Telegraph.co.uk succumbs to typo irony

Revenge is a dish best served cold, it's said. When it comes to the internet, editorial mistakes are best when the article in question tackles the subject of typing and those producing the piece have flagged up other peoples' gaffes. And so to The Daily Telegraph, which reported online Thursday how a UK judge slammed lawyers …

[Steve]

Need a spelling checker

Or maybe not. The Telegraph motoring pages recently ran an article mentioning the "Father Christmas Fe". Took me a moment to work out that there had been an over-zealous global search and replace of "Santa"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Support bad causes

They also had a headline for 'some footballer supports teenage cancer' earlier today, which I thought was a bit scary.

[Gareth Irwin]

I am quite tired

But this article seems to mostly be gibberish. Not very interesting gibberish.

[Anonymous Coward]

I too...

...am already winding down for Christmas. I linger a little longer at the drinks machine than it really takes me to make my choice. Those pointless office conversations about TV, or cricket, or Americans, drag on for a few more seconds than was really necessary to formulate a comprehensive plan to fix the world for good. The scale on which is stacked a years worth of office injustices, the growing heap of unstarted "critical" projects, and the evaporating pre-christmas working days, is now finely balanced such that "I'll get to that next year" just rolls off the tongue - deliciously irrefutable. I probably surf El Reg, and check my email, and scratch my crotch a little more often than is natural, or normal, or socially acceptable. I even ride the lift and go to the loo just to soak up a little extra time from the painfully slow day.

But seriously... Typogate? You need sudoku, or at least rum drinks.

[Shusui]

They're worse than the Grauniad

It is rare to find a news article on the online Telegraph WITHOUT a typo or grammatical error, and it is not always corrected after publishing. Damned laziness - where are the human sub-editors?

Think of the children!

Or, think of the teachers trying to teach kids how to spell ... well, some teachers.

[Colin]

Still up

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3709380/Judge-attacks-120000-lawyers-bill-for-3000-win-over-typing-injurtyy.html

Errors still online. Well done Telegraphh

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it really come to this

rioting in Greece, Iceland on the brink of a revolution, India and Pakistan about to go to war, Sterling doing its best to mimic the Peso, and the Register leads with typo found on website :)

I don't know what is more ironic - come on start finding the IT angle on the big news events, what happened to the data centres in Icleand? Was the web used to coordinate the strike in Greece? What has happened to the main routers that connect India and Pakistan, is traffic being dropped, reports of monitoring? How aware are people of the falling pound, is it suddenly a little harder to find those online currency conversion tools?

Oh there is so much going on, so little festive cheer, hint it is gone traditional this year, twelve days of christmas is all we get, and all bets are off come boxing day, it is going to be one hell of a ride come 2009, I have my Sombrero ready, Ci Signor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intentionaill?

Anyone thought this might be intentional irony? An article discussing something to do with RSI containing typing errors.

It's so funny I almost considered getting a drink so I could spit it over my monitor.

Almost.

[Adrian Tritschler]

Common across the board

Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia had a magnificent article that proudly told that world:

SPANISH golf legend Seve Ballesteros, a five-time major winner, has

been diagnosed with a brain.

[H]

My word

I fear this may be the least interesting article ever posted on The Register. I mean *really*.

[Anonymous Coward]

cyber-subbing

I have frequently sub-edited online newspapers and other organs from thousands of miles away by email. Many respond with corrections quickly, even The Drudge Report, a frequent misspeller (though I suppose he gets many sub-edit volunteers). The Telegraph, however, never puts anything right, even when it makes them look quite stupid. Not long ago one of their columnists made fun of Sarah Palin for thinking that Africa was a continent. I kept checking the page for days to see if they would change it, but they never did, despite countless readers' comments about it attached to the article.

One of my alerts was once published as a letter to the editor in a hometown paper in upper New York State, mostly just as a way to brag that they had a reader in Europe.

