A typo more mysterious that most

I came across the following passage in a book I was reading this morning:

Did you notice the typo? (And in the title?) Typing that for than seems to be a very common slip. It appears in all sorts of prose, edited (see above, and the fourth paragraph proper here) and unedited. It appears occasionally in my own writing before I fix it. If you Google “bigger that”, “more common that”, etc., and ignore the false positives, you’ll get a hint of the extent of this mistake. Anecdotal evidence further suggests its prevalence.

For such a widespread and apparently simple typo, its cause is rather mysterious. It is not like typing my name as “Stab” or “Stabn”, which I often do, and which is a simple misstroke resulting from the adjacency of B and N on a QWERTY keyboard and the mechanical imprecision of my typing. T and N are not adjacent, and that-for-than is not an error of omission, duplication, transposition, or repetition. Nor do that and than overlap in meaning. So whence this ubiquitous typo?

Introducing the apostrophantom

In previous posts I have mentioned the apostrofly, described in the Guardian style book as “an insect that lands at random on the printed page, depositing an apostrophe wherever it lands”. It looks like this. What then do we make of an entity that absconds from the printed page, leaving only a ghostly trace of the apostrophe it once was?

Here is an image from Frank Miller’s exceptional Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (click to enlarge):

Close examination of the word its in the first thought bubble will show you what I mean: there is visible, if only just, a faint smudge in a space that formerly accommodated an errant apostrophe. Someone spotted this apostrophe and dealt with it, presumably with a ruthless efficiency of the sort Batman employs to put evildoers out of action.

That apostrophe, once spotted, never stood a chance, but in its wake there remains an indelible mark testifying to its former corporeality. It is no longer an apostrophe, but it is evidently not nothing; I call this mark the apostrophantom. This blend describes what it denotes, and also serves to honour the much-maligned genre (superhero comics) that inspired it.

Compared with the apostrofly, the apostrophantom is an elusive creature, a rare typographical spectre. Yet it exists. We have seen it with our own eyes. And now we have photographic evidence to persuade the sceptics.

By the way, if the internal monologue illustrated above disturbs you, you wouldn’t be the only one. But rest assured that the relationship between Batman and Robin (AKA Carrie) was chaste, and that the writer knew exactly what he was doing.

No one, no-one, nobody, no noone

The indefinite pronouns no one and nobody are largely interchangeable. Garner (1998) notes that no one is more formal and literary, a judgement supported by this corpus analysis. Both terms, however, are apt to appear without controversy in almost any kind of writing.

No one, meaning no person, is spelt with two words. The hyphenated no-one is a common variant, especially in informal contexts, though it is less to my taste than the traditional two-worded form. The diaeretic noöne is unlikely to enter common usage. The practice of writing no one as noone may have resulted from its virtual synonymity with the one-worded nobody; from its connection to the similarly unified everyone, anyone and someone; or from the tendency for the morphology of many compound words to go from A B to A-B to AB.

Noone is a decidedly strange spelling of no one. To my eyes, today, it is wrong, but no one can say for sure what usage will be accepted in 50 years’ time. Noone implies the monosyllabic pronunciation /nuːn/, especially to non-native speakers of English. (Mind you, I have yet to hear anyone mispronounce cooperate.) Searches for “noone” on Bartleby.com turned up a small number of results, all of them the archaic spelling of noon.

Moreover, noone immediately suggests some specific person called Noone, e.g. the actor Nora-Jane Noone or the musician Peter Noone. Thus it may lead to momentary ambiguity or to additional meanings that are both unintended and comic:

Noone loves me, but I have my eye on Sullivan.
Noone saw Noone leave the room.
Noone was behind the tree, so I discreetly relieved myself before rejoining the others.

You see the problem.

Now, a few notes on usage.

Indefinite pronouns (no one, everyone, anybody, etc.) usually take singular verbs but can be referred to by singular or plural pronouns (they, them, their). If you follow an indefinite pronoun with a plural pronoun, you scupper notional agreement (AKA “concord”), but you avoid awkward constructions such as s/he and his or her, as well as the accusations of sexism habitually slung at the notoriously gender-specific he, his and him.

