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A magazine I cherish is The New Yorker.
Wait, let me rephrase that: The New Yorker is a magazine I read each and every week cherishly.
Better put, no?
The New Yorker has been dubbed “the most meticulously edited magazine in the world.” Articles, paragraphs, sentences, words — all are filtered clean by a cadre of fact-checkers, copy-editors and proof-readers. One of its editors recently boasted: at The New Yorker “every quote, every detail, every attribution, every everything is checked for accuracy.”
So don’t expect to find the word cherishly in its pages.
Is it any wonder that for many readers the hunt for typos in The New Yorker has become something of a sport, nay, obsession? Examples of these hunters — including a few proudly displaying their trophies — can be found here (“the other night I found a typo in The New Yorker“), here (“stunned to find a typo”), here (“this week’s New Yorker has a shockingly obvious misspelling/typo”), here (“I have discovered typos in The New Yorker), here (“there are now typos in The New Yorker“), here (a tweet about a Saturday night well spent “looking for typos in The New Yorker”) and here (“…extra credit for catching typos in The New Yorker“).
Can I jump in here?
Today, while reading Ian Parker’s profile of J.K. Rowling featured in the October 1, 2012 issue of the magazine, I came across this passage on page 62:
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The same typo — Mr. Mosley’s surname erroneously offered up first as “Mosely” — appears in the online edition:
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I did a Google search to see whether anyone else had bagged this catch and then bragged about it online before me. No results. My arms shot up in triumph! (Sorry, no photo).
Essayist Joseph Epstein, a seasoned questioner and answerer, had this to say on the subject of spotting typos:
“Why do people take such pleasure in discovering typographical errors—typos, in the trade term—especially in putatively august publications? I confess I do. Is there a touch of Schadenfreude in it? Not so much “see how the mighty have fallen” as “see how sloppy, sadly incompetent, bereft of standards they have become.” Catching a typo heightens the reading experience, making a reader feel he is perhaps just a touch superior to the author, his or her editors, and, it does not go too far to say, the culture of our day.”
Just so: I savor my finding of this error with cherish.
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