When you write a whole lot of words as your job each week, mistakes happen. For a writer or journalist, getting facts wrong is well, wrong. Misquoting folks is totally forbidden so always make sure the recorder is actually on and the batteries are fresh. But the biggest faux paus that I’ve found, which brings me the biggest pain, is misspelling someone’s name and having it go into print.
Sometimes a hurried spell check will change a name’s spelling and sometimes your eyes play a trick on your brain and you suggestively read something into a name that’s just not there. And these days the AI transcription aids actually hear worse than me and make the absolute wrong guess at a name. Once it’s typed/written down and copied and pasted from a transcription, it can well, get overlooked. I recently interviewed Tara Herron in Cleveland about her Catfish Cabin Restaurant moving to Boyle and she was talking about Boyle Mayor Murry Roark (yes, that is how you spell his name, M-U-R-R-Y – believe you me, I looked that up and cross-checked more than once) but my transcriber device turned Murry into Mary and that late-night deadline story was sent in and no one caught it and Mayor Murry was Mayor Mary and I got a few calls and texts.
It happens.
When I worked for an Oxford newspaper, The Oxford Eagle, I wrote a business spotlight on a hardware business that had been there for decades and I had most likely frequented during my four years in town getting my journalism degree. At the time, the Ole Miss Rebels had a starting quarterback with the same last name. Now, in journalism school, even at Mississippi Delta Junior College back in 1981, the late Miss Laney Wooten taught us to ask the simplest questions like, “How do you spell your name?” That’s supposed to keep a journalist from falling into the pit that kills a story – misspelling someone’s name. Well, I wrote it up and Sneed’s Hardware was published as Snead’s Hardware. Now I could’ve blamed it on working remotely or even on my editors for not seeing this glaring one.
But they didn’t. Yes, that phone call was made and the apology was given but the damage was done. In large print, I might add.
You’d think that after a few of these, a writer would learn a lesson and regroup and ask the spelling question, which I do pretty much 99.99% of the time. Then there’s what I call “old brain” problems.
My latest name mishap came about when I wrote a story for the Enterprise-Tocsin’s most recent magazine and had the wonderful opportunity to interview Dr. Erica Bass at North Sunflower Medical Center. She was a wonderful interview and I got a lot of great quotes and sat down to write it all up. Did you know there is a somewhat famous actress named Angela Bassett? Well, somewhere in my writing my brain decided that Erica was Angela and Bassette was Bass and oh, boy, spell check only checks what you type – not what you were supposed to type. I emailed the story and somehow Dr. Angela Bass slipped through and was printed.
I misspelled my mother’s name once, Molly and not Mollie and had a long-time problem of putting an extra “i” in my father’s middle name. I made Willard into Williard for some strange reason.
Misspellings happen. But they’re not supposed to, if I’d just remember Miss Laney, Wait, let me go check the proper spelling of her name. Ok. Yes, Laney…whew…Always ask for a proper spelling. Always…and when you don’t, ask for forgiveness.
