From the Dec 30, 2004 – Jan 5, 2005 issue

Pullout

Dept. of Orthography

Which Is Just a Fancy Word for "Spelling" and Isn't Something We're Very Good At

by Stranger Copy Editors Amy Kate Horn and Gillian Anderson

Contrary to popular belief, several people do read what's in The Stranger before it goes to press. A couple of those people--us, the copy editors--are employed solely to find and fix errors of spelling, grammar, and style. Unfortunately, we are forced to do our job blindfolded, in a dark cave, in the dead of night, without food or lamps or dictionaries. Or so you'd think if you picked up any issue of the paper at random and looked at it for more than a second. There are errors everywhere.

This year we let sneak by nonstandard spellings of dozens of words, including: education ("educatoin"), overpass ("overapass"), temporarily ("temporaryily"), overarching ("overarcing"), popular ("populuar"), ironically ("ironcially"), flawless ("flawles"), believes ("beleives"), curiosity ("curiousity"), melancholy ("meloncholy"), healthcare ("heathcare"), spokesperson ("spokeperson"), eighth ("eigth"), soft-spoken ("aoft-spoken"), propaganda ("propoganda"), palette (when we meant "palate"), and cannon (when we meant "canon"). We published "Electra Records" when we meant Elektra Records, "Fred Meyera" when we meant Fred Meyer, "Yates" when we meant Yeats, and "Hannah Levine" when we meant Hannah Levin, and "Arkansa" when we meant "Arkansas."

The news section has had a particularly erroneous year, thwarted by missing punctuation, repeated words, orphaned clauses, subject-verb disagreements, and the like. Most famous around the office is this spectacularly bad sentence from September: "The problem with our schools are large class sizes and low teacher salaries…"

Contrary to popular belief, several people do read what's in The Stranger before it goes to press. A couple of those people--us, the copy editors--are employed solely to find and fix errors of spelling, grammar, and style. Unfortunately, we are forced to do our job blindfolded, in a dark cave, in the dead of night, without food or lamps or dictionaries. Or so you'd think if you picked up any issue of the paper at random and looked at it for more than a second. There are errors everywhere.

This year we let sneak by nonstandard spellings of dozens of words, including: education ("educatoin"), overpass ("overapass"), temporarily ("temporaryily"), overarching ("overarcing"), popular ("populuar"), ironically ("ironcially"), flawless ("flawles"), believes ("beleives"), curiosity ("curiousity"), melancholy ("meloncholy"), healthcare ("heathcare"), spokesperson ("spokeperson"), eighth ("eigth"), soft-spoken ("aoft-spoken"), propaganda ("propoganda"), palette (when we meant "palate"), and cannon (when we meant "canon"). We published "Electra Records" when we meant Elektra Records, "Fred Meyera" when we meant Fred Meyer, "Yates" when we meant Yeats, and "Hannah Levine" when we meant Hannah Levin, and "Arkansa" when we meant "Arkansas."

The news section has had a particularly erroneous year, thwarted by missing punctuation, repeated words, orphaned clauses, subject-verb disagreements, and the like. Most famous around the office is this spectacularly bad sentence from September: "The problem with our schools are large class sizes and low teacher salaries…"