A good correction

A mistake a co-worker made that thankfully the desk caught.
School in our that's exclusive for deaf kids. A new writer misunderstood/misheard/was rushing too much when we told him what the acronym the school uses stood for and turned in copy as "school for the death". Fortunately a copy editor caught it.

One time I was reviewing a concert for newsside. I said the band covered so-so's song. I call to ask if there are any questions and the copy editor says to me "What do you mean he covered the song?"

 

Great post. Thanks.

 

They won't get fooled again.

 

This isn't a correction, but it's in the ballpark on the idiocy scale. Nigh two decades ago, a buddy of mine wrote a lede on a multi-position athlete at some school who was hoping to play quarterback but was under consideration to be moved to RB or WR or something.

The lede: "QB, or not QB? That is the question for blah blah blah."

The edit, by the notoriously ham-fisted hacks at Gannett News Service:

"Quarterback, or not quarterback?"

It would've been justifiable homicide.

 

Like when the desk changed Roger Kahn's lede after a game filled with errors -- "The Dodgers died with their boots" -- to "The Dodgers died with their boots on."

 

Well, the desk should have made sure that cliched lede died, but should have worked with the writer to do a different one, not make the situation worse.

 

Oh, I like the lede, dools.

It's not cliche, it's a play off a famous line. If you can't have some fun with a feature like that, when can you?

 

No sweat. It's one of the professionalisms that should be past.
Like The Rim and Slot. No desk configuration is set up in that form, but the terms continue to have relevance. They're specific to our profession. It's our lingo.

 

First, do no harm.

That's in the copy editor oath, right?

 

At one of my former stops, we ran an obit for a 100-some-old-year-old woman whom family described as "genteel." But the headline read that she was "gentile."

I'm not sure we needed a correction, because technically she was indeed Gentile.

 

Oy!

 

It would've been justifiable homicide if that cliched lede had run. It was ancient when I was starting out a quarter-century ago.