I'm Not Really Capable of Making Typos

August 19, 2020 11:51 AM

The proud pedant behind @nyttypos is, as his Twitter bio proclaims, an “appellate lawyer and persnickety dude.” While working for a government office on appeals for the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, he has diligently, competently, and caustically grammar-policed the paper of record in his spare time, producing more than 20,000 tweets over the past 11 months. His account is a cross between an ego trip, a crusade, and a compulsion. His quixotic quest to flag the words that weren’t fit to print has attracted roughly 8,000 followers, yielded countless corrections, and made its anonymous owner the object of some fascination within the walls and Slack chats of the Times, while exposing the trade-offs in copy quality that competitive publishing in the age of algorithms demands. One Twitter Account’s Quest to Proofread The New York Times [The Ringer]
posted by chavenet (42 comments total)

"He knows not to [sic] where he eats."
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:07 PM on August 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

This is exactly, exactly what I'd expect from an appellate lawyer. Fucking. On. Brand.
posted by joyceanmachine at 12:12 PM on August 19, 2020 [25 favorites]

“I can tell the difference between an italicized and non-italicized period,” he once bragged.

Like, this is basically a standard-issue appellate lawyer power. Ask any junior lawyer who has ever worked for one. df;alie;elkfjadslkdf.
posted by joyceanmachine at 12:14 PM on August 19, 2020 [19 favorites]

I bet this guy is really fun at parties.

No, really - I bet I'd enjoy talking to him. I know that being fussy about grammar and typos and whatnot tends to get a bad rap these days, but I prefer people who care deeply about these things than those who are unconcerned.

I write and edit copy for a living. I'm not really a great copy editor, but I do tend to be very good at spotting other peoples' typos. Spotting my own, that's another story. The lawyer I sometimes work with for review is amazing at spotting typos and things I've missed. I consider it a badge of honor each time I send something her way and get "no comments" back.

Generally I'll give people private feedback (I have an author friend who writes for a major tech pub with no net, er, copy editor) but I'll take public or private feedback. I'd rather be lightly embarrassed in public than ignore a mistake.
posted by jzb at 12:16 PM on August 19, 2020 [14 favorites]

“I can tell the difference between an italicized and non-italicized period,” he once bragged.

" " => italicized space
" " => non-italicized space
There are threee mistakes in this paragraph.
posted by klausman at 12:20 PM on August 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

Christ, what a comma-fucker.
posted by Earthtopus at 12:21 PM on August 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

One of the reasons we gave up on our local paper was the increasingly frequent grammatical errors.
Basic errors, not even esoteric depends-on-what-style-guide-you-use types of errors.

Our basic feeling was, if you can't bother to look for mistakes in the prose you are directly involved with, how much effort are you putting into fact-checking the articles you are printing?

(Posting a comment in a thread about typos is surprisingly nerve-wracking.)
posted by madajb at 12:36 PM on August 19, 2020 [31 favorites]

I didn't know the NYT had eliminated its copy desk. Christ, that's depressing.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:46 PM on August 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

ya.....tell me, aboout, eet!--
posted by sammyo at 12:47 PM on August 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

There were 37 errors in the previous comment.
posted by sammyo at 12:47 PM on August 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

My favorite NYT typo from the last few years was a headline that included the word "deptartment."
posted by anhedonic at 12:56 PM on August 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

No, really - I bet I'd enjoy talking to him. I know that being fussy about grammar and typos and whatnot tends to get a bad rap these days, but I prefer people who care deeply about these things than those who are unconcerned.
jzb

The issue isn't caring or not caring, it's that in many people's experience (myself included) those who pride themselves on being champions of grammar or the like tend to be real dicks about it. They aren't trying to improve communication or honestly just want to help someone, they want to humiliate a person they see as lesser and flaunt their perceived superiority. This guy does seem to fall into that "Well, actually..." mold.
posted by star gentle uterus at 1:19 PM on August 19, 2020 [10 favorites]

I don't correct people's spelling and grammar because I want to feel superior. I correct people's spelling and grammar because the anomalies cause me perceptible emotional distress, and I want the pain to stop.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:37 PM on August 19, 2020 [25 favorites]

My favorite NYT typo from the last few years was a headline that included the word "deptartment."

