“My job, simply speaking, is to get things right. So there is no worse feeling than the realization that you have entered a correctable error into print and that a correction will appear a day or two later to proclaim, ‘Because of an editing error . . . .’
“There is no escaping the page of the newspaper that you have marred; it reappears everywhere you look: blowing down the sidewalk, on a subway car, wrapped around the sea bass you’ve just bought at the market. There is no doubt that five years from now, I’ll buy something on eBay and it will come in a box padded with a scrap of The New York Times that says ‘Tom Udall of Utah.’”
—David Vecsey, copy editor, “Because of an Editing Error: Blunders, gaffes and terrible math skills, written in permanent ink,” The New York Times, Jan. 3,
2021.
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Editorial Comment: Any editor knows: Some errors are invisible until printed 10,000 times.
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“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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