[Unlimited]

Muphry's Law

In case you're not already aware, this very specific type of irony is known as Muphry's Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

[Andy]

Ok, so –

– you're poking some fun at a newspaper which made the unwise move of highlighting someone else's mistake, by... highlighting their mistake? Let's assume the irony is intentional, because we'll get along much better that way.

I think I've seen the line "Publish first, correct later" somewhere before – isn't it the motto over the doors to Reg Towers? :)

[Moss Icely Spaceport]

Move along now, nothing to see here...

..really. Nothing at all.

[Jeff Rowse]

But 'tis such sport indeed...

...to see the end gin ear hoyst buy he's owen pet Ard.

I believe many respondants are missing the point - yes, the world is still full of woe, misery and nastiness but don't we need just this sort of silliness to get through the day? I mean, it's not as though the Telegraph appears to be relying on IT (in the form of spiel chuckers) to get around staff either being incapable of spotting such a spelling mistake, or just not bothering about it at all.

There is a difference between "Publish first, Correct later" when the story changes due to new information or events, and publishing a story without checking basic grammar and spelling first. If a publication the size of the Telegraph can poke fun at a small local newspaper for typography errors, then that big publication had better make sure they don't do something equally as stupid - especially in a story concerning typing... or am I alone in thinking that if people want to criticise others then they must be prepared for someone to crticise them?

[Chris Thomas]

Irony? Hyypocrites the lot of u!

the real irony here is that sometimes the reg has these errors and the timesonline.co.uk as well, everyone who doesnt know how to use a spellchecker, or how to spell words WITHOUT ONE, makes these mestakes.

:D

[TeeCee]

Actually this *is* relevant....

.....just not for any of the reasons mentioned in the article.

One of the things going on in the great wide world, is the dash for the internet edition by all the major newspapers. The e-version is seen as a cheap option and a revenue generator (have a look at the rather seedy collection of adverts on the Torygraph website).

Certain newspaper owners have taken this as an excuse to slash the sub-editing functions and reduce the number of "real" correspondents. The thinking here is that by running the online version as a continuous update any errors will be spotted and corrected before they make the dead tree edition and content can be generated by trawling the web and looking up references on the wikipeadoia (see what I did there - topical huh?). The effects were well illustrated by the number of allegedly reliable sources that faithfully reproduced the Ronnie Hazlehurst (sp?) / S Club 7 wiki-gag, something that any *real* obit editor or music correspondent would have spotted immediately as bogus.

To give 'em their due here, it's not just the Telegraph doing this. It's a shame that, instead of the websites of the major newspapers being a beacon of quality information and comment amidst the sea of dross that is the wibbly wobbly web, what's actually going on is that the newspapers themselves are being dragged down to the lowest level, being forced by penny-pinching proprietors to survive on "F" grade content trawled from the blogosphere (ugh!), reworded by meeja studdiz graduates and banged straight out to press.

To paraphrase Syndrome: "When everybody's crap, nobody will be".

Words like "wedge", "thin", "end", "iceberg" and "tip" can be bandied around with this one.

[Bassey]

Re: Has it really come to this

Given that the article itself was so dull I just thought I'd point out to AC that the 12 days of Christmas don't finish on Christmas Day. They actually START on Christmas Eve. So you don't need to worry about all the Christmas cheer being disposed of on Boxing Day after all.

Sorry. Very dull. Just like this article.

[Paul McConkey]

People in glass houses

shouldn't throw stones!

Let's hope the subs at el reg are on the ball for the next few days!

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony indeed

Nope can't remember the last time I read a Reg article without some typo or other, my favourite of late was "Blue Eater" in an article about "Blue Water".

Kepp itpyu [sic]

[Anonymous Coward]

@TeeCee

"have a look at the rather seedy collection of adverts on the Torygraph website"

AdBlock, Dear Boy, AdBlock.

[John]

seedy ads?

you mean for sky, t-mobile, road angel, barclays, haynes?

Is that worse than el reg having ads for MS, PC World and hosting all those whitepapers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm

I'm reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story in which someone took offence at the mis-spelling "Austrilian" (claiming it was a dig at his accent), and tried to sue the newspaper; the judge, who happened to be a New Zealander, threw it out of court -- and the headline in the next edition of the paper included the misprint "riduculous".

