The Joy of Print Mistakes

Good proofreading is a difficult task and it is very easy for typos, grammatical errors, and other mistakes to slip by in important publications. On this blog, I make many mistakes, and since I don’t proofread much, they more often than not slip through. But this is not problematic, because most people would agree that this is not an important publication.

But I always get a kick out of reading mistakes in various print publications, especially newspapers.

A classic example occurred in a local paper, The LaSalle Post on Friday, April 3, 2009 in the “LaSalle Police Blotter” section.  In describing a situation with a person pulled over for speeding and found to have drugs in their car, the writer seems to have omitted a word (“by”),  making the sentence grammatically incorrect and also introducing an interesting way to read it.

It says “A search of the vehicle was conducted the officers and other narcotics were found in the vehicle..”

The most natural reading of this grammatically incorrect sentence (without adding the obviously missing “but”) would be effectively split it into two clauses “A search of the vehicle was conducted,” and “the officers and other narcotics were found in the vehicle..”.

That is odd because it would seem to suggest that not only were the officers “found” in the car, but that the officers were classified as narcotics.