Unfortunate typo in preface of an 1830 book

Apparently, that’s the French way of doing things.

Etaoin! shRdlu? cmfwyp!

I think your linked source was an earlier printing. The flaw in “supposed” in line 13 is intact, but many words look much heavier and messier in the BB copy (line 4 “following” line 11 “remarkable prevalence”). This doesn’t mean it isn’t photoshopped, but it is possible that a mistake was made when working from a damaged stereotype.

In the 70’s, there was a headline in the Style Section of the local paper announcing " Husband and Wife in marital arts demonstration at Seattle Center".
Imagine my disappointment when I read further to find out it was a show about a couple of Karate experts.A woman black- belt being a novel idea at the time.

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I laughed so hard a little pre came out.

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It’s been a long time since we’ve had a genuine “This is shopped. I can tell by the pixels” comment!

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I get this occasionally in my translation projects. It’s pretty much inevitable with some companies - really tight deadlines, no editor or proofreader, and you get the flack if there are any errors. This morning a company asked me to translate a legal text with about 11,000 words in two and a half days (I refused). Sentences that reasonably closely match ones that are already in the translation memory are often automatically translated and locked (so they don’t have to pay you for them) or paid at ridiculously low rates (so making money while properly translating and editing them is basically impossible), so some errors will spread to any similar document through lack of quality control. Most companies I work for aren’t as bad as the examples I gave, but almost all of them seem to be doing what they can to cut corners where possible.

One of the most annoying translation mistakes I’ve seen was when I had to get my official documents translated into Chinese to support our adoption application. The translator got my year of birth wrong, which would have made me too young to be eligible.

My father has a small book publishing business. He often comments that it doesn’t matter how many people have reviewed the text; you’ll still find a glaring error as soon as you get the book back from the binders.

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Yes, I was taught by a woman who used to be a professional proofreader to do something we are taught not to do in school, which is to take a ruler and go line by line through my text looking for typos. I still do it to this day, right at the end of a project. It’s not perfect, but I do catch those things my mind skips through more often.

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I was taught to turn the page and read upside down. I don’t know why, but it seems to work.

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If at all possible, I leave a night between doing work and proofreading it; otherwise I’m a lot more likely to skip over mistakes I’ve just made.

I totally forgot that my old boss did that as well when proofreading but at the time I just assumed it was a personal quirk.

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another unfortunate case was - a whole stationery package for some company named Carerra or (something similar) except that it should have been Carrera - so the broker had someone design the logo but that person misspelled the company name and subsequently all the proofs that went back and forth were spelled wrong. And though signing off on a proof should be a straightforward acceptance of responsibility apparently it is not, in this case the print broker accepted the responsibility and had it all redone on her dime. Of course it was not noticed until the whole job was printed and delivered. Which fits with another printer’s maxim - the customer only checks the proof when the job is finished.

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