RECREATIONS.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 136, 6 October 1871, Page 6

RECREATIONS.

No. I. —A CHAPTER OP BLUNDERS AITD MISTAKES. (Continued from our last.) Typographical errors, caused by the carelessness of either the compositor or the proof-reader, are of constant occurrence, and many of them are very amusing. In one case, by the misplacing of what compositors call a " space," a gentleman, instead of sending a bulletin to the Lord Provost, was made to send a bullet into him. Whether it brought him a visit from the police is not known. In columns of news an absurd effect is often produced unintentionally by the running together of items that ought to have begun on different lines. In one of the leading papers in Paris the following paragraphs, printed without a break, must have read ominously : "Dr. X. has been appointed head physician to the Hopital de la Charite. Orders have been issued by the authorities for the immediate extension of the Cemetery de Parnasse."

By far the most common form of typographical blundering is the insertion of one letter in place of another. Not long since a newspaper, reporting the danger that an express train had run in consequence of a cow getting upon the line, said—" As the safest way, the engineer put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut it into calves !" Some farmers would no doubt be glad to know when that engineer is to be on the road again. Dr. Robertson, of Irvine, told me that his lecture on German Student life was originally entitled " Burschen Life in Germany," but a bill-printer on one occasion had it up on the walls as " Buckskin Life in Germany;" and the Doctor thought it better afterwards to keep to words that printers could understand.

Such mistakes, however, are not always the fault of the compositor. They frequently arise from illegible writing on the part of those who supply "copy," or from reporters failing to catch the exact words used by a speaker. John Bright was generally heard with perfect distinctness to the farthest corner of the House; but on one occasion, when he spoke of " attenders of clubs," these aristocratic gentlemen appeared in the report as " vendors of gloves !" Another oi'ator, speaking of the Italian struggle, said—" What do the Italians want ? They simply want to be a nation." " What do the Italians want?" said the newspaper report. " They simply want to be in Asia !"

Indistinctness of utterance is a source of confusion to many besides reporters. A clerical friend in Lancashire told me that he had got a wholesome warning in regard to pulpit articulation by discovering, in one house where he was visiting the day after preaching from Luke xix., 21, that the servant had gone home with the impression that his text had been " I feared thee, becai se thou art an oysterman."

A Hampshire incumbent recently reported in the ' Pall Mall Gazette' some of the blunders he had heard made in the marriage - service by that class of persons who have to pick the words up as best the can from hearing them repeated by others. He said that in his own parish it was quite the fashion for the man, when giving the ring, to say to the woman—

" With my body I thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods, I, thee and thou."

He said the women were generally better up in this part of the service than the men. One day, however, a bride startled him by promising, in what she supposed to be the language of the prayer-book, to take her husband, " to 'ave an to 'old from this day fortui't for betterer horse for rieherer power, in siggerness health, to love cherries and to bay." What meaning this extraordinary vow conveyed to her own mind the in. cumbent said it baffled him to conjecture. (To be continued*)