[John]

seedy ads contd

The bigger problem with the DT's ads is that the flash ones cause opera to use all available CPU time

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it amused me.

Although "peoples' "? Are you the Queen?

[kevin elliott]

Glass houses indeed....

Quote:

'And so to The Daily Telegraph, which reported online Thursday how a UK judge slammed lawyers for excessive fees after they'd represented a woman who'd prosecuted her former employer over repetitive-strain injury.'

....which reported online Thurday........

I rest my case.

[Stu]

Eh?

@Gareth Irwin and 'H' + others- Totally agreed, and duller than grey too.

@author - You're from the US or just reporting from there? So nothing like this ever comes out the arse end of US press keyboards then!? Shyeah right!

.

NEXT!!!!!!

[Jerome]

Astonishing

On the plus side, this is the first Register article I've ever read without a typo in it. I expect you had to proof-read it several times, just to be sure you weren't contributing further to the irony quota.

[Apocalypse Later]

Opera?

Flash slowing Opera? Why are you using Opera then? As well as AdBlock mentioned above, there is an excellent addon for Firefox called FlashBlock. Use both and you won't be troubled by adverts anymore. You can still see the flash that you want to see, like YouTube videos, with a single click, but the rest of the bandwidth hogging animated junk doesn't come down the wire.

As yet there is no TypoBlock addon. Would we use it if there were? It might suffer from absurdity even more than spellcheck.

I have been noticing, in addition to the common internet misspellings, wrong homonym choices and spellcheck howlers, that online articles frequently omit words entirely. This can render a sentence incomprehensible or even reverse its meaning. The Register is a frequent offender, but so are all the news sites.

[ShaggyDoggy]

Shock !!

A tpyo in thhe Telegrope hww is tht newss ?

[Sarah Bee]

Re: Astonishing

Jerome, you fucker, I sweat and toil over these stories and there are plenty of the buggers without any typos in whatsover as well you know.

I'll typo you if you're not careful.

[A Ahmed]

More errors in the article

The opening paragraph says:

"Claudia Slevin's case of repetitive strain industry was fought tooth and nail ..."

Anyone spot the not-so-deliberate mistake? I guess the spell checker didn't catch that one :)

Paris, because she wouldn't know what a spell checker was either.

[Jonathan Richards]

At the risk of being Bee-stung...

...I'll point out that this article comes from the organ currently punting the Engelbart anniversary article with "The Mother of All Demos: 150 years ahead if its time".

There, there. You are not even remotely in the same league as the festive vegetation seller advertising with a sign on a fence (just outside Bath) which reads:

"EXMAS TREE'S Here Saturday"

[Sarah Bee]

Re: At the risk of being Bee-stung...

There there my arse, you walking world of wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Sarah Bee

I'm sorry my dear, but I have to do it:

"whatsover"

is surely missing an 'e' ?

[Sarah Bee]

Re: @Sarah Bee

Oh for fucksakes. It's the O that sticks on this keyboard too.

Well, I'm still not well and beside it's my imperfections that make me so goddamn alluring.

[Sarah Bee]

Re: @Sarah Bee

Oh and you know I can still see your name even when you post anonymously, D...

[Graham Marsden]

Talk about...

... Publish and be dumbed!

[Anonymous Coward]

missing 'E' != stuck 'O'

At the risk of incurring the wrath of our majestic Moderatrix, I thought I ought to point that one out... maybe El Jefe Reg could spring for some new kit as it is Chrimbletime, and there seems to be a desk currently vacant over at BOFH Towers..?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad news, this

It's really scary to hear that the Tryograph (Tegleraph? - Tlegephar? - whatetever) has, decades on. deicded to umelate the Grauniad (Graudian? Guradian? - Guredian? - that oen seems to fit with thire editroila veiws, mabey? - Gudarain? - whatever) and splle evethyign worng.

The pic - well, even she can splle bettre tahn taht

M.