Today, the front page of The Daily Universe (BYU's student newspaper) proudly displayed a tender photo of the LDS General Conference and entitled it "Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates." Did you catch it? The Twelve Apostates? Needless to say, the paper was recalled earlier this morning.
I have to cut the Daily Universe staff some slack - these people are up at insane hours of the morning trying to meet a deadline to get the paper out in a timely fashion and as my years of college experience will attest, tired eyes aren't exactly the best at catching mistakes like this one. But... sometimes you have to wonder. I mean, how do you miss something like "umitity" instead of "humidity" or "I know don't" instead of "I don't know," especially when it is a book that went through a rigourous process of editing, publishing, forwarded copies, etc.?
I have a friend who receives forwarded copies of books from her mom and proceeds to go through, edit them herself, and then check them against the edited copies when they come out. Want to know how many of her corrections were actually made for Breaking Dawn's edited release? Zero.
For me, this begs a question: what do editors actually do if they don't catch these things? Is our society as a whole is starting to care less about grammatical and spelling errors. Granted, skills rust and most people know what you mean regardless of your grammar, but I worry what will happen to the English language if we continue down the path of carelessness.
But now I'm getting way ahead of myself. In any event, I encourage you to start editing the world and I think you will be surprised at how many mistakes there are, even with an untrained eye.
