How Many Lords, My Lump? The Sweetness of Error

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“The realm of student errors is a kaleidoscopic thicket where Mother Teresa achieves ‘St. Hood,’ bankers seek the ‘Notary Republic,’ Jesus is interrogated by ‘Poncho Pilate,’ and drug addicts kill for ‘morpheme tablets.’ In this alternate universe, ‘Bach has 20 kids and practices on a spinster in the attic,’ villanelles are ‘bad girls,’ American soldiers die in ‘Indigo-China,’ Euripides produces ‘Media,’ Moses creates ‘mosaics,’ and ‘The Jabberwocky’ is written by Carol Lewis.” Skip Eisiminger

“Every night is the dawn of a new error.”—Anonymous

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”—James Joyce

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/25/2013—Anatole France preferred “the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.”

Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truths for yourself.”

And Ortega y Gasset felt, “Man’s real treasure is the treasure of his mistakes, piled up stone by stone through thousands of years.” Indifferent wisdom and sterile truths notwithstanding, one may die eating the Amanita virosa, identified as “safe” in the 1991 color edition of the Petit Larousse Dictionary.

Of course, there are errors, and there are errors.

In 1995, a legislative comma printed as a hyphen eliminated thousands of Indian Gowaris from affirmative-action benefits. Following that clerical error, 113 Gowaris died in what was intended as a peaceful protest.

About 20 years earlier, Dr. Hayward Foy was indicted on 42 charges of selling the amphetamine phendimetrizine. But when Foy’s lawyers pointed out that the Illinois legal code once spelled the drug pheudimetrizine, all charges were dismissed—the code had the drug misspelled, an error that had been corrected in 1975.

And in July of 1945, when Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki told reporters following the Diet’s discussion of the Potsdam Declaration that the legislature had rejected the Allied demands, President Truman decided that was the last straw and ordered the atomization of Hiroshima. Trouble is, Suzuki had used the ambiguous word mokusatsu in addressing the reporters. What he meant was that the Diet was still discussing the humiliating surrender demanded of Japan.

When Kirby Olson wrote that “to err [is] divine,” he was surely not thinking of how one word led to the tragic conclusion of World War Two and set the stage for another. More likely, he had in mind some inspired slips of the mind such as the “Perishing Rifles,” “World War Too,” and “Catch-1984.”

The realm of student errors is a kaleidoscopic thicket where Mother Teresa achieves “St. Hood,” bankers seek the “Notary Republic,” Jesus is interrogated by “Poncho Pilate,” and drug addicts kill for “morpheme tablets.” In this alternate universe, “Bach has 20 kids and practices on a spinster in the attic,” villanelles are “bad girls,” American soldiers die in “Indigo-China,” Euripides produces “Media,” Moses creates “mosaics,” and “The Jabberwocky” is written by Carol Lewis.

Most students disappear from professors’ lives after they drop off their final examinations, but one young man I taught stayed in the area and opened a bicycle shop not far from Clemson. I had a good mind to take my bike to his establishment until I read his newspaper ad: “Bike Shop: owned & operated by a Clemson Grad & formal CU footbal player [sic and sic].”

Formal as this announcement was, I wasn’t going to trust my Shimano derailleur to one unable to spell “football” after playing the game for four years at a university that aspires to be worthy of its athletic department.

But what are the young to do when so much of the culture is in error to start with?

Aesop’s story of the ant and the grasshopper is an elementary case in point. Ask any entomologist, and she will tell you that grasshoppers are as diligent about feeding themselves as ants, most of which are torpid through the winter in the middle latitudes.

In health classes, students are often told of the “funny bone,” which is a nerve, and the “jugular vein,” which is an artery.

In history, the story of Nero “fiddling” while Rome burned is likewise seldom examined as it should be. Indeed, no fiddle or violin existed during the Roman Empire; what Nero probably played was a small lyre called a fidicula, thus the “fiddling.”

In their English classes, students may learn that the lion is “the king of the jungle” but, if they take German, they’ll learn that it’s “the king of the desert.” Both languages have it wrong, of course; lions dominate the African plains.

And students familiar with Bulfinch’s Mythology often ask why Atlas carries the Earth on his shoulders when the Titan’s punishment was to carry the sky.

Normally, I’m the sort to note that two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left. I also have a habit of scouring errata lists for, you guessed it, errors. When I was teaching full-time, I used to peruse the footnotes in the new anthologies publishers mailed out for review. I’ll never forget one gloss of an allusion to “the fraudulent Contrivances of Plagius” in an essay Ben Franklin wrote at age 16. The footnote explained that the reference was “a pun on Pelagius, an early British theologian whose belief in free will was attacked by Calvinists and Puritans.” But this made no sense since the young Deist was a staunch defender of free will. The allusion was simply to the fraudulent contrivances of plagiarists, who transcribed the work of others to embellish their own, as Franklin clearly states in a later passage.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’ve never claimed to be without sin, especially as a writer. With no tongue in cheek, I once wrote, “As a boy, Abe Davidson [a Russian-American sculptor] carved buxom women into wooden canes for Russian soldiers, for there were many following WW One who needed help walking.” My editor for the piece, Davidson’s granddaughter, wrote back wondering how Russians today regarded her grandfather given his rude treatment of women. Though I was embarrassed and chastened, I was grateful to have been spared further ridicule.

When I first started teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses, I made so many errors that I made a mea culpa session at the start of most classes a regular feature. But my most embarrassing public error was made when my wife and I took a basic computer class in the late 1980s. A Clemson instructor stood at a lectern while about a dozen of us sat facing him and our new computers. After telling us where the on/off switch was, he said, “Now type ‘Are you in?’” I did as instructed, figuring this was some silly personified DOS code to waken the computer genie from his nap, who if “in” would fetch something called my “electronic mail.” When my screen suddenly appeared different from those of the students around me, the instructor walked around to see what the problem was. “No, no,” he said, barely able to contain himself, “Type R-U-N.”

Perhaps the most famous English literary error is Cortez’s “discovery” of the Pacific in Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” As English teachers never tire of pointing out, it was not “stout Cortez”; it was “fat Balboa.” What I have long found interesting in this regard is that Keats’s friend Cowden Clark immediately pointed out the mistake, yet the poet did not correct the error in any edition while he lived. Some readers have theorized that he was alluding to Cortez’s being the first to view the Valley of Mexico, vast as a sea. Others have thought “Balboa” spoiled the rhythm, but it doesn’t, especially if the superfluous “stout” is dropped. No, I say; sly John Keats knew that a rich error had much longer legs than the truth, or I would not be writing about it almost 200 years later.

The illustration for this column was taken via Flickr from Rob Pym’s Photostream (735) at http://www.flickr.com/photos/robpym/282716411/

Our caption, “Through a glass darkly,” is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_a_glass,_darkly_%28phrase%29#.22Through_a_glass.2C_darkly.22