I’ve been away for (part of) the long weekend so this is my first chance to ask if anyone else noticed the detail in the headline of the Sydney Morning Herald’s News Review yesterday?
22 Responses to “Typ-oh!”
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Fox News is editing the SMH now?
The subby must have been a Howard man. After all it was Johny who said a vote for Barrack Obama was a vote for Osama. I think he might be shown the door but what a beauty to go out with.
That’s lovely. I hope there was a lot of three stooges style slapping in sub land when it was noticed
that’s hilarious.
Subliminal suggestion at its best :o)
I read it five times, suz - and couldn’t find the typo for the life of me - felt inadequate - and finally resorted to looking for a spoiler in the comments. (Thanks Pablo.)
Fantastic. Double fantastic that I couldn’t see the error myself. (Always suspected I was a crypto-reactionary in denial.)
Yikes! Of course, being the purist Arabic transliterator the American usage of “O” for Usámah has long driven me crazy. Is it true (or just another Muslim conspiracy theory) that the Americans decided to promote the O spelling because they didn’t like the first three letters of his transliterated name are the same as the good ‘ole USA?)
Wait ’til they have to deal with his middle name.
Umm Yasmin: “Is it true (or just another Muslim conspiracy theory) that the Americans decided to promote the O spelling because…”
I’d bet the chances of that are pretty slim. For one thing, who exactly woulda been giving those orders?* One way to investigate it though, would be to look at news reports of OBL’s activities as written up in US media long before 9-11, when his antics occasionally showed up in news reports, but not with the same sense of scale or importance (I’d never heard of the guy before 9-11). My guess is the spelling was the same back then. Or there might have been variations and disagreements, don’t know. Back in the day, the papers had a pretty hard time agreeing how to spell Ghaddafi or Khadahfy or etc…
(* -recall that GHW Bush the Elder made a political point of comically mis-pronouncing Saddam Hussein’s name, as a kind of lowbrow show of disrespect, but the news media didn’t follow his lead.)
English just has a long history of transliterating non-Western languages in ways that made more sense to the range of an anglophone ear, w/ less regard for accurate renderings (English is not particularly rich in phonemes, and just can’t reproduce a lot of linguistic sounds from other tongues — they butchered Irish Gaelic for centuries). I don’t mind calling the capital of China Beijing, but I didn’t mind calling it Peking, either — the idea that “Beijing” somehow accurately reflects Chinese phonemes is pretty illusory, and in any event both words are really just English words for a foreign place, not words in the original languages (we call Germany “Germany,” not Deutschland, etc.)
While we’re being purists over this sort of thing, it’s wrong to write ‘ole as in “good ‘ole USA” for reasons that should be obvious, unless you’re a Cockney chimneysweep trying to say “good hole USA”. You’d either write ole or ol’, where the apostrophe actually elides something in the real word.
For instance it always drives me crazy when people can’t get “li’l” right, and they write things like ‘Lil Abner.
Haha touché.
I remember him from before September 11, and if my memory serves-news media couldn’t make up their mind how to spell it. As for who would direct it - I’m too lazy to go and google it, but wasn’t there a bit of a brouhaha a few months back when some Republican political figure was caught in a lie b/c he’d distributed a memo saying that journos that weren’t “on message”, weren’t to be given first bite at the news releases etc.
I must do a search on Factiva and see whether spellings of the Evil One changed at some definitive point.
Well, over at Andy Bolt, the spelling of the enemy’s name has changed from Al Q-A-E-D-A to Al G-O-R-E.
What a howler. Bet the sub didn’t eve3n realose s/he was doing it.
Maybe the same SMH sub-editor worked on this article just a few weeks ago.
This is probably the worst -
http://www.veracifier.com/post/7753/fox-news-knocking-off-osama-obama-or-both
I remember when a paper I worked for had a big 16-page full-colour liftout about climate change.
In the middle was a big fancy diagram. In extra mega super hyper bold type at the top it read:
GLOBAL WORMING.
JC @ 14,
Guess the Spice is runnng out.
With the case of “Beijing,” however, it’s the transliteration under pinyin romanization, which all of the PRC uses (accepting the SARS and the renegade island, should you consider that the PRC) and which most Western nations use in transliterating Chinese names now a days. The comparison with Osama/Usama(h) just isn’t there.
What is it Osama has?
Therese, can you transliterate post 16 into Romanized English, with or without the assistance of a PRC?
Like wbb, I didn’t spot it at first, though I thought I had.
The Osama/Obama howler hides a deeper, perhaps more serious flaw.
“…race. Whatever O(b)ama has got, McCain hasn’t…”
I’m with you FDB. When I read it I read Osama as Obama and just read the headline as being a problem with “race”. So the poor man is coping a double whammy. You either have him confused with public enemy number one or you can’t help but mention his ‘race’.
is says osama??
yep, I had to read it twice but it sure does