Tiptoeing Through Typo Turmoil

Let me start this week’s scribbles with a shoutout to three extremely talented individuals who put together an awful lot of the product you are currently reading.

Front and center is Jacob Hester. He’s our office manager and has been with us going on four years. Jacob does a yeoman’s worth of work and always has a can-do attitude.

Melissa Bernhardt is the senior member of the crew. She’s been here seven years (or will be when the calendar hits the first day of spring, March 20). And Texan Genny Lawson is the newcomer of the group.

They each do great work – Melissa and Genny paginate our pages. If you don’t know what that means, join the club. In the old days we ran all copy and images through a waxer and put them on stiff sheets the same size as the newspaper page. After the page was built, it went to the camera room where an image was created, turned into a negative, burned onto a metal plate, placed on a press and whisked to your front porch (or bushes, depending on the quality of the paper boy that day).

Pagination, best I can tell, is some sort of mystical spell that turns everything into electrons that come out on your computer screen (or junk mail, depending on the quality of the internet that day).

I share all this to tell you what great work these good folks do – and to let you know that if you see a mistake – a typo, a misspelling, a grammatical error, it’s very likely my fault, not theirs.

Back in the day, when we used to have actual copy desks, we had what we called rim and slot positions. The whole thing was a logistical puzzle – editing all the copy, deciding what was going on what pages (a small paper was six 12-page sections). At one paper I used to work at, our Sunday edition was 10 sections, each averaging around 20 pages! Ah, those were the days.

And copy editors took their trade seriously. All copy got edited multiple times – by copy editors on the rim for spelling and grammar and factual accuracy – as well as section editors to make sure us lowly reporters didn’t completely miss the story (a young sportswriter named Tim once turned in a story on a football game that failed to mention the final score).

But we all got better (at least Dear God I hope I did). So forgive me for waxing a bit poetic about the old days and processes.

Hey, want to know a great trick we used to use to catch typos? Read your copy from right to left. You see, when we read left to right our brain puts the words in context, so it’s easy to miss something because we know what we meant to say. When we read right to left, the words make no sense and we are looking at each word on its own, not in context.

Us old newspaper dogs still know a trick or two!

I’ll share one last story on copy editing – back in the ‘80s I went to a copy editing seminar led by a giant in this business, Kenn Finkel. He had been an editor at the New York Times, Newsday, the Miami Herald, Dallas . . . all the big places. He was one of the last remaining true “wordsmiths” in our business. In his 2021 obituary, this was included: “ . . . writers who worked closely with him remembered an editor who read their stories with great care, laboring over the smallest detail. Punctuation mattered. He was forever on the hunt for unneeded words.”

So there’s a room of about 30 of us and he gives us this 10-or-so page handout. It’s got a hundred numbered sentences, paragraphs, headlines, etc. Finkel tells us to assume the context is correct, but that in each item, there is a mistake. Might be spelling, might be AP Style, might be factual, etc. Here’s an example:

“The two of them deserve each other. One’s born a liar, the other one was convicted,” Martin said.

The mistake was the quote is a famous quote and is incorrect. NY Yankees Manager Billy Martin was talking about Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner and said: “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted,” 

Finkel’s point was that if you are a sportswriter, it is your business to know the sports world THAT well!

Another example was this:

Despite living to an old age for horses, Native Dancer never won the Kentucky Derby.

The mistake is that the Derby is a race for 3-year-olds only, so a horse only has one shot at it. The context of that sentence made it seem like Native Dancer had multiple chances.

The deal was, we each had to stand up, read the next entry and tell what was wrong with it. I am looking at the room, counting the number of people in the row and figuring out which number would be mine. It was this:

“Our guys played hard,’ the coach said. “They never gave up.”

I stared at those two sentences until I had sweat dripping from my forehead. Everything was spelled correctly. The grammar was correct. Coach was a lowercase C, which was right since it did not have a name connected. I could not find a single, solitary mistake.

When it got to my turn, I stood up, read it aloud and said I was sorry, but I did not see anything wrong. Finkel exploded. “It’s drivel,” he screamed. “Drivel! If the coach doesn’t say anything better than that, don’t quote him.”

Most journalists would accept the point and sit down. Nope. Not me. I had to push back. I pointed out that I often heard quotes like that and that I could not control what a coach chooses to say or not say. I actually got on a bit of a roll, talking about how hard it is to interview a coach after they lose a game. What was it comedian Ron White said? I had the right to remain silent, but I did not have the ability.

Yup, that was me.

Finkel stood at the front of the room, with this interested look on his face. I thought, Hey! I’m winning him over!

Silly me.

I got all done and he said, and I quote: “You done?”

“Yes.”

“Did it ever occur to you to ask a better question? . . . Next!”

For the record, I don’t remember the second item I had to dissect, but I missed it too.

And that, dear friends, is why Jacob, Melissa and Genny put much of this together while I struggle to still get the questions right.

Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically on Wednesdays in The Paper. Timmons is the publisher of The Paper and can be contacted at ttimmons@thepaper24-7.com.