Raising the Bar
Oh, Globe and Mail. I can always count on you to piss me off.
Why did I buy it yesterday? I was waiting for the bus on my way to work and it seduced me with its siren song of death and destruction; above the fold, the entire thing was Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. (Which at least wasn't as bad as the weather-porn people were saying it would be; it was still bad, but the would-be Category 5 was downgraded to a Category 3. A couple of years ago I endured Halifax's Category 2 hurricane, Juan, and that was a hell of thing; it sounded like the underside of a big waterfall, it went on for hours and hours, and it really trashed the city, destroying, among other things, a large percentage of the zillions of trees. A Category 5 just beggars the imagination.)
Anyway. I was reading the story, and of course I can't get through a G&M story without finding some sort of mistake, because they're just shockingly careless. Here's the culprit:
Hurricane experts have been warning for years of the dangers of a direct hit by a monster hurricane because much of New Orleans is as much as three metres below sea level and only keeps out the water because of a complex system of levies, dams and pumps.
Levies? You mean taxes?
Oh--you mean levees.
The words, it is true, come from the same root: French "lever", "to raise" (which comes from Latin "levis", "light", leading to such words as "levity" and "levitate"). But there's still no excuse for an error of that sort, which even the most cursory proofreading would have caught. (The same mistake is made two paragraphs later, suggesting that the writer honestly didn't know how to spell the word properly.)
As I have mentioned before, headlines aren't generally written by the people who write the stories, and that's also true of captions, cutlines, pull quotes, and such. Consequently, the captions adorning the illustration of New Orleans' vulnerability managed to spell "levees" correctly, so we know that at least one person at the newspaper can spell the word. Globe and Mail honchos: Promote him or her to head copy editor pronto! Create a position if you have to! (P.S. You have to.)
Why did I buy it yesterday? I was waiting for the bus on my way to work and it seduced me with its siren song of death and destruction; above the fold, the entire thing was Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. (Which at least wasn't as bad as the weather-porn people were saying it would be; it was still bad, but the would-be Category 5 was downgraded to a Category 3. A couple of years ago I endured Halifax's Category 2 hurricane, Juan, and that was a hell of thing; it sounded like the underside of a big waterfall, it went on for hours and hours, and it really trashed the city, destroying, among other things, a large percentage of the zillions of trees. A Category 5 just beggars the imagination.)
Anyway. I was reading the story, and of course I can't get through a G&M story without finding some sort of mistake, because they're just shockingly careless. Here's the culprit:
Hurricane experts have been warning for years of the dangers of a direct hit by a monster hurricane because much of New Orleans is as much as three metres below sea level and only keeps out the water because of a complex system of levies, dams and pumps.
Levies? You mean taxes?
Oh--you mean levees.
The words, it is true, come from the same root: French "lever", "to raise" (which comes from Latin "levis", "light", leading to such words as "levity" and "levitate"). But there's still no excuse for an error of that sort, which even the most cursory proofreading would have caught. (The same mistake is made two paragraphs later, suggesting that the writer honestly didn't know how to spell the word properly.)
As I have mentioned before, headlines aren't generally written by the people who write the stories, and that's also true of captions, cutlines, pull quotes, and such. Consequently, the captions adorning the illustration of New Orleans' vulnerability managed to spell "levees" correctly, so we know that at least one person at the newspaper can spell the word. Globe and Mail honchos: Promote him or her to head copy editor pronto! Create a position if you have to! (P.S. You have to.)
posted by pyramus | 8:39 AM
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