Historically Speaking: Typos Have Been Around as Long as Writing Itself

Egyptian engravers, medieval scribes and even Shakespeare’s printer made little mistakes that have endured

May 12, 2022

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is 100 years old this month. The beloved national monument is no less perfect for having one slight flaw: The word “future” in the Second Inaugural Address was mistakenly carved as “Euture.” It is believed that the artist, Ernest C. Bairstow, accidentally picked up the “e” stencil instead of the “f.” He tried to fix it by filling in the bottom line, but the smudged outline is still visible.

Bairstow was by no means the first engraver to rely on the power of fillers. It wasn’t uncommon for ancient Egyptian carvers—most of whom were illiterate—to botch their inscriptions. The seated Pharaoh statue at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia depicts Rameses II, third Pharaoh of the 19th dynasty, who lived during the 13th century BC. Part of the inscription ended up being carved backward, which the artist tried to hide with a bit of filler and paint. But time and wear have made the mistake, well, unmistakable.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Medieval scribes were notorious for botching their illuminated manuscripts, using all kinds of paint tricks to hide their errors. But for big mistakes—for example, when an entire line was dropped—the monks could get quite inventive. In a 13th-century Book of Hours at the Walters Museum in Baltimore, an English monk solved the problem of a missing sentence by writing it at the bottom of the page and drawing a ladder with man on it, pulling the sentence by a rope, to where it was meant to be.

The phrase “the devil is in the details” may have been inspired by Titivillus, the medieval demon of typos. Monks were warned that Titivillus ensured that every scribal mistake was collected and logged, so that it could be held against the offender at Judgment Day.

The warning seems to have had only limited effect. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer was so enraged by his copyist Adam Pinkhurst that he attacked him in verse, complaining he had “to rub and scrape: and all is through thy negligence and rape.”

The move to print failed to solve the problem of typos. When Shakespeare’s Cymbeline was first committed to text, the name of the heroine was accidentally changed from Innogen to Imogen, which is how she is known today. Little typos could have big consequences, such as the so-called Wicked Bible of 1631, whose printers managed to leave out the “not” in the seventh commandment, thereby telling Christians that “thou shalt commit adultery.”

The rise of the newspaper deadline in the 19th century inevitably led to typos big and small, as well as those unfortunate and unlikely. In 1838, British readers of the Manchester Guardian were informed that “writers” rather than “rioters” had caused extensive property damage during a protest meeting in Yorkshire.

In the age of computers, a single typo can have catastrophic consequences. On July 22, 1962, NASA’s Mariner 1 probe to Venus exploded just 293 seconds after launching. The failure was traced to an inputting error. A single hyphen was inadvertently left off one of the codes.

Historically Speaking: The Long Haul of Distance Running

How the marathon became the world’s top endurance race

The Wall Street Journal

September 2, 2021

The New York City Marathon, the world’s largest, will hold its 50th race this autumn, after missing last year’s due to the pandemic. A podiatrist once told me that he always knows when there has been a marathon because of the sudden uptick in patients with stress fractures and missing toenails. Nevertheless, humans are uniquely suited to long-distance running.

Some 2-3 million years ago, our hominid ancestors began to develop sweat glands that enabled their bodies to stay cool while chasing after prey. Other mammals, by contrast, overheat unless they stop and rest. Thus, slow but sweaty humans won out over fleet but panting animals.

The marathon, at 26.2 miles, isn’t the oldest known long-distance race. Egyptian Pharaoh Taharqa liked to organize runs to keep his soldiers fit. A monument inscribed around 685 B.C. records a two-day, 62-mile race from Memphis to Fayum and back. The unnamed winner of the first leg (31 miles) completed it in about four hours.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The considerably shorter marathon derives from the story of a Greek messenger, Pheidippides, who allegedly ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. to deliver news of victory over the Persians—only to drop dead of exhaustion at the end. But while it is true that the Greeks used long-distance runners, called hemerodromoi, or day runners, to convey messages, this story is probably a myth or a conflation of different events.

Still, foot-bound messengers ran impressive distances in their day. Within 24 hours of Herman Cortes’s landing in Mexico in 1519, messenger relays had carried news of his arrival over 260 miles to King Montezuma II in Tenochtitlan.

As a competitive sport, the marathon has a shorter history. The longest race at the ancient Olympic Games was about 3 miles. This didn’t stop the French philologist Michel Bréal from persuading the organizers of the inaugural modern Olympics in 1896 to recreate Pheidippides’s epic run as a way of adding a little classical flavor to the Games. The event exceeded his expectations: The Greek team trained so hard that it won 8 of the first 9 places. John Graham, manager of the U.S. Olympic team, was inspired to organize the first Boston Marathon in 1897.

Marathon runners became fitter and faster with each Olympics. But at the 1908 London Games the first runner to reach the stadium, the Italian Dorando Pietri, arrived delirious with exhaustion. He staggered and fell five times before concerned officials eventually helped him over the line. This, unfortunately, disqualified his time of 2:54:46.

Pietri’s collapse added fuel to the arguments of those who thought that a woman’s body could not possibly stand up to a marathon’s demands. Women were banned from the sport until 1964, when Britain’s Isle of Wight Marathon allowed the Scotswoman Dale Greig to run, with an ambulance on standby just in case. Organizers of the Boston Marathon proved more intransigent: Roberta Gibb and Katherine Switzer tried to force their way into the race in 1966 and ’67, but Boston’s gender bar stayed in place until 1972. The Olympics held out until 1984.

Since that time, marathons have become a great equalizer, with men and women on the same course: For 26.2 miles, the only label that counts is “runner.”