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"T" is for "typo"

Tim de Lisle, the deputy editor of Intelligent Life magazine, has pointed out to me that there was, until this morning (I fixed it just now), a typo in the standfirst to our Philip Pullman interview online.

What should have been a "thought" in the first sentence lost a "t" and appeared as a "though". Nothing surprising there: typos that don't get picked up by spellcheckers have a much better survival rate than those that do.

What surprises me now is that the piece was read by at least 45,000 people here on our site, attracted a comet's tail of comments, and yet Tim was the first to point out the typo—alerted by the author of the original piece. Was the author the first to notice it, or the first to mind?

I assume we read less fixedly online, because the screen is harsher on our eyes (at least until our Kindles arrive); and that this helps us to skate over typos. I also guess that readers (other than authors) mind typos less online, unless mistakes are so intrusive as to destroy sense.

I would go on to guess that readers mind less, because they're sympathetic to the greater degree of improvisation that goes with small-scale online publishing; or (my approach, I think) they are more tolerant because they know mistakes can be fixed easily at any time, now or later. In absolute terms, they matter less.

But for whatever reason, context has a huge effect. A typo like that in the print edition of Intelligent Life would have been the cause of long faces all round.

Over lunch on Friday—Emily Bobrow and I took Enid Stubin to the Morgan Library dining room, but the dining room was overbooked, so we ended up in the café—Emily cited the story of an internationally famous violinist who had busked for a lark in the New York subway, and found that nobody had paid him any special attention.

We thought this was a pretty striking story at the time, and it led us into a discussion of how much of our supposed tastes are really affectations, and how we don't know the good stuff until it is put before us in a gallery window with a fat price tag, or on the stage at Carnegie Hall. But on reflection I'm not so sure.

Part of that "affectation" argument is undoubtedly true. I'm pretty sure high-end audio must be wasted on 99% of buyers, who beyond a certain age are highly unlikely to have any hearing left up in the ethereal ranges that high-end audio reaches. Blind tastings of wine are notorious for producing ratings wildly different from those implied by the prices of the bottles and the grandeur of the labels.

But our sensitivities surely change with context and expectation. Whatever part of our sensibility we need to enjoy great classical music, we don't need to have it switched on when we take the subway to work. Whatever part of our sensibility demands perfection in typesetting, we don't have it switched on when we read online. Why should we? Imagine how exhausting life would get, if we responded to every subway busker with the intensity reserved for a $115 concert at Carnegie Hall.

But imagine now the busking experiment in reverse: you take an average subway busker and put him or her on stage at Carnegie Hall. With a few exceptions, I do believe the audience would pretty soon lose patience.

Enough: this is fast becoming a very roundabout reflection on a missing "t"—probably one of the longer outpourings provoked by the absence of a single letter, since Georges Perec wrote a whole novel ("La Disparition") without using the letter "e". We shall struggle at More Intelligent Life to maintain the standards of a concert at Carnegie Hall. But you will forgive us if, from time to time, we give you Joshua Bell playing in the New York subway.