Even its errors are understandable as actual typos where a typist has miskeyed something, rather than the ones I spot in papers where it’s clear the writers do not understand the words they are using (yesterday a headline announced that after a brief unseasonably cool spell later this week, temperatures would sore again by the weekend).

The National Post here in Canada seems to have an ongoing competition to see who can get the most egregious blunder into its copy and its headlines. One headline a couple of years ago criticized actions by “teachers’s’ unions.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:08 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

it's that in many people's experience (myself included) those who pride themselves on being champions of grammar or the like tend to be real dicks about it.

I'm pretty sure it was David Foster Wallace of all people who cured me of hyper-correcting grammar/punctuation/mispronunciation.

Those of you who still due it should no that sum of us are fucking with you because its hilarious too bee easily provoked about something that's sew generally inconsequential outside very specific contexts.
posted by aspersioncast at 3:07 PM on August 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

I don't correct people's spelling and grammar because I want to feel superior. I correct people's spelling and grammar because the anomalies cause me perceptible emotional distress, and I want the pain to stop.

Your selfish behavior forced me to comment to reduce my distress.

[it didn't work].
posted by srboisvert at 3:29 PM on August 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Never correct someone's grammar, unless maybe you're their grammar teacher or parent. And even then, be VERY sure you know what you're talking about. I was the middle school kid who got marked down a couple times for using the subjunctive tense appropriately. I didn't bother arguing with the teacher about it, because even as a child I understood that sometimes being right is not always worth the argument.

I don't see any problem with pointing out errors in a newspaper. Nitpicking bastards are always going to find an outlet, and this is a fairly harmless one. I confess that I couldn't imagine putting that much time and effort into something so brutally pointless in 2020 of all times. When I think of all the things I've been reasonably worried about in the last FOUR HOURS, it makes me lose my mind. But...eh, maybe this is how he relaxes. (Or maybe none of the things that worry me bother him at all.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 3:38 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

My first reaction to seeing this story was "I'm so glad I'm not on Twitter anymore", and it was a sound one.
posted by mikelynch at 3:58 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

He'll make a typo one day.

And the Internet will come for him.
posted by scruss at 4:09 PM on August 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

I started my career as a proofreader, and the biggest lesson I took away from that is that even if you have a rotation of proofreaders and a read-behind on all work before it goes out, there will always be a typo or error that you missed, somewhere. approximately one every 4 pages double-spaced, give or take.

there is value in polishing your work -- trustworthiness, consistency, and clarity are all virtues gained through editorial rigor -- but there is no value in being a pedant for pedantry's sake. my view on this kind of picking, particularly via sniping on twitter, is far closer to the latter than the former.
posted by Kybard at 4:19 PM on August 19, 2020 [5 favorites]

My second reaction was that proofreading and copy editing is work, you have to pay people to do it, and when you stop employing those people, you get more typos.
posted by mikelynch at 4:26 PM on August 19, 2020 [13 favorites]

He'll make a typo one day.

And the Internet will come for him.

There's already a Twitter account for that.

Personally I think he's doing God's work. The New York Times, the "Paper of Record", fired its copy staff in 2017, which has resulted not just in the hundreds of typos you see here, but also serious errors resulting from the loss of fact-checking and sub-editing that accompanies that work.

Every typo or misused word is a condemnation of the paper's reliability and trustworthiness, and frankly I think pointing out each and every one is a reminder to the editors that they can, and should, do better.
posted by Theiform at 5:03 PM on August 19, 2020 [21 favorites]

There's already a Twitter account for that.

