Sunday, December 09, 2012

That duck won't hunt

This candidate for Eggcorn of the (rapidly fading) Year comes from the Nation's Newspaper of Record:

An article on Nov. 25 about the artist Malcolm Morley, who has a new exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Long Island, misstated what kind of aerial battles he watched from the rooftops during the London blitz. He and his friends watched dogfights — not duck fights.

The Times's dance-around-the-error style of writing corrections can get a little annoying sometimes. Are we trying to say there are two kinds of aerial battles to choose from here -- dogfights and duckfights -- and the writer simply picked the wrong one?

At any rate, imagine a world in which people were paid to read the stuff after writers wrote it, but before it was printed. We could call them ... copy editors!

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