Interesting hockey poll in the Sun

[www.cornellsun.com]

Now goddam... in the accompanying article, we find that Cornell is assured of a "birth" in the NCAA tournament. This tells us something either about the Sun or about our players' activities when practice is over...

Bill Fenwick wrote:

This tells us something ... about our players' activities when practice is over...

Didn't we already know about that from the earlier posts by Big Dave Francis' bedpost?

The point was
Birth, vs. Berth (which is what the team would get). No comment on the former....

Also, it appears that the Sun has fixed its typo. The sentence now reads "berth."

Sorry, but a "typo" is an unintentional instance of incorrect spelling, leaving out, or repeating a word, etc. This case was an example of ignorance. It might bee ok for awl of us to right the weigh we speak, but a journalist and his/her editors should know better.

I catch an average of three errors per day in the New York Times. Sure, it's a bigger paper but the Sun is put together (mostly) by unpaid students in the middle of the night. I think the Times has less excuse and we let them slide. Or do we? Their college hockey coverage sucks.

1. At least The Times has college hockey coverage. Back in the day, before Internet access was so prevalent, it was one of the only ways in NYC to keep up with college hockey. Given the status of the college hockey programs in the area, I am happy that they choose to devote an almost weekly column to it. But complaining here isn't going to help the situation; write to the paper if you want it to expand coverage.

2. The fact that The Sun is student-run is irrelevant. The reporters and editors there are expected to meet the highest standards. People used to catch a lot of flack for mistakes like that (I remember one night a sports columnist wrote the phrase "for all intensive purposes" (instead of "for all intents and purposes"; the mistake didn't get caught until the column had been laid out on the flats and had to be changed at 3 a.m. before taking the flats to the Journal for printing. Both he and the sports night editor heard about that one for some time). Also, there used to be internal grading by the Editor in Chief and Managing Editor of each edition, with mistakes highlighted in red and hung up on the wall for all to see. I'm not sure if those traditions are carried on, given the prevalence of mistakes the past few years.

I did send the Times an email last year when they went on a streak of several consecutive weekends without printing the hockey scores. No response. They seem to have done better this year although one Sunday they reprinted Friday night's scores. But their hockey coverage is roughly the same volume as their yachting coverage - and I'm not just talking America's Cup.

Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that a student run paper has lower standards, only that it shouldn't be surprising if they make a mistake or two. Since the Times makes them, that should tell us that even professionals make mistakes and it is difficult to produce an error free paper every night.

The only thing I bash the Sun (and the Times) for is its unwavering liberal slant while cursing the existance of Fox News. You can't have it both ways.

I have seen "all intensive purposes" in the Sun on more than one occasion. Glad to see I'm not the only one who is bothered to no end by that one.

Yesterday a columnist described her well-built friend's features as "chizzled." Ladies and gentlemen, journalism's future!

Beeeej

Wasn't it the University of Oklahoma's student paper that accidentally on purpose globally changed the wording in a science article on black holes to "African-American holes"?

Or maybe God damn?

Actually, "goddam" is in the dictionary, although the preferred spelling is "goddamn."

Of all of the gaffes listed above, "chizzled" is the most bothersome to me because it indicates that the writer, and presumably the editors, couldn't even be bothered to run a spellcheck. That's just lazy.

accidentally on purpose?

> accidentally on purpose?

A common idiom for "an understandable action that results in an unintended consequence."

Diction Police of the world, unite.

Accidentally on purpose has two meanings as far as I can tell.

The first would be (as Greg described) doing a global change to insert the PC term in a careless manner, resulting in a really bad correction in a science paper.

The second would be doing it on purpose to poke fun at PC-ness, and hiding behind "whoops" after the fact.

"Intensive purposes" obviously made it past the word processor's spell checker but "chizzled"? Maybe the kids have some new slang. . . .