Shady characters, scarlet letters – An Irishman’s Diary about typos

I have written here before about that bane of an Irish Times journalist's life – the treacherous lower-case "l" that goes missing from certain words in a way that its absence is not picked up by spell-checkers.

Well, it happened again recently, as an eagle-eyed reader has pointed out. And just to show that nowhere is immune, the incident occurred in that high-security compound over there to my right (if you’re reading this in the print edition) – the leading editorial.

Normally, because of the importance of editorials in a paper like this, there are strict controls on the movement of all characters in and out of that area.

Despite which, on or around the night of January 30th, in an article about Dáil debates, we printed a sentence suggesting that Sinn Féin had “deliberately targeted the Ceann Comhairle last year in an attempt to deflect pubic attention from the Máiria Cahill controversy”.

As usual, the intended word was “public”. And had any other letter absented itself, the remaining five would immediately have been underlined in red by the automated alarm system. Not in the case of the “l”, however, which like a prison escapee leaving an effigy under the blankets, was well over the wall before anyone noticed its departure.

I sometimes think that, important as the word “public” is to a serious newspaper, there’s an argument for banning it. Otherwise, the risk of us making high-minded references to the “pubic interest” or, worse, to “pubic life” (a subject usually confined to the health supplement) will always be high, no matter how careful journalists are.

In the meantime, the rogue “l” from that editorial remains at large. We’re all on high alert now lest it attempt to reinsert itself plausibly somewhere else – on the business pages, maybe, after the “b” in “bank cheque” – and cause even more problems.

Still, I suppose it could be worse, as a legal case in Britain recently showed. That too involved a single, misplaced letter – one wrongly included in this instance. And speaking of blank cheques, it led to a multimillion-pound compensation order.

The letter in question was a small “s” – a shady character that, in the UK Companies House database, changed the name of a firm called Taylor & Son (singular) to Taylor & Sons (plural). The former was a business in liquidation. The latter was a Welsh engineering company that had survived for 134 years until it was wrongly included in a 2009 list of those insolvent.

By then, Taylor & Sons-plural were struggling with the recession, like many businesses. But the Companies House mistake in confusing it with Taylor & Son-singular caused it to go down the s-bend, altogether.

Customers cancelled orders, lenders got cold feet, and the company soon went out of business, fulfilling the unintended prophecy. So last month, six years on, the courts ruled that the single, misplaced “s” was worth £8.8 million.

The mercy, at least for some of us, is that it wasn’t a newspaper that made the error. Alongside £9 million payouts, the occasional embarrassment caused by missing “l”s is a small price to pay.

Embarrassing typos are, in any case, as old as print itself, a point underlined by one of the more entertaining sections of Brewers Dictionary – the list of editions of the Bible made infamous by misprints.

The catalogue includes one wherein a rogue “l” was implicated. No doubt missing from its proper place of employment somewhere else, it turned up in a 1562 Geneva edition of the holy book, replacing an “e” and suggesting that Jesus had said: “Blessed are the placemakers”.

The book later became known as the “Whig Bible”, after the British political party once notorious for inventing jobs on the public purse with which to reward supporters.

And then there’s the even more influential “Wicked Bible”, printed in Belfast in the early 18th century, which inadvertently transposed the letters in the word “no” so that John V:14 advised readers to “sin on more”.

According to Brewers, this was the first English-language Bible printed in Ireland and the mistake was not discovered until 8,000 copies were printed. Which may explain a lot about the popularity of sin in what has been, for most of the intervening centuries, a Christian country.

There’s some debate about the exact date of the offending book’s publication. But Brewers and most other sources say 1716. So unless somebody can prove otherwise, the Wicked Bible’s tercentenary will be an interesting addition to the next year’s major anniversaries. If only as light relief, it could be worth a festival.