The most famous typos in history that led to very dire consequences

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Experienced journalists and publishers treat typos as a nasty but indestructible evil. They can disappear from the pages of newspapers, magazines, books, and now the Internet only when a person is completely replaced by machines. Most often they are not paid attention to, however, there have been such mistakes in history that led to very unusual results. Unfortunately, such incidents did not always end well for inattentive proofreaders.

"War" around the word "Peace"

For many years there have been disputes about the interpretation of the name of the great novel by Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. The fact is that before the spelling reform of 1917-1918, the two meanings of the word "peace" - the opposite of the word "war" and "planet, community, society", differed in spelling. In the first case, they wrote "mir", and in the second - "mir". After the reform, this difference was lost, and we most often perceive the words in the title as an opposition of two concepts. However, this was not always so obvious, with the first editions sometimes there were discrepancies. For example, in a book published in 1913 under the editorship of P. I. - "mіr".

This mistake even became the reason for the widespread legend that Lev Nikolaevich supposedly meant “the world” in the title of the novel precisely as a community and society. This version, however, is not confirmed, since there is Tolstoy's own handwritten correction on the draft contract for the publication of the novel, where the original version of the title "One thousand eight hundred and fifth year" is crossed out and signed: "War and Peace".

Encroach on sacred

In 1631, the English "royal printer" Robert Barker got into a very bad story. When publishing the King James Bible - the official translation of the holy book into English, the typesetter made an incredible semantic error: a negative particle in the commandment was omitted. The circulation of this "depraved" version was 1000 copies and cost the unlucky publisher a fortune, for such blasphemy he had to pay a huge fine at that time of three hundred pounds.

The print run with a misprint hit the market, but the mistake was quickly noticed and almost all of it was confiscated. Today, only a few copies have survived, mostly they are stored in large libraries in England and the United States and, of course, arouse great interest among collectors. By the way, in the same 1631, another "seditious" Bible was published with an even stranger typo: it was printed instead. This mistake cost inconsiderate publishers as much as three thousand pounds, and the book itself is known today as "The Bible of the Mad."

An even worse mistake was made in 1648 by the professor of theology Flavigny. In one of the treatises, he quoted the Gospel of Matthew:. The phrase was given in Latin, but unfortunately both times the first letter was missing in the word "eye" - "oculo". And since there is a very similar rough Latin word "culus" - "ass", the location of the log became very piquant. Around this mistake a terrible scandal erupted, from which the poor professor, apparently, did not recover until the end of his days, even on his deathbed he cursed the negligent printer.

By the way, it was this brethren, most often responsible for all such incidents, that in 1702 also received their "trademark" typo in the Bible. Since then, this edition has been called the "Printing Bible". In one of King David's psalms, an interesting mistake was made in the phrase: instead of "princes" (princes), "printers" was typed. Happened:. Considering how many oversights the world's most published book endured in the early years of typography, this phrase makes perfect sense.

Top-Level Errors

Of course, the most dire consequences for inattentive publishers came after mistakes in relation to the leaders of the state. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, the editor of the Kievskaya Mysl newspaper was put on trial for a terrible typo. The case was so ugly that the trial was not even covered in the press and they tried to hush up everything as soon as possible so that the details did not become public. The fact is that in the title of the note in the first word, the letter "r" was accidentally replaced by "o". A mistake from the category "you can't think of it on purpose" looked too indecent.

In the 1930s, the entire staff of the Izvestia newspaper was on the edge of the blade. In the material about Stalin's meeting with the Polish ambassador, the first letter in the word "ambassador" disappeared. The newsmen were saved only by the leader's sense of humor. Upon learning of the typo, he said:.

However, when mistakes concerned the personality and surname of Stalin himself, the editors had nowhere to wait: for "Salin" they put a proofreader in Ufa, for "Stadin" they fired the entire editorial office of one of the regional newspapers, but for "Sralin" the editor-in-chief of the central newspaper in Makhachkala even shot. Indeed, under the guise of typos, a class enemy could publish anti-Soviet propaganda - there was even an official circular about this, so the NKVD did not recognize the "human factor" in the appearance of such dangerous mistakes.

And in continuation of the literary theme "Parnassus on end": How was the fate of "literary hooligans" and the first Soviet book of literary parodies.