The parody account was created in 2013. The original? 2019. 🤯
posted by Foci for Analysis at 5:11 PM on August 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

dunno, i once spotted a bold hyphen in a draft and i'm a fucking DELIGHT at parties
posted by prefpara at 5:39 PM on August 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

He uses two spaces after a period. What kind of monst—

Haha. Just kidding. Grammar anarchist don't care. NO COMMAS NO MASTERS.
posted by surlyben at 5:56 PM on August 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

This seems... exhausting to keep up. I like tight standards of grammar (mathematician by training; precision in syntax is of professional importance for me) but doing so with an air of know-it-all would feel crazy tenuous for me. Like, the inevitable slip-up -- we're all human, all fallible -- will always lie in wait. Why tempt it?

There's either a thrill for flying just above the fray, or a mind so finely/rigidly attuned to precision that I just can't relate to it. It's an entertaining premise, but I'm more on board with the NYT folks happy to absorb his content and disregard his tone.

There's been a long process for me, personally, to arrive at this perspective. I can fairly clearly picture a time in my life where I would have thought this account (had Twitter been a thing back then) would have been the coolest, and a solid starting point for ranking "content farms" (in the words of this twitter account). My personal 'rehabilitation' from this viewpoint can point out (specifically) two moments from the blue that helped along the way. (neither of which I could find after cursory searches -- would love it if anyone also remembers these posts)

One MeFi post: linked to an infographic someone created pointing out all manner of common grammar mixups: your/you're, their/they're/there, etc. Each mixup was filled with GRAR-level commentary on why each mistake was inexcusable. Title: "Learn your damn grammar."

MeFi comment: "shouldn't it be called learn your damned grammar??" You think I remember anything else on that infographic? Hell no. That last laugh (okay the only laugh) was really the best.

Second MeFi post: honestly have no idea the topic. But someone in the post (wow look how sharp my memory is!!) was quoted [paraphrased]: "I used to think you find your place in the world was defined by how smart you were. Then, I realized it was about how kind you were." So stark, so simple, so true. Which is to say, go ahead and italicize my periods, double space after a period or don't, but go ahead and look a bit deeper for the true meaning in things, huh?

(I'm ranting against someone's Twitter persona, aren't I? Ask me in another 20 years how I'll feel about this personality trait of mine)
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 7:29 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

I was assigned an (unexpected manufacturing event) investigation a while back. The person who brought the matter to the investigation review board provided a summary of the issue on a slide shown during the review board's meeting. The record in the tracking system used his text verbatim (including grammar errors) for the incident description.

In his review of the results at the end of my investigation, he took issue with multiple facets of the incident description. "This is poorly worded", "this shouldn't be part of the incident but somewhere else in the record", grammar errors, ...everything was wrong with the description, and he let the board know about it in front of God and everyone. I played dumb and suggested we go back to the slide that initiated the investigation, make sure the original and final text weren't at cross purposes.

Of course, they were identical. Verbatim. I've had it drilled into me not to change a goddamn thing in the incident description, until after the review board has the wrap-up meeting and suggests editorial changes.

He kinda quit bitching.
posted by notsnot at 7:37 PM on August 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

“It’s more impressive to receive a draft manuscript and edit out 98 percent of the typos than it is to read a published manuscript and cherry-pick the remaining 2 percent,” [Ringer editor Craig Gaines] says.

That's a pretty weak defense, tbh. The 98 percent are the low-hanging fruit. When you're cleaning a room, sweeping up 98 percent of the dirt is easy. Mopping and scrubbing the corners to get the last 2% is hard.

There will always be diminishing returns, of course. But also, maybe the New York Times should aim a little higher.
posted by explosion at 8:39 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

I have learned to be much less of a grammar asshole recently, partly because I have read about the racist effects of that kind of pedantry and partly because typing on my phone routinely makes me look like an illiterate fuckwit. But I still send the CBC web editors a few emails a month pointing out really blatant copy errors. Not sbout the little things like missing periods because, honestly, who cares? But the weird editing artifacts that make sentences nearly incomprehensible, I try to point out. Also, little factual errors like not correctly naming who was last appointed to the Canadian Supreme Court. Most of them get fixed so I assume the corrections are appreciated or at least not resented.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:34 PM on August 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have to confess a mad respect, even delight, that anyone has the ability, time, and dedication to keep doing that. I think it's a valuable service though. You can hardly make it through any NYT article without at least one glaring typo (even more from anywhere else), never mind the more arcane ones. Yes, you can get carried away with pedantry, but keeping the self-styled paper of record to account is fine. Sliding standards can happen in the small areas first...
posted by blue shadows at 11:08 PM on August 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

