Elementary mistakes - May 13, 2008
On Monday UK newspaper the Guardian, known to many as the Grauniad due to its penchant for mistakes, ran the following correction:
We misspelled a number of elements in the periodic table printed in part VI of the Science Course supplement distributed with the paper on May 1. We meant Iron (not Irone); Praseodymium (not Praseodynium); Neodymium (not Neodynium); Neptunium (not Neptuniam); Americium (not Americum); Seaborgium (not Seoborgium); and Darmstadtium (not Darmstadium).
Oh how we chortled. Then someone suggested I check if Nature has ever made similar boobs...
Well I’m pleased to say we’ve never misspelled ‘iron’ as ‘irone’.
But we have been guilty of using ‘Neodynium’, eight times to be exact, versus the Guardian’s two.
This looks bad. But wait, surely what’s more important is how often you misspell a word?
With that in mind, the Great Beyond is proud to present the first ever Neodymium misspelling league. The graph below shows the number of times a publication has printed the word ‘Neodymium’ versus the number of times it has printed ‘Neodynium’ (based on Google site searches for both words).
So what can we take from all this? Well the numbers for the Guardian are probably too small to draw any robust conclusions from. It looks like the New York Times has won the day again though.