Embarrassing SI spelling error of the week

Incorrect.

And incorrect.

Next.

 

OK...

I'm getting jell...

I might be getting notoriety ...

Is there something bigger I should be getting?

 

I think that's it.

Just a mistake by a publication caught in the same economic climate as any print product . . . but one that at least pretends to still care and try (my shop quit trying a couple of years ago).

 

Spelling errors are just silly, but big factual errors in a publication like this make me cringe. This was in the May 24 edition, opening paragraph, no less:

"Grant Hill lay in a hospital bed at the Duke Medical Center in the spring of 2003, Kobe Bryant on his television and James Nunley in his ear. Nunley, the chief of orthopedic surgery at Duke, was reminding Hill of all the postretirement options that awaited a magnetic basketball star with a spotless reputation and a gift for public speaking who was educated in art and medicine, connected in media and real estate, at ease in front of politicians and the pope. "I thought he could be president," Nunley says. But Hill's attention kept drifting to the TV, on which Bryant was savaging one foil after another on the way to his third consecutive NBA championship."

I hadn't realized that Kobe was traded to the Spurs.

 

My son's August edition of SI For Kids arrived the other day. He pulled out the Albert Pujols poster, looked at it, and said to me, puzzled, (he's 11), "Doesn't Pujols have a J in it?" I said, "Yeah, why?" He showed me the poster -- in giant letters down the side, it said, "ALBERT PULOLS."

 

It's fascinating, considering how much attention we pay to body copy, how often something goes wrong with big display type -- especially when the designer does something funky with it, like running it down the side.

I once released a magazine page with the word ENTHUSIASM, running sideways in 120-point type, missing the second S. It happened many years ago, but I've never forgotten to check the big type since then.

Of course, the older I get, the more I've begun missing the small type, so it all evens out ...

 

The bigger it is, the more you check it. Or at least that's my motto. That way all of my mistakes are really tiny.

 

You know who said that? She.

 

LOL!

 

The major metro near me -- still an exceptionally good paper despite being "gutted" -- runs a page full of emails/letters once a week from people nit-picking about one thing or another that the paper did. I find it comforting in a way, knowing that a paper of that stature gets a lot of the same bellyaching from readers that we get at my place.

On an apparently regular basis, people write in to point out some grammar or usage error. To the paper's credit, they run these letters, allowing the world to see them own up their foul-ups. But it chaps my ass every time I see one of these, because I wonder how much of an effing loser you'd have to be to write a snide message to the newspaper about some grammatical error. Can you imagine having nothing better to do with your time? Can you imagine being that oblivious to how anal-retentive it makes you sound to the rest of the world?