If there is one thing thatgenerative artificial intelligence (AI) has definitively solved a problem that has plagued the publishing industry since its inception: the typo. Already the etymology of this word proves how far back in history the emergence of this problem that arises with the movable type printing and which involves "recasting" the case of the line where the displacement of one or more characters has occurred.
A nice tutoring service
In the answers of the generative AI you can really find everything, but it is difficult to come across typos or, even more serious, spelling errors.
Generative AI has brought the tools of spell check that have existed for more than twenty years particularly in word processors. Subsequently, this function was extended to all writing tools.
I think many of us have gone to the Google search mask to check the correct spelling of a word we pasted or typed into the search box, for example "acceleration", to be told: "perhaps you meant 'acceleration'". Or "Dhal writer" to get corrected in "Results related to Dahl writer". This is an exceptional function from Google which, unlike other contexts, is also activated on proper nouns.
Spelling competitions
Sometimes it is more the spelling that is lacking than the typo that comes forward. In Miami in the United States, every year, a very popular competition takes place called Scripps National Spelling Bee. It is a spelling contest with a cash prize of 50 dollars and a bonus in goods of equal value.
The competition is reserved for elementary and middle school students from all over the country.
The 2023 edition was won by the 14-year-old of Indian origin Dev Shah who correctly spelled the impossible word "psammophile".
The most gifted in these spelling competitions are the young men and women of families of Indian origin. A finalist or winner of Indian origin always appears in the last ten editions.
Uncertain spelling
Shakespeare himself, the bard of the English language, is said to have had some difficulty spelling his name correctly. Actually that name gives many problems even to us native speakers other than English. I had to memorize it in the sound of our language in order to write it correctly.
Think how difficult it is to write well"Massachusetts”, even for the native speakers themselves who write Cambridge, Mass. in the bibliographies. They say they do it because writing it in its entirety would take up too much space. However, whoever then understands the meaning of this "Mass" is a Sherlock Holmes.
The two greatest presidents of the United States had some difficulty with spelling in English.
A frequent mistake of Washington it was the use of doubles followed by a vowel. He wrote "happned" instead of "happened" or "addressd" instead of "addressed".
He also ran into similar errors Lincoln, an extraordinary orator, who, among other blunders, was also wrong to write the battlefields that saw his army engaged: the battle of Fort Sumter for him was that of Fort Sumpter.
Also exceptionally talented writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and our own Italo Svevo, who however lived in a territory of the Austrian empire for 60 years, had problems with spelling and the publishers had a great deal of work (which is not a business writing) to fix their manuscripts.
Errors in the printed Bible
The Bible is also a book, indeed the first book to be composed with movable type and printed in a typography.
There have been sensational typos in the Bible. The most striking occurred in what was later called the "Sinner's Bible" (Sinner's Bible) also known in the variants of "The Wicked Bible" or "The Adulterous Bible".
Anyone wishing to enjoy discovering many sensational typos committed during the composition of the King James Bible can go to the "Guardian" website and read The 10 worst typos in the Bible by David Shariatmadari from whom I draw the following information.
7. You are an adulterer
Agreed a book, but a bit special as verified by an unfortunate English printer. In 1631 a beautiful and rich edition of the Bible of St. James, published by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas of London, got, as we have said, the title of "Sinner's Bible".
Only 11, now highly prized, copies of Sinner's Bible survived the immediate pulping order of the entire print run. In 2015, a copy was auctioned for £10.
The entire edition was destroyed due to a gross oversight of the proto who composed the slab of the page of the Book of Exodus with the 10 commandments.
The 6th, for Catholics and Lutherans, and the 7th, for Jews and Protestants: "Thou shalt not commit adultery" had become none other than "Thou shalt commit adultery" (He desires someone else's woman). The mean proto had neglected to insert the three letters of "not" in the line.
Barker was fined, had his license to print taken away and was locked up, to meditate on the delicacy of his profession, in the Tower of London where he died 15 years later.
On closer inspection, more than one mistake would almost seem to be a sort of sabotage, perhaps by a competitor, because even then the drafts were controlled, as the "Guardian" reminds us, by at least 4 editors.
The protofeminist typo
A damaged typescript deceived the proto in composing verse 5:22 of the Paul's letter to the Ephesians in a 1944 edition of the King James Bible. Instead of composing “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your OWN husbands” you typed into Lynotype the much more exciting “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your OWL husbands” This way the verse became the much more exciting “Wives , likewise, be in subjection to owl husbands,” turning the verse into an ornithological euphemism. Perhaps the proto was a woman.
The cannibal husband
Deuteronomy 24:3 is part of a section that regulates divorce in the Old Testament. Here too there was a glaring misprint again in a 1682 edition of the King James Bible. The sentence: “If the latter husband HATE her” has become “If the latter husband ATE her”.
Here, too, a protofeminist spirit hovers.
D'Annunzio and Mondadori
When in 1937 D'Annunzio had the opportunity to set his sights on his complete work, just printed by Mondadori, sparing no expense, he flew into a rage.
In act 3, scene 5 of the Francesca da rimini, D'Annunzio constructs a skit between Paolo and Francesca on a tuft of basil. Francesca hands the basil to Paolo and says:
Here, hold. Smell it. It's good.
[...]
In Florence, every woman keeps her basil on the windowsill.
When D'Annunzio reads in the Mondadori edition that instead of "basil" there is "basilisk" he gets angry and throws himself like a cyclone to re-read the whole body of his opus magnum.
He finds a handful of typos in the 49 volumes published by Mondadori. For him it is intolerable. So he calls a torcoliere to the Vittoriale and has him print three or four copies at his own expense without those typos.
On these copies D'Annunzio has a plaquette applied in scorn by the good Angelo Sodini, a friend of the Vate and curator of the work, who had not adequately supervised the work. A friendship gone because of that "handful of horrendous typos that disfigured the work".
Joyce the anarchist
In 1984 an international team of scholars produced a three volume edition of theUlysses by James Joyce where nearly 5.000 omissions, transpositions, and other errors from previous editions of one of the greatest novels of the XNUMXth century were corrected.
This new edition has found and corrected a mean of seven errors for each page printout of Ulysses — punctuation errors, missing words, truncated sentences, and even entire sentences omitted. Joyce himself was very irritated by the errors, but managed to correct only a small part of them before turning his attention to other books.
There were so many typos because Joyce wrote the text by hand, often illegible, with a ballpoint pen, then added another 100.000 words to the proofreads.
Furthermore, the 26 French protos who mounted the type by hand did not know English and copied from a single-spaced typescript printed on very thin paper.
The experts who edited the new edition are convinced that the few readers who have struggled with the novel's many obscurities since it was first published in 1922 certainly realized that Ulysses was one of the most buggy novels among the great works of literature.
The book, composed in Dijon, 200 km from Paris, came out of the printing house for Joyce's 40th birthday. Each copy of the book carried an insert declaring:
"The publisher requests the reader's indulgence for the inevitable typographical errors in the exceptional circumstances in which it was produced."
Indulgence granted. See a copy of James Joyce's original manuscript below.
