More insight and incite

Letter from Stan Stanfill

Orthography – May 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

Ed,

It took a few days for me to get around to reading the April issue of Colorado Central, so I imagine you have been inundated with the “gotcha” emails on the pair of painful usage errors your usual careful copy editing failed to catch. Imagine two different writers making the same mistake in the same issue! Both George Sibley on page 11 and Martha on page 33 used “incite” (“vt. to set in motion”) when they obviously meant “insight” (“n. the ability to see and understand clearly”). At least that is the way I remember it from Mrs. Rae’s 8th grade English class in Craig in 1946. Even though the error is more in keeping with those of our own Montrose Press, keep up the good work. We both enjoy your publication and your columns in the disappearing Denver Post.

Stan Stanfill

Montrose

Dear Stan,

Just a reminder that in this business, the buck stops at the copy editor, and thus all errors in Colorado Central are the fault of the establishment — because we can’t afford one.

I have no memory of what George originally put (or if it was changed). But occasionally we change words because they divide wrong, or dangle, or have accents we can’t duplicate, or to simplify a complex construction. And this double error certainly suggests something was changed.

This particular error doubtlessly occurred because I often spell “insight” wrong, by converting it to “insite,” but the spell check usually catches my bad habit. This time around, however, careless spell-checking probably earned me a double-gotcha.

Martha