Squirrel Thoughts

We were going through some old photo albums at my grandma’s house this weekend, and I came across this clipping from the publication for which I currently happen to work:

Yep, that second graf is a blurb announcing the birth of yours truly in the June 13, 1985, edition of the Great Falls Tribune, two weeks after I was born. Pretty cool, huh?

That’s what I thought, too, until I noticed … the error.

OK, “error” is not exactly accurate. It’s really just a typo. A typo made back in the day when reporters still click-clacked away on an old-timey machine called a “typewriter” and could not even imagine the simple convenience of hitting the backspace key to erase an error. During the era when they measured copy with pica poles and laid out the paper using “paste ups.” Whatever that means. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Check facts. They may have used computers by the ’80s … In which case, UNACCEPTABLE!)

But the irony of a proper grammar/spelling/punctuation enthusiast finding a typo more than 28 years later in her own birth announcement — published in the very paper for which she works, where she started her journalism career as a copy editor — was not lost on me.

So this morning, I strolled into the morning news meeting with other editors and reporters, slapped the clip down on the table in front of the city editor and demanded a correction. Of course, not everyone is cut out to be a copy editor, so I mainly received puzzled looks at first regarding the “error” I wanted corrected.

“Do I look like somebody’s DAUG-ter to you people?!?!?” I bellowed. “DO I?”

Most people caught on at this point, and we all had a good laugh. I was then reminded that we run corrections for factual errors, not typos. (Because let’s face it, with shrinking staffs and newshole, there’s simply not enough room to publish corrections for all the typos papers make these days … ba-du-dum-ching!)

I figured I’d give it a shot though. Maybe I’ll even write the correction myself and try to slip it in. I owe it to all the remaining copy editors out there to try, at least.