I've noticed this too, Sarah C. Sometimes even a word is missing. I can only conclude too many people are depending on spell check rather than careful reading. My local newspaper, which used to garner national awards, was bought by Gannett and is now the worst offender. I am a strict grammarian, and it annoys me to no end.

Did you see the article about the national spelling bee? The writer advocates EZ spelling, saying that enuf is much better than enough and there is no sense in having to learn proper English spelling. Horrors!

Amen.
A few years ago there was an article in our local paper about a family and their very old farmhouse, which they had spent many years renovating and restoring to historic appearance with cleverly integrated mod cons. Every single time the writer wanted to talk about the members of the family as a group, they created a singular possessive....for example:
The Brown's spent three years rebuilding the stone chimney. The Brown's all spent many Saturdays stripping wallpaper. The Brown's all say it was well worth all the work to live in a beautiful home.
What really drove me round the twist was that he or she only did it with the name, not other plurals....I must have been in a really cranky mood, because I got out my teacher pen, marked up the article, wrote a cover letter and mailed it to the Editor in Chief. I mean really!

The Star Ledger is NJ's largest paper. When a headline used courtesan for courtier that curled my hair. I got the editor on the phone & spoke to him about it; his response was "So?" Then I asked if he knew the difference; he did not. That says it all.

Leel: Frequently the "editors" who pick up the phone to listen to readers are the ones in the newsroom who lack a clue about anything in the newsroom, so I'm not surprised! I would have hoped that he would grab a dictionary while you were speaking and figured it out-- I'm kind of optimistic that way, thinking that they care to get a clue. Oh it's a hard, hard life for me!

LOL, Pammy.

I recently sent off for a free gift offered with a box of porridge and in my email pointed out an error on the packet blurb. It was the common one where "I" should be "me". I got a return email saying that the copywriter said this was correct! I sent another email explaining how to work this out "drop the second party and listen to how the sentence sounds". I have not received another email or my free gift!

Our newspaper once had a front page story about a deer who had jumped through the front window of a local restaurant.
The "journalist" wrote "the deer ransacked the restaurant".
I couldn't believe that someone who had a major in English and graduated with a degree in Communications/Journalism would make such a mistake !

Apparently there was no one above him to catch the error .
It is a sign of the times is so many fields.

It's very sad and very widespread. I caught two misspellings on school bulletin boards this past year. At least in that setting the office staff had the grace to be mortified and correct the errors at once.

Too many people and businesses rely on spell-check and don't know any better, which in turn makes me even more of a spelling curmudgeon.

Carolyn, I also saw that article and it infuriated me. Why must everything be dumbed down? And the leader of the protest was a former elementary school principal!

Here is a link that might be useful: Spelling Bee Protests

I saw that same spelling bee piece and couldn't believe it. You would think it would be fairly easy to have something copyedited, but I seem to see more and more mistakes in everything I read. Newspapers are notorious. I have frequently wanted to send them corrected articles, but unlike CeCe and Annpan, I have never done so. Maybe I'll start doing so.

I've just finished Susan Hill's Howards Way is on the Landing which deals with her favourite books and, at the end, lists the forty books most important to her. One of these books is listed twice, which seems a pretty basic proof-reading error as it means she now has only thirty nine on her list.
Newspapers have got really bad over here, especially the local ones with misspellings and as leel says wrong words used. A recent edition featured a photo of a 'protester' holding a sign which said "Where is are MP when you need him?"
Someone wrote a letter pointing out the wrong use/misspelling of are/our which was followed by another letter saying "That's how we speak round here" with a few choice remarks about where the previous writer could stick his dictionary.

Hear hear!

One of my pet hates - at the risk of sounding like my grandparents, the quality of proofreading these days is just dire.

And yes - electronic copies are particularly bad. Why should this be? Modern books are printed from electronic masters, not from old-fashioned printing presses - you'd have thought they could use the same master for the electronic copy. But no...

The worst I heard of was an electronic copy of a book about the demise of Bear Stearns, which referred all the way through to Bear Steams. It had obviously been created by using optical character recognition on a scanned copy of the book. This is just stupid.

Ah, Martin, and you didn't say, "Here, Here!" I'm so proud of you.

But it is a problem. I feel sorry for all the little Englishspeaking children who have to learn the difference in spelling between sea and see, for instance. I spent a semester in my son's American elementary school helping out on Wednesdays and I didn't know how to explain to the poor boy I was supposed to help. I couldn't possibly explain that one word comes from Old English sae and the other from seon and the changes that have occurred in sound and spelling since then!

It's unfairly easy for me to spell correctly because I learnt English words by reading and have a good visual memory and some knowledge of Latin and French. This is why I have no problem to spell definite, a word that seems to be constantly misspelt even by educated persons. On the other hand I have trouble pronouncing certain words because I've never heard them spoken. I was really surprised by the pronunciation of epitome.

Mariannese - There was a character in one of my favorite books as a child whose name was Penelope. I had never seen it before and read it as "Pen-ah-lope". With the lope pronounced as in "The horse loped (cantored) across the field."

Year later, my daughter then did the same thing with another book, and when she started telling me about the character, she looked at me as if I'd gone daft as I burst out laughing.

Ann Owed Two the Spelling Checker

Eye have a spelling checker
It came with my Pea Sea
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it's weigh
My checker tolled me sew.

-Web doggerel, author unknown

This is from one of my favorite websites, Take Our Word For It:

We are told that this little poem came about as an exercise for multi-national translation personnel at the NATO headquarters in Paris. English wasn't so hard to learn, they found, but English pronunciation is a killer. We haven't had time to check the provenance of this poem, but that really doesn't matter, as the poem is interesting, amusing and insightful despite its origin.

