Some copy mistakes don’t matter much. Some do.

          In the ’60s Minolta came up with a campaign to show us all how smart the company was. In a commercial highlighting tech-advanced products up flashed the new slogan: Out of our Minds.

          I’ll say.

          If you’re going to have a typo, make it in the headline in gigantic type. I edit a magazine about Western Canada and a few issues ago we ran a headline with the word Saskatchewan in it, only it came out missing an s: Sakatchewan in letters an inch and half high. Nobody called or wrote about it.

          My all time favorite typo came when I was in Maclean Hunter’s circulation department in Toronto. I worked on 5 titles, one of which was a French language news magazine called “L’actualité”. The premium for new subscribers was two wall maps, one of Canada and one of the world. The headline was “L’actualité vous offre le Canada et le monde.” which means “L’actualité offers you Canada and the world.”

          One Friday, I signed off on a blow in card and left early for a three day road trip. An art director, who knew just enough French to be dangerous, decided to help me because she thought I’d made a major blunder. Under the impression that “vous” was the subject of the headline (it’s the indirect object; L’actualité is the subject) she recast the sentence to read “L’actualité vous offrez le Canada et le monde.” The z at the end of offre changed the meaning to, well, gibberish.

          Everyone at Maclean Hunter had a fit when it was printed. Un désastre!  The editor and publisher in Montreal wanted to kill me. I survived somehow, probably because the blow ink was the most successful they’d ever run and they didn’t get even one letter or call.

          I suspect that people (readers, not clients!) really don’t mind typos. We all know that shit happens and some of us find little mistakes endearing.

          But mistakes of ignorance, especially when the ignoramus is trying to be upscale, which is what the people who came up with Out of our Minds were doing, can be irksome to knowledgeable readers and that can depress response.  

          For instance, a lot of words and expressions don’t mean what we think they mean. Decimate, for instance. It doesn’t mean wreck or demolish; it means to kill every tenth one.

          It’s is not the possessive of it. It’s is short for it is. An easy way to remember is to thinks of his, hers, ours, theirs. We don’t write hi’s, her’s, our’s, their’s. No apostrophe.

          You see beg the question a lot which amazes me. It doesn’t mean “bring up the question”: it means arguing in a circle or answering a question with a part of the question. Why is John such a nice man? Well, he’s a very pleasant person. The sentence in italics is an example of begging the question.

          You will occasionally see a reference to The Immaculate Conception in copy, most often in snotty op-ed columns. Just about everybody thinks it refers to getting pregnant without having sex, as in Mary with Jesus. It doesn’t mean that at all. It’s Catholic dogma that means, unlike the rest of us, Mary herself was conceived in her mother’s womb with no original sin on her soul. 

          More importantly is an expression as common as sand on a beach these days. “John is a generous man; more importantly, he’s generous with his own money.” The –ly makes it an adverb which it isn’t here, can’t be. The proper form is “John is a generous man; more important, he’s generous with his own money.”  No –ly.

          Does any of this matter? It can. There’s certainly no harm in taking a minute or two to look things up.