Correct me if I'm wrong

Correct me if I’m wrong ...


C’mere ‘til I tell ya
Daniel Carey

A FEW years back, I wrote a newspaper article about a soccer club in the midlands. In the course of my research, I interviewed a man who singled out a particular individual for praise, before adding: “Unfortunately, he’s not with us anymore.”
I took this to mean that the person concerned had gone to his eternal reward, and referred to him as deceased in the story. In fact, the man was not dead at all – he simply wasn’t active in the club any longer. Luckily, he realised it was an honest mistake and was able to laugh about it. “Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” he noted when I was subsequently introduced to him.
We all make mistakes, but in this line of work, slip-ups are there for all to see. A website called Regret The Error recently published its review of the year in media errors and corrections, which is well worth checking out.
The Correction of the Year went to Dave Barry (the American humour writer, not the former Cork footballer) for something he wrote in the Miami Herald: “In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologise. In my defence, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.”
The Most Cutting Correction award went to the British satirical magazine Private Eye, whose amendment arguably did more damage to the parties concerned than the original story. It read as follows: “Our item about Slough in the last issue said the leader of the Tory group on the council was Cllr Diana Coad. In fact that honour currently falls to one Derek Cryer. ‘Lady’ Diana, who is also the party’s parliamentary candidate for the town, merely behaves as if she is leader. Apologies to the invisible man.”
Some corrections do more than repair bruised egos – they save lives. Antony Worrall Thompson was the sole candidate for Best Recipe Error after accidentally recommending a potentially deadly plant in organic salads.
The celebrity chef said in a magazine article that the weed henbane made an excellent addition to summertime meals. Henbane is in fact toxic and can cause hallucinations, convulsions, vomiting and – in extreme cases – death. Worrall Thompson had confused the plant with fat hen, an edible weed rich in vitamin C.
It’s never too late to get something clarified in the New York Times, which was a shoe-in for Best Delayed Correction after bridging a 38-year gap. “A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theatre review of ‘West Side Story’ on its return to the Winter Garden theatre, mis-stated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.).”
I wonder if he got the part.