There was a pair of additional posts from Bluesky in November 2023 that appeared next to each other, and that took too much description to include yesterday.
This really is the greatest correction of all time:
Ashton Pittman
This really is the greatest correction of all time:
Eric Roston
Every time I think of either of these, I laugh out loud. Literally. I don't roll on the floor laughing, but I do laugh out loud. Especially if I imagine myself reading them in the original publication.
The first correction is from the New Yorker. I'm not sure when it ran exactly, but it was probably some time before 2000, either during Pat Buchanan's time in the Reagan White House or while he was running to the right of more mainstream Republicans in the 1990s.
Given Buchanan's politics, the mishearing (misunderstanding) of "us-and-them" as "S&M" is not that far off, if one takes S&M to mean sadistic. I suppose a New Yorker-level fact-checker should have been suspicious and gone back to listen to the interview tape, but it was in a quote: it wasn't a statement of fact being made by the writer. Maybe the tape was bad and it was hard to make out what was said. Who knows?
The second correction is much more recent, around the time Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified before Congress in October 2019. This is an obvious and unforgivable error that any proofreader should have caught. And it was a statement of fact made by the magazine.
And yet, even as I typed the words "unforgivable error" and reread the original mistake, I thought of someone being awarded a Purple Heart for an injury from an IUD…and laughed again.
No comments:
Post a Comment