius (R instead of R in an equation caused the launch to fail and the error cost Nasa $US18.5 million.
Newspapers, with their tight deadlines, can’t always avoid typographical errors (typos). The Guardian was once such a frequent offender that the satirical magazine Private Eye always referred to it as The Grauniad.
In the days when classified ads covered pages typos were common. Sometimes taken over the phone and hurried through the editorial process these advertisements often included errors which saw the ad being cut out and spending time on office noticeboards — things like, "Manure woman seeks farm work."
Strangely enough, two similar words have been mangled in recent typo tales. In 2014 The New York Times spelled "response" as "reponse" — no big deal, perhaps, but that the error appeared in a front-page headline in highly-respected newspaper created ripples.
Pretty well unforgivable was the 2018 proofreading horror story of the new Australian $50 note. The Reserve Bank of Australia printed 400 million banknotes on which the word "responsibility" was erroneously spelled "responsibilty".
Collectors’ items but still valued by the bank at just $50. If that can happen on a banknote with maybe a hundred words you can understand how error-ridden novels often appear.
Spell-checking technology isn’t foolproof. A sentence like, "He leapt on his hoarse and rode off, but not before ruing the chances of fickle fete," can escape correction in some spell checkers.
Proper names are a minefield as they are often beyond the range of spell-checkers which may not be programmed to pick up, say, "Lyttleton" and correct it to "Lyttelton."
Hence the need to read and re-read what you’ve written. I once had the job of writing the annual report for the Plunket Society and a fine document it was — attractively illustrated with pictures of infants at play.
One endearing picture showed a small girl and her playmates in the sandpit. The caption read, "Sally Smith (3) with her fiends at the Plunket play group."
Before it was printed, I’d read it ten times, Plunket staff had checked it a dozen times, but "fiends" was never picked up.
You noticed "fiends" at once, of course. Just as you’ve pounced on the deliberate mistake left uncorrected in the second paragraph of this column.
— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
