Whenever human beings peck away at newsroom computers, bad stuff can happen and frequently does.
Fortunately, gimlet-eyed Star readers like Herb Grimm of King City are there to spot annoying, even infuriating, glitches that despoil the world of print.
Ever charitable, Grimm refers to spelling and grammatical stumbles as zwiebelfische, a German word for “onion fish.”
Among printers, he notes, a zwiebelfische is a jumble of type.
Let’s see how good you are at zwiebelfisching in our Christmas edition of The Nitpicker’s Quiz. Find 10 boo-boos that got past the editors and landed in the Star. (See answers below.)
1. “She is a rare, all-black Irish mare of unparalleled confirmation points meaning all the physical qualities by which show horses are measured and sweet disposition, with a stable nature that should help transform the four-year-old into a dressage chorine with the RCMP Musical Ride.” column.
2. “Sandra Terzievski has spent 25 years managing other people’s wealth, but a $5 million lottery windfall will turn she and her husband Andy into clients.” news story.
3. “Tonight they gather with other members of a very special group – The Star’s Quarter Century Club a club that has more than 800 active and retired members and will be marking it’s 48th anniversary.” Star house ad.
4. “Instead, the (customer service) counters eventually there will be 258 will face each other, perpendicular to the entranceways, allowing passengers to queue up in strait lines on either side.” feature.
5. “The Charitable Gifts Act made it illegal for a charity or foundation to own more than 10 per cent of a private company. Those that did had three years to divest themselves of excess holdings. Lawyer J.J. Robinette described the act as `the most viscous use of political power for personal and political purposes in the history of Ontario politics.’ ” feature.
6. “Child progeny turns 90 At the age of 5, as he remembers it, Eugene Kash was handed a mandolin by his mother.” headline/feature.
7. “Salim Damji’s lawyer, Joseph Markin, intervenes as Detective Jeff Thomson, (left), and crown council Alex Alvara, (right), answer media questions after Damji apologized to his fraud victims.” photo caption.
8. “Send PM’s flak to finishing school” headline.
9. “You’d take two or three T-shirts down with you on a shift and when you’d change every couple of hours, you could ring it (the shirt) out like a dish cloth.” feature.
10. “It might turn off people who would say (NDP leadership candidate) Jack (Layton) isn’t in touch with the party’s working-class routes,” (Gavin) Will said, “but at the same time he has a strong record of social activism.” news story.
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Answers:
1. We can confirm that conformation is the shape or structure of, say, horses.
2. Strike out she and insert the objective pronoun her.
3. It’s is the contraction for “it is.” The possessive form, its, has no apostrophe.
4. Straight, not strait.
5. Viscous means glutinous or sticky, says the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Robinette felt the law was vicious.
6. Progeny are your offspring. When Kash switched to violin, he played so well he became a prodigy.
7. Crown counsel (prosecutor), not council (deliberative body).
8. Wrong flak. Flacks are publicists. Flak is anti-aircraft fire, an abbreviation from German Fl(ieger)A(bwehr)K(anone), aircraft defence gun.
9. Wrong ring. Wring out the shirt.
10. Roots are where you came from; routes are where you’re travelling.
