By all means email me via the contact page if the relevance of this particular entry eludes you. Don't feel bad, it's a little obscure. Plus, I brazenly stole the idea from a friend of mine who's considerably brighter than me. In a remote monastery, a new monk arrives to devote his life to contemplation, seclusion and thankless labour. He is soon assigned the task of copying antique texts. After a couple of weeks of this, it occurs to him that he and the other scribing monks are copying, by hand, books that have themselves already been copied by hand. “Forgive my impertinence, Brother Matthew,” he says one day. “But isn’t there a considerable risk that by copying from copies we might perpetuate earlier errors? Has anyone ever proofread their work against the original texts?” Brother Matthew admits it has never crossed his mind. He immediately takes himself off to the vaults and begins to scrutinise the original texts. In the small hours of the following morning, Brother Matthew emerges, tears glistening in his weary eyes. In his hands is gripped a particularly ancient-looking volume. “What’s wrong, Brother Matthew?” his brethren ask. “Please, tell us. There must be something we can do to alleviate your suffering.” It is some minutes before Brother Matthew is able to speak. He holds the dusty manuscript aloft. “The word is ‘celebrate’,” he says. In a little departure from our 'A World Without Proof Readers' feature, we present 'If Proof Readers Ruled the World'. Okay, just kidding. But judging by the number of images of very permanent spelling errors I've seen floating around the internet, it's a market that's ripe for exploitation. |










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