Sometimes the singular form will be called for, and it is preferred by some writers, but there is nothing grammatically wrong with the plural.

“Nobody remembers a journalist for their writing” – Richard F Shepard
“[N]o one can ever be in love more than once in their life” – Jane Austen, in Sense and Sensibility
“Nobody here seems to look into an Author, ancient or modern, if they can avoid it” – Lord Byron, in a letter

This last quote is cited in The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage, which adds that Byron’s “Nobody here” could only have meant males. Yet he opted for genderless they, and it seems altogether natural and sensible. Elsewhere, MWDEU states that “the plural they, their, them with an indefinite pronoun as referent is in common standard use”. Writing about any, anyone and anybody, Robert Burchfield points out that “popular usage and historical precedent favour the use of a plural pronoun”. In adopting the singular use of “plural” they, Byron is in good company.

So, would you write “No one in their right mind”, “No one in his right mind”, “No one in her right mind”, “No one in his or her right mind”, “No one in zer right mind”, or what? My advice is to approach these options with an open mind; to be aware of, but not cowed by, those who decry singular-they constructions; and to let context, meaning and good sense guide your decision.

[image source]

Five-typo feast of fail

Everyone makes typos now and then. I’m not in the habit of pointing them out unless they’re especially egregious or interesting.

This impressive collection – five (5) in one sentence – belongs to the former category, and may even constitute some kind of record. Click the image to enlarge:

The typo count is six if you include the capital letter in “Psychologist”. I didn’t include it because it’s an editing call rather than a typo.

From today’s Galway Advertiser, page 67. A digital edition is available on the website.

Stationary stationery

Stationery means stationery goods, i.e. items sold by a stationer, such as paper, pens, ink, envelopes, and other office supplies and writing and printing material.

Stationary means immobile or apparently immobile, not moving, fixed in a station, or not changing in quantity, course, or condition.

Stationary also used to mean stationery; both terms derive from the Latin stationarius, stationery arriving indirectly by stationer + -y. The words have had distinct meanings for hundreds of years, yet they are still confused even by stationery companies (click image to enlarge):

At least the company’s website has the correct spelling.

If you have trouble remembering which is which, a mnemonic can help. You could picture a stationary car or van and think of the ‘a’ common to those words, or think of the ‘e’s common to stationery and letter or envelope. More elaborately, you could imagine a taxi driver called Harry who waits for you at the station. This is Station ‘Arry, and he’s not moving, he’s waving.

Attack of the 100 Foot Tissue

When I upload photos of signs and notices to Sentence first, I don’t mean to mock them but I can’t help having fun with them. A stroll down a supermarket aisle is enlivened by signs such as this one:

Apparently each hundred-foot mamsize tissue is sold singly, which seems about right, but whose mother did they measure? And despite the low cost, I think the market for this product is limited to a certain niche.

(SV is just an abbreviation of the name of the supermarket.)

Peddling while pedalling

When you’re cycling in a city you should expect the unexpected – especially if you’re sharing the road with a lorry in a hurry. Luckily no one seems to have been seriously hurt in this incident, but it must have been a shocking experience for everyone there. One of the cyclists has uploaded a couple of photos, and the story was picked up by the Guardian and NY Times websites, among others.

[Edit: this image is just an image, not a video or an external link.]

The Guardian reported that the Mayor of London and the UK transport minister “peddled” round a corner. They may have been pedalling, but I don’t think they were peddling anything. The two activities do not go well together: presumably even cyclists who peddle from the saddle would not attempt to do so without stopping.

The newspaper’s own style guide has the following entries for these near-homonyms:

pedaller: cyclist
peddler: drug dealer
pedlar: hawker

Peddler can mean more than “drug dealer”: one can peddle goods of all kinds, though the word sometimes carries connotations of dubious or illicit activity. But the guide is deliberately very concise; I am not disputing its entries, I am reproving the website editing. Whether the mistake was the writer’s or an editor’s, it was a careless one – though not as careless (or dangerous) as the lorry driver’s.