For a short time I was in a position where I needed to apply corrections to web copy at a prestigious publishing house moving into academic online stuff. The traditional copy editors worked on paper only so I received corrected printouts of screen grabs with red pencil and traditional edit markings. Actually two copies from separate editors. I could tell it was separate individuals handwriting.

Every single pair caught exactly the same tiny (almost arbitrary for normal human purposes) errors exactly the same.

Luv em to derth, but copy editors are another species!
posted by sammyo at 4:37 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

And even then, be VERY sure you know what you're talking about.

I would like to think I have learned my lesson on this; it is so easy to make a snide comment about someone's bad "grammer" or otherwise make a 101-level mistake in the middle of your pedantic input. Nothing makes a pedant look worse than being wrong while criticizing others.

That's a pretty weak defense, tbh. The 98 percent are the low-hanging fruit. When you're cleaning a room, sweeping up 98 percent of the dirt is easy. Mopping and scrubbing the corners to get the last 2% is hard.

Our documents go through multiple levels of review, including, for important documents, professional copy editors. Mistakes still slip through; it is a human process and no one is perfect. I'd love to have every document be 100% correct, but I doubt that will ever happen.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:27 AM on August 20, 2020

Also, little factual errors like not correctly naming who was last appointed to the Canadian Supreme Court.

I look on these sorts of things as being the brown M&Ms of news organizations. If they cannot get this small and easily verifiable thing right, everything else is dubious. I care not at all if someone puts one or two spaces after a period, but I can mark almost to the minute I stopped treating TV news as a serious source: the noon news on CFTO in Toronto on December 7, 1989. Toward the end of the newscast, the anchor mentioned the annual memorial observance at Pearl Harbor, introducing the segment with, “Today is the 48th anniversary of what President Franklin Roosevelt called ‘a day that will live in infamy...’”

I thought, “Good Christ, that is arguably* the best-known American quotation of the twentieth century and you got two words out of seven wrong? Does no one have a copy of Bartlett’s there?” If I watch the news today and see a story about an plane crash in Slovakia, I find myself wondering if it might be in Slovenia. Do they get that Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and Ghana are three different West African countries?

*(I say “arguably” because it is outranked by Armstrong saying, “That’s one small hop by a guy.”)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:29 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the little mistakes make it harder to assume they took the bigger issues seriously, but I also think that with the little time that journalists have to write and file copy these days, there's a distinction between the central facts of a story and little side details that they might ordinarily have looked up but went from my memory because they didn't have time to fully fact check. That might be naive of me, though, to hope that they do have time to get the central facts correct.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:06 AM on August 20, 2020

When words are the tools of their livelihood, shouldn't they use them correctly? It's mostly the talking heads I'm thinking of, and I'll give them a pass if only they'll take care where they put their modifiers: "Dogs only go there to eat" is the half brother to dogs go there only to eat, but only a distant cousin to "only dogs go there to eat." I don't care about subjunctive abuse, so, there's that. But if one were to differentiate "dogs were to go there only to eat" with "were only dogs go there to eat,"

I can't be the only person whose ears bleed during the 6 o'clock news.

Let the NYT be aware that people care.
posted by mule98J at 8:16 AM on August 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is an excellent post, though I am disappointed at the lack of appellate lawyer jokes in here. I'm a trial lawyer - the cooler, sexier, dumber more socially adept type of litigator - and virtually all of us have had our had our hard work besmirched by an appellate lawyer at one point or another. It is not fun, and feels like watching a Westminster judge criticize and score a beloved family mutt.

