Word blankness can last 25 years!

Posted: 28th Jan 2014

IT’S QUITE COMMON, when you read ‘below the line’ comments on news media websites, to find a slew of criticism and contempt for the journalists (usually the sub editors), who have let slip a few typos and grammatical errors in their work.

Of course, journalists ought to be committed to accuracy in their work, but it seems the public aren’t particularly forgiving of the fact that human error can easily creep in when you are revising many thousands of words a day to a tight deadline.

No journalist who spots an error in their work after the fact is ever pleased about this! They are usually mortified, breaking out in a cold sweat at the thought someone may want to have a stern word with them at any moment. Because on the whole, the person responsible will genuinely not have been aware of the error they made at the time it occurred. Why? It’s a phenomenon I like to call word blankness.

Word blankness (because word blindness is a recognised neurological condition) is a common affliction of people who handle vast volumes of words on a daily basis. This is where you see what you are expecting to read in a sentence, as opposed to what is actually there. Some people may rely on a computer spell-checker to help them out of these situations, and to a degree they are helpful. But what about the situations where you have used a word that can be spelt two ways, and you have used the wrong version? A spell-checker is not guaranteed to pick this up.

I have to own up to a rather embarrassing example of word blankness, which has persisted for 25 years on the back of the pronunciation of a word I heard in a pop song! In 1988-89, as an avid fan of the singer Bobby Brown (please don’t judge), I sang merrily along to the lyrics of what I thought was ‘My perogative’. I read the sleeve notes on the album countless times. I have used the word in my everyday speech (though it is not, admittedly, one that comes up all the time). But until this year, I never had cause to write it down.

So when I saw the spelling ‘prerogative’ in print, I was mystified. This must be wrong! Surely Bobby Brown never spelled it this way on his single or album cover? Ever the curious linguist, I looked it up in a dictionary.

Lo, and behold, prerogative was the correct spelling. So, I thought – Bobby’s album cover is to blame for my error! Into the musty old vinyl storage cupboard I ventured, rummaging through the ancient cardboard sleeves until I arrived at the correct specimen.

Oh dear. Bobby spelled prerogative correctly after all. It was me, hearing ‘perogative’ in his clippy, pop delivery that led me to believe this was the spelling. And I read it that way every time.

So, what is the cure for word blankness? If there is one at all, it is to slow down. People are always in a hurry to meet a deadline, to get something published. And publishing quickly (from first draft, with no extra revisions) is all too easy in this digital age. But not taking the time to see something for how it really is presented can leave you feeling very silly indeed. Just as I do right now.