by Doug Campbell

Copy editors: so important yet too often overlooked and unthanked. Be meticulous and exacting at your job day after day, and when will you finally receive recognition? Only when a front-page headline gets botched or an error like “Department of Pubic Works” creeps into a story. Imagine, then, the pressure that must be felt by the editors of Copyediting, a bimonthly trade newsletter for copy editors. The strain of achieving perfection for an eagle-eyed audience of one’s peers must be enormous. After all, what excuse can there be for a misspelled word or misplaced apostrophe when you run a publication called Copyediting? Yet, as terrible as it is, there’s something ridiculously satisfying about spotting a typo in an article devoted to the most efficient ways to catch typos. Let’s indulge together.

Here are ten nitpicks taken from the last three issues of the newsletter.

(In this case, the question being quoted was submitted via LinkedIn, but what, no [sic]?)

(Buffett is spelled with two t’s.)

(In this list, the word “and” should not be italicized since it’s not part of the “objectionable entries.”)

Related: What It’s Really Like To Be A Copy Editor

Doug Campbell has worked for newspapers and magazines in Syracuse and New York City. He’s moving to Chapel Hill in June, where he will probably be blacklisted from every copyediting gig ever. Find him on Twitter.

Tired of just waiting around for his mother to die, the heir to the British throne decided he’d take a crack at meteorology.

Ooooh! The Yancey Media Group, an organization founded in memory of the late and beloved Detroit producer James “J Dilla” Yancey, and Ruff Draft Records are releasing an album next month of local MCs rapping over previously unreleased Dilla beats. It’s called The Rebirth of Detroit, and the first single is the excellent track above on which Danny Brown disses a competitor by telling him, “You’re softer than that rock band Asia.” That’s pretty soft.

“A survey has concluded that around 11pm on a Saturday night is the most common time for a woman to feel amorous.”

“Mitt Romney Comments on Kennedy Funeral,” read the front page headline on the Dec. 17, 1963, edition of the Crane. “Note: Personal comments and observations made by Mitt Romney in Washington, Nov. 25, 1963.”

“The old Washington theory of relativity, briefly: one is important only until a bigger brass appears, was blatently [sic] obvious for whenever before have we had the top potentates of the world here to outrank our dignitaries? We all recall the day when we saw a senator of the like in some big, black limosine [sic] drive through our town. Most likely our mouths were hanging wide open as our Mommies and Daddies told us the man out there was a very important person who worked in Washington.”

— Mitt Romney might have gone to a great school but they sure didn’t teach him much English. He was just shy of 17-years-old when he wrote that.

Here is what is apparently a Chinese reporter planting a Chinese flag on some bit of disputed land in the massive South China Sea territory. Here is a Chinese hacker “planting” a Chinese flag on the website of the Philippines News Agency. Here are tit-for-tat pictures of people burning China’s flag and people burning the flag of the Philippines. I would suggest to the Philippines that neighbors that have land disputes with China often end up in unhappy situations.

Also did you know that in 1951 we signed the “Mutual Defense Treaty Between the Republic of the Philippines and the United States of America”? It’s true! Hillary Clinton was just over there a few months ago reaffirming it and stuff! Oh, hooray.

“After a visitor group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor’s section, and immediately after that he put stones under it. He also appeared to have placed projectiles behind, just before he went in after the hay. After this, he sat down beside the hay and waited. When the visitors came back, he waited until they were close by and, without any preceding display, he threw stones at the crowd. What makes this a bit special is that he actually had not experienced before what he seemed to anticipate. He, in a sense, produced a future outcome instead of just preparing for a scenario that had previously been re-occurring reliably.”
 — It begins. Mathias Osvath, scientific director of the Lund University Primate Research Station in Furuvik, Sweden, describes the cunning military tactics employed against humans by Santino, a chimpanzee at the Furuvik zoo. The act of pre-planned deception displays a level of intelligence previously thought to be beyond chimpanzees’ ken. But Santino does not like to touch his own feces, as many other primates do (that’s why he chooses rocks as projectiles), so he’s obviously pretty smart. He is also the dominant male in his troop, so we can expect other primates to follow his lead and an all-out war to ensue.

Is this the perfect spaghetti carbonara? You know what, it could be. Everything seems in order. I may try this tonight.

“He ate another piece of bacon. 8:14 a.m.

He tweeted: ‘Here. We. Go. Let’s. Do. This.’”
 — Joe Weisenthal’s job at Business Insider sounds terrible! Also, don’t you think a Times mag profile of a blogger who works 17-hour days is remiss to not mention his pay or equity (???) arrangements? If the marvel is that people work like this now, don’t you think we should know how this life-shortening labor should be compensated?

“People diagnosed in January with ‘totally drug-resistant TB’ (TDR TB) have been independently retested at the National Tuberculosis Institute in Bangalore. The tests confirm that the bacteria resist all first and second-line drugs used to treat TB…” Even better: “Three of the first 12 patients have died, six are being treated and three have gone missing.”