Railway signs and posts

A certain paper is referenced in that venerable satirical journal Private Eye as the Gruaniad as for years it had a love affair with typos and misprints. As a taker (reader is far too low a word for such a publication) of the self-styled 'Britain's best' quality paper, the Daily Telegraph, and its sister paper the Sunday Telegraph, I along with fellow takers could laugh into my marmalade with smug self-satisfaction that it truly was a 'quality' paper and the superior being.

Alas, those years have gone the way of private banks and the Hamster Dance as the new and celebrity keyword-optimised eTelegraph takes typos into a new generation. At least the Grauniad had claims of right-wing saboteurs bent on making its harridan-screech content easily dismissible, but the same can't be said of the DT.

So to this blog. Why do I care? I don't know, but I am a trained subeditor and a long-time reader who has followed their editorial complaints procedure to report faults to no avail. So it was that after several error spots, this is the article that finally prompted me to create this blog.

Couple clearing attic...

Minor typos, such as "every where" in para 10, "literally" as if the word still has meaning, switching from 1970s to 1980's, the random peppering of quote marks, and you could argue it would hardly be worth the effort to change. But phrases like "They used lot", presumably not in the Biblical sense, the neologism "memoabilia" and the missing paragraph between paras 2 and 3, so that it seems like a train stowed the boards itself, that brings this article to the height of incoherent rubbish.

Are there worse things in the world than typos and poor subbing? Yes. Do they get people as annoyed? No. There's no excuse in this age of word processors and presumably keen staff who would make subeditors. There's no bitterness here by the way, I'm happy in my job, but there's nothing like the internet for anonymous gripes on other people's errors. No doubt including my own.

If you find some teleble errors in the Telegraph, do let me know and we can name and shame here.