Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Temperment (for Temperament)

"When angry count to ten. When very angry, swear." This timely advice came to us more than a hundred years ago from Mark Twain. The typo temperment is found on the B, or high probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html, meaning that it was found at least 16 times in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. Missing vowels are the most typical form of typo to be found in an OPAC, but temperament is also a word that people aren't sure how to spell. Evidence of this can be found in Google, where temperment is present in almost a million web pages. By way of comparison, temperament is in 10 million sites. We cannot stress this enough - check each individual record before you make a change. There is always the chance that the typo was in the original and an alert cataloger marked this with a "sic."

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