Reading old posts (rather narcissistic but checking what I’ve written) I find typos un-noticed by me and Principal Proof Reader, Mrs Dog-Lover. Mrs D-L gets on the job at about 7.00 a.m. so by the time you read, it has all been tidied up. When I went to stay with my cousin in Essex she was occupied proof reading her husband’s column for a financial magazine.
The Times – the paper of record – recently carried a story about an Augusta Westland helicopter, so don’t give me a hard time about typos: Agusta Westland (actually Leonardo Helicopters) comes up as Augusta if you don’t correct spell check. Later in the same edition a “drink-drive boss” ( The Times, really) was defended by her colleague: “ I was just going around the table filling the glasses up … It’s all my fault she’s in all this trouble. I didn’t know she wasn’t drinking”. So is the witness a half-wit or did she allege she didn’t know her boss was driving? Well, no way of knowing, now that The Times has become sloppier than The Guardian or a Sloppy Giuseppe.
All this is by way of apology because I prefer to write daily rather than accurately. Thank you to other sub-editors who correct my glaring errors. Special mention for the pickers-uppers up who got Robert Adam(s) and Citro(ë)n recently. Picking up is something that happens at this time of year in the British Isles. It is not to be confused with dogging which, usually, means shooting grouse over pointers. Picking up is when single people of a certain age take their dogs to driven shoots and dog and owner endeavour to pick up. The dogs sometimes eat their quarry and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their owners do the same.
Nothing wrong with reading your old posts! Blogs are really just old-fashioned diaries, aren’t they? But open for all to read- which is kinda scary. If by chance, I happened to delete the entire GS, I would be devasted.
I’ve been going through the old GS posts- and it’s a nostalgic field fest. I wasn’t married then, and living in a different house, with a different job. And blogging was a suspicious activity. It wasn’t a decent chat up line. Tell a girl at a party that you ‘blogged’ and that was the end of that one. Now everybody’s at it and wants a piece of the action.
The earlier GS posts are full of typos, which doesn’t surprise me as it was often written in the early hours with a glass of whisky. And clumsy grammar. And silly little photographs, placed in strange positions on the page.
I think I can remember your very first post- July 2015 (from your records to the left?). How I came across it, I don’t know. Serendipity.
But is it a good idea to go back, correct and sharpen up the dodgy English? Or should we leave our blogs preserved in aspic?
Keep at it! Best wishes, Luke
The Times and Daily Telegraph, once the apex in daily news publication, have allowed quality to slip in recent times and, regrettably, are now commonly sullied with errors and typos. Perhaps this is the result of a more demanding news environment, or a reflection of a slipshod approach to the written word in modern society.
Digital authors have the advantage of being able to cover their tracks without any explanation (I would call this cheating). Surely a correct approach would be to append erratum at the end of the article?
Those of us who feel inclined to post comments do not have the convenience of being able to amend our text. Our folly shall remain in the digital archive for perpetuity. Thank heavens I employed a nom de plume.