We were also told that, after trying the poem, a native French interpreter said he'd prefer to spend six months at hard labor than reading six of the lines loud.

English is Tough Stuff

Dearest creature in creation
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar.
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamor
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and droll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangor.
Soul but foul, haunt but aunt,

Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, knob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual, but also victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, Conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but...

That's amazing, Siobhan. When you grow up speaking the language, you don't really think about the trickier aspects of it.

Try reading it aloud!

May I share a family joke? We used to watch "The Andy Griffiths Show". Recently we found that my son thought that the Aunt Bea character was nick-named "ANT-BEE" because she was always busy.
We pronounce it "Ahnt'!

Where have all the copyeditors gone?

most likely pink-slipped to the unemployment line.

Rosefolly -

You are completely right. I work in a job where I am hired for my writing/vocab/editing skills and the position is in jeopardy due to change of leadership. I wish people would understand and appreciate how important it is to have someone literate on staff to proof papers before they get to conferences, check bib citations, write annual reports on deadline etc.

But it seems that these positions are those of "disposable crewmen" like in Star Trek - the ones who always get killed and usually wearing beige uniforms. I wish I would get a red uniform and then I'd feel fairly safe, professionally speaking.

The spellcheck poem is hilarious and the one about English pronunciation is so true. How do folks ever learn ESL?

I have been following this thread with interest since these errors also make me uneasy and seem to be becoming more common as education slacks off.
In addition to spelling and grammatical errors, however, twice lately I've noticed that authors (and copyeditors) have allowed incorrect historical facts to slip through. One had confused Mary, Queen of Scots with Bloody Mary. (This was actually in a textbook!) The other had Booker T. Washington, the educator, named as the scientist who developed so many uses for the peanut. That was, of course, George Washington Carver. This was in a book from which I would have expected better.

Rosefolly: I am being serious when I ask you if you have had something in your line of work published?
When I worked at a university many years ago, I was told by a distinguished gentleman there that it was always a good idea for the lecturers to have recent publications when their jobs were up for review. I gather that it gave them extra clout.
Luckily I was a humble library assistant and until books learn to shelve themselves, my position was safe!

Sorry, my last posting was for Lemonhead. Too much cough medicine

Annpan, no, I am a librarian by training and until I retired (early), I worked for an online database company, now defunct. I'm just one of those who are irked by typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. This is not to say that I don't make such errors myself; I certainly do. It's just that before we invest in making an enduring, crafted object from an author's words, I think it might be nice if we reviewed it first.

Sara Canary is right. If you look at even the cheapest popular fiction from the 1950's and 1960's, the text has been checked and corrected in a way that our better books are not, today. It annoys me greatly.

(I should say that while popular, Mary Stewart's novels are much higher quality than the "cheapest popular fiction" I was describing.)

Rosefolly

Siobhan, that poem was terrific. There were words there I'd never heard pronounced (Terpsichore and Melpomene for example). I did read it aloud, and stumbled quite a bit. I'm going to see how my kids do with it. Wonderful stuff!

I wonder if some publishers are better than others. I just finished reading "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery. It was translated from the French by Alison Anderson for Europa editions -- a French publisher. It seemed to have very few copyediting errors, at least that I noticed. But it is certainly the exception in most of the books that I read.

I recall reading years ago that novelists used to do their own proof-reading. This would happen several times with the book's proof sheets (galley formatted)sent back for rechecking after each copy was reset, well before the actual publication date. This writer said that he used to enlist friends to help because he was too familiar with the work and overlooked typos.

Talk about being "asleep at the wheel": I have a paperback edition of a fascinating memoir by Freya Stark. It covers her years in Arabia. There's just one thing wrong with it -- ONE WHOLE CHAPTER is missing! No, it wasn't torn out by some "chapter thief" at the bookstore. I bent the book backwards for a deep search into the binding -- nothing is torn; no loose threads; no gaps. (It's not a used book, either; came from a new-book bookstore.)

Lauramarie, binding problems like that are more common than you might think, although usually it is some pages missing and some repeated. It is unlikely to be a copyediting mistake - and there is no way each book could be checked at the printing stage or by the book shop staff.
If you take the book back to the shop, they should replace it for you. We (I work in a book shop) send such books straight back to the publisher and they give us a replacement.

Hello Astrokath:

Thanks for the advice.

Too bad I discovered it so many months later. I'd been in the middle of a very big move, ... had stopped reading the book. It was when I went back to it, that I discovered the omission.

In the U.S. many prominent newspapers, lacking readership, due to the rise of the Internet and Cable TV, are going bankrupt, and many have only a skeleton staff left. I know that those persons who read and checked copy in the past were the first to be let go, when the pink slips were handed out. We notice the lack here in our daily newspaper repeatedly.

Annpann -

You asked whether I had had something published. Yes, as I used to freelance write a column for Entrepreneur magazine's sister website. The column was based on work/life balance which is incredibly ironic as I am such a stress monkey at times. Anyway, that gig lasted a year and then easy come, easy go as the saying goes.

Then I have lots of ghost writing floating around, which I wrote, but has someone else's name on it. Grumble. Topics range from engineering to medicine to book reviews to anything in between.

And then I have a meeting with an agent at the end of the month to talk about a novel and NF book on sustainable energy I'd like to do. Wish me luck on that! I am rather nervous about it, but we'll see.

Back to books: one of the best writing related books I can think of is "Bird by Bird" by Annie Lamott....