Last Saturday, my year-end column on errors was a quiz that included 15 notable mistakes – what The Globe and Mail got wrong and what the article should have said. The headline "Can you spot the errors of our ways" was a great invitation to readers to keep noticing the mistakes and keep helping The Globe correct its errors.
Several readers readers noted that the errors just kept on coming, even in the day before the column appeared and the same day.
On the day before, as you see in the picture above, the regular feature Facts and Arguments lost a letter, an amusing but embarrassing typo.
Also on the Friday, Dec. 26, a Globe Drive car review said this: Car buyers "no longer fret about getting from A to B, but instead worry their quaffed heads about how to get from A to B."
Quaffed heads? We aren't discussing beer here, so it should have said coiffed.
"Thanks for the quiz related to G&M writers' and editors' lapses of 2014 – but I was disappointed that you didn't test readers on their knowledge of the difference between drinking and hairdressing, based on a sentence that ran in your newspaper one day earlier," one reader said. "I trust [the writer] knows how to spot a coiffed reader's seemly hairdo, and dictated his text to a less-aware colleague whose mind was on the next pint."
I don't know who doesn't know quaffed from coiffed and I'm not sure we can blame the holidays for that.
Another reader noted that in the Focus section last Saturday: "It's handy that G&M includes in the same section both an invitation to join the ranks of the clever and vigilant (Stead Dec 27, 2014) and an example to employ in doing so (piece of mind)" … in one of the Bearing Witness series.
Yes, it is peace of mind, not a piece of your mind.
For those of you who love the funny homophone errors, here's another quiz to test yourself on how many homophones you know.
Please let me know if you see any others, and Happy New Year.