New York Times, you should ask yourself whether saving the cost of a copy room is really worth attracting this foe. Otherwise, welcome to the club. We meet on Tuesday's.
posted by ZaphodB at 11:15 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Seeing all the mistakes in current newspapers must particularly infuriate the slews of copyeditor that they've fired over the past decade.
posted by mkuhnell at 11:42 AM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

Seeing all the mistakes in current newspapers must particularly infuriate the slews of copyeditor that they've fired over the past decade.

It is the nature of fired ex-employees, if they contributed anything of value, to shake their heads sadly at how things have gone downhill since they left. My last full-time employer has made two or three very public blunders since they canned me and my whole office.

Not that my presence would have avoided everything: one of the decisions of the new regime was a sweeping rebranding around a term that, as it happens, is remarkably close to “COVID,” which I would not have foreseen either. You know how AYDS diet candies disappeared in the eighties? It’s a lot like that.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:24 PM on August 20, 2020

ya.....tell me, aboout, eet!--

You can't convince me this isn't a typographically exact line from a song in a future Pynchon novel set in the Upper Peninsula.
posted by aws17576 at 3:07 PM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Incidentally, a major 2020 online news source locally ran a piece today with the headline:

Police issue arrest warrant for 19-year-old after carjacking and violent robberies

...and the subhead:

The vehicle had a family, including an 8-year-old child.

It turns out that the stolen car did not leave behind a bereaved family, but rather that one car had a family forced out a gunpoint, but the carjacker departed with an eight-year-old child still in the back (the kid was recovered unharmed a block away, but you had to read to the thirteenth paragraph to satisfy your curiosity).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:12 PM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I used to teach a career practicum in a certificate program in editing at the local big university, and the students had to work on a quarter-long project using the copyediting basics they'd learned in the winter quarter. Every year, I advised them to really consider their editing queries (the remarks/questions a copyeditor will make to the author), the tone they used, and to ensure they didn't try to kill an author's voice by overediting or making unnecessary changes.

And every year, they plowed right ahead and ignored all of that (or maybe they thought they were paying attention and they weren't being overly aggressive, who knows) and handed me projects that would bleed red ink, run roughshod over everything the writers had done. And the queries! Oh my gooood, so rude! I gave them tons of examples of how to do it respectfully, but they just never got it right. I'd have to tell people who had no handle on pop culture not to try to correct terms they were unfamiliar with, that it's better to look up anything you have even the slightest hesitation about, than to assume someone got it wrong, especially when it's a term of art. I even told them about my experience as a very young editor, when the term "bleeding edge" was brand new, assuming someone didn't understand "cutting edge" and trying to correct it, and then being corrected myself.

But they just never changed. By god, they were on a course to fix English usage and grammar and no one was going to stop them! I got so burned out on that class, for many reasons, but reading multiple long projects where everyone went crazed comma fucker on the projects was soul killing after a while. I mean, I care A LOT about usage, and what words mean ("why doesn't anyone understand that it's hold on to, not hold onto for fuck's sake!! Doofuses!!!" I've been known to rant), but I edit a lot of stuff where people are doing their best, and it's not great, but I wouldn't have a job if it were. I've been on major publication copy desks, and watched the slaughter in the past few years as they get rid of all their CEs and proofreaders, and god does it show (Entertainment Weekly, I'm glaring at you, with your hone in ons and compliment/complement confusion, etc.). It's harder and harder to convince anyone to hire us, because they believe that if they don't notice errors, no one else does. So I care, and I like other people who care, but not necessarily when they're assholes about it.

Also, could someone who mentioned that of course this is an apellate lawyer explain why? I'm afraid I don't know much about law, and I was just wondering why you're all laughing about that aspect.
posted by kitten kaboodle at 6:24 PM on August 20, 2020 [9 favorites]

I followed this account for a while, given my background as a proofreader, but then stopped as something about it really put me off. It wasn't the corrections, which I appreciate, so much as the "you all are idiots" tone that was so off-putting and superior sounding that I got exhausted. My wife gave me a coffee cup that reads "I am silently correcting your grammar" so no-one is more dead-center of the target audience than me. Watch there be a typo in this comment.
posted by hilberseimer at 12:15 PM on August 23, 2020