On ‘pharoah’ watch

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Did you spot the typo in the heading above? Did you have to look twice or did it leap out at you as it did at me? But then I have to confess I’m on permanent, obsessive “pharoah” watch; if I had a pound for every time I spotted one in the papers . . .

The rather interesting article, published last Saturday, was about Senusret III, who reigned c.1872–1854 BC. The article itself contains two “pharoahs” and the exhibition information at the end refers to “A Legendary Pharoah”.

Having seen ""pharoah" so many times, I decided to check whether the spelling was an acceptable variant – it appears not to be, so it’s just a plain error. Other common errors include “elegaic” (try saying it) and, less frequently these days (presumably because of spellcheck), “dessicated”, “abbatoir” and “mocassin”.  Oh, and “momento mori” – the assumption presumably being that the first word shares a root with “moment”.

So it’s mostly a case of transposed vowels (easily done) or doubling the wrong consonant (ditto). I guess the eye takes in the word as a whole rather than letter by letter, hence the ease with which typos get through.

I’m as guilty as anyone on this count. As a page-reader at the TLS, I’ve (I’m sure more than once) let “principal” through for “principle” and vice versa. And I wrote a blog last year in which I referred to a harbour “peer” rather than pier.

But it’s always fun to see typos in a heading, or simply unfinished headings: “Vern, I need a heading here” once appeared in the Independent, I think. And captions can be a minefield too: the Guardian some years ago published a photo-montage captioned “Binch of crappy travel mags”. Their wonderful “Corrections and clarifications” column pointed out the next day that that should have read “bunch of crappy travel mags . . .”.