My Billings Gazette

John McIntyre, in a blog post titled "The Errant Hand," deconstructs the unfortunate apostle/apostate case at the Brigham Young University newspaper and offers a few lessons.

Chief among them: don't use the correct-all function on your otherwise handy spellcheck program.

But John's post is so much more than that, so I encourage you to read it in its entirety. In this paragraph, he gets at the heart of the errors that bedevil those of us in the word-pushing game:

Readers react to blunders of that magnitude by asking how anyone could be so ignorant/careless/stupid. But every copy editor maintains a private roll of shame over just such lapses. We run down the list as we lie awake on still winter nights. The wrong synapse fires, or the hand slips, there’s a momentary distraction, or there is pressure to hurry on deadline — and if you think that it wouldn’t happen to you, then you have never worked on a copy desk, a locale that regularly reinforces humility.

Here, then, are a few of the big-picture rules for editors who wish to remain on the sunny side of their sanity:

1. Never use correct-all (all the better for avoiding phrases such as "in the African-American" and "Enola Homosexual").

2. Never type anything into the system that you would be embarrassed to see in print.

3. Never re-create standing elements (labels, nameplates, etc.) out of whole cloth every day, lest you misspell something. A paper at which I formerly toiled once rendered its name, on the front page, as the "Anchorage Daiy News." No amount of equivocation can soothe that sting.

Any other nominations?

My apologies for the prolonged quiet since we migrated over here to MyBillingsGazette.com. There's a good reason for it: I'm neck-deep in producing the commemorative book on Rocky's basketball championship. (Want one? Call 406-657-1241.)

Nonetheless, we do need to keep the chains moving around here, so I offer this for your consideration: Our friend JD, the proprietor of the Engine Room blog, has started a Flickr group just for editors and lovers of language. Cruise around and see all the ways in which the language can be fractured in print. And, please, post your own.

I'll be back sometime next week.

There’s a reason we - and I’m using the royal we here - don’t like to play gotcha games, even if our business is finding and correcting mistakes.

Jon Stewart’s bust of the finger-wagging crew over at Fox News illustrates that reason.

We’re not sure how this evaded our attention for nearly three weeks*, but we’re grateful to Editrix for pointing it out. * - Slothfulness, probably.