07 April 2009

Tales Of Spell Check Terror: We Meant APOSTLES!

2019.Someone down at Brigham Young U's daily paper, The Daily Universe, made a very very amazingly amazing oopsie. I'll let this excerpt from the Salt Lake Tribune tell the tale:

The phone call Rich Evans got Monday morning wasn't good news.

It was an employee at Brigham Young University's The Daily Universe , where Evans is the editorial manager. There was a typo on the front page.

"It was the worst possible mistake," Evans recalled.

The error? A caption on a photo from this weekend's LDS General Conference stated that "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning ...

The group is, of course, made of of Apostles. Apostates, on the other hand, are people whose presence in a church-policy-determining body would be awkward at best (maybe not if it were Unitarians).

We must have sympathy. We understand the caption editor was so aghast over what she'd accidentally done by choosing apostate in the spell-checker that she was in tears over it, and all involved seem to agree it was an honest mistake – an honest mistake that an entire print run had to be trashed over, but still.

On the up side, the journo student involved can take heart. She's just made the biggest mistake she'll make in her career and it's early on. It's going to be thumbs up the rest of the way, odds are.

And if anyone actually got a copy of the Universe (I love the sound of that sentence) that has the error, you can frame it or auction it off on eBay for a down payment on a house, your choice.

This is of course the biggest religious printing gaffe since the Adulterer's Bible, and the biggest printing gaffe since That Man Sarkozy.

When Etaoin Shrdlu pops up, boy, he means business!

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