I love newspaper corrections and apologies. I love misprints and mistakes. I always have. As I child, I used to scour second hand bookshops for collections of newspaper clippings, misprints, mistranslations and general errors. Yes, I may have been quite a strange child. But that’s not the point right now.
The point is, I still like them. just as much. I like it when people get things wrong - not in a cruel way, just because some things are just funny, and that’s one of them. Things are funny by being wrong. It’s how jokes work.
But I’m very picky about my papers. I think they *should* be correct. Factually, gramatically, sensically, there’s no real reason for them to be wrong, I don’t think, and my