Word[s]count – Mix-Meat Pie, Anyone?

Is it petty to complain about little mistakes, the sort that are more than typos but less that egregious errors? I like to think I harp on the Gray Lady because I respect it so much; I hate to see casual mistakes in the Times because I know it’s a better paper than that. Still, the cavalier attitude toward quality in Web-edition articles is pernicious. Publications that would be embarrassed to find errors in their print editions seem to shrug it off when a mangled sentence turns up online. The latest example:

About five hours after I captured the screen shot, the first sentence was altered: “Mr. Miliband minced no words in demanding that Mr. Cameron reverse course on the British Sky Broadcasting takeover and instruct the cabinet minister responsible . . . .” It’s interesting that corrections are appended (and therefore acknowledged) when a name is misspelled or a title misstated, but run-of-the-mill spelling and usage errors are wiped away with an eraser, not circled with a red pen.

In other Times news, we have a new entry in the “Links Run Amok” contest. The latest eye-roller:

Laura, the young mother, lives with a lot of fear — of what would happen to her children if she were deported, of whether they will be able to thrive in school, of how they will grow up to be strong and healthy living in such conditions.

The link pairs “healthy” with “living” when the emphasis is on being “strong and healthy” while “living in such conditions” and completely garbles the sentence. It’s worth noting that the article, which details the myriad health problems that afflict residents of colonias along the Texas-Mexico border, is already chock-full of automatic links to everything from salmonella to hysterectomies to Hansen’s disease (leprosy). The story has been online since yesterday, but it hasn’t yet received the mixed/minced treatment. Apparently nobody’s double-checking the linking software with a red pen either.

Whack-a-Birthmark!

Whack-a-Mole! (photo via The Miami Herald)

Automatic linking software has run amok again. From an article on local nutrition laws in the Times:

“In some cases, lawmakers are responding to complaints from business owners who are weary of playing whack-a-mole with varying regulations from one city to the next.”

The “mole” link doesn’t take you to the dictionary definition of “whack-a-mole,” which might actually be helpful to someone looking for an explanation of the cultural reference. It doesn’t even take you to a page about the lawn-destroying mammals, whose name comes from the Early Modern English word mouldywarp, which loosely translates to “one who throws soil” or “dirt tosser.” (The Wikipedia entry is mildly fascinating; who knew that a group of moles is called a labour, or that a toxin in the animals’ saliva paralyzes earthworms?) Instead, the Times directs you to its Health Guide page for “in-depth reference and news articles about Birthmarks – pigmented.” Anyone looking for an answer to the question “Does Tweezing a Hairy Mole Cause Cancer” is in luck, but as for the rest of us . . . ? Not particularly helpful.

Links Run Amok

Whatever computer program the NYTimes uses to automatically insert links into its articles has a history of producing eye-rolling results. Interview someone with the unfortunate name of Michael Jackson, and readers are led to stories about the late singer’s leaked autopsy and his sister La Toya’s stint on Celebrity Apprentice. Metaphors and figurative speech are frequent victims of automatic linking; don’t use the phrase “fever pitch” unless you want to be directed to the Times Health Guide on “fever, chills and shakes.” Today’s egregious example, from a story on the Apollo space program:

Most of all, Dr. Logsdon said, hindsight had made him aware of his blindness to Apollo’s implications for the long run.

Hover over the link and you’re invited to explore “in-depth reference and news articles about blindness,” including this informative defintion: “Blindness is a lack of vision.” Is it any surprise that this comes from the same people who brought you About.com? Ironically, the definition works on both a literal and metaphorical level, though the next sentence, “It may also refer to a loss of vision that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses,” is slightly less profound.