Eggcorn seeds

Interesting comment* from the judge in the guinea pig trial. Want to know what it looks like at the crosstown competition?

The judge noted Wednesday the teens didn’t have prior criminal records and were good students from good families, but said he put off the sentencing by for a while to make sure there were no “deep-seated issues” that needed to be addressed with the young defendants.

The guiding wisdom of the AP Stylebook, "Never alter quotations even to correct minor grammatical errors or word usage," doesn't apply here. In this sort of case, that's exactly what the writer heard (and step forward anyone who writes for a living and can claim to a perfect record on this front.) The assembly line of news, though, evolved a set of processes that vastly increased the chances of such blunders being caught -- even if by a typesetter who was better at spelling than half the newsroom.

Blunders got through in the good old days of full employment and double time and a half for holiday shifts, and blunders will get through when the last editor is reassigned as a content creator. If you want a product in which they're rare enough to call attention to themselves, you need to let your content providers know. Preferably with subscriptions or large stacks of unmarked bills.

* Now, alas, corrected online.

Tuvan ale

Tell us more about the Pulitzers, Nation's Newspaper of Record:

An article on Thursday about Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, referred incorrectly to a vocal technique explored by a group she has sung with, Roomful of Teeth. It is Tuvan throat singing — a tradition of the Tuvan people of Siberia — not “tooth and throat” singing.

That duck won't hunt

This candidate for Eggcorn of the (rapidly fading) Year comes from the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

An article on Nov. 25 about the artist Malcolm Morley, who has a new exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Long Island, misstated what kind of aerial battles he watched from the rooftops during the London blitz. He and his friends watched dogfights — not duck fights.

The Times's dance-around-the-error style of writing corrections can get a little annoying sometimes. Are we trying to say there are two kinds of aerial battles to choose from here -- dogfights and duckfights -- and the writer simply picked the wrong one?

At any rate, imagine a world in which people were paid to read the stuff after writers wrote it, but before it was printed. We could call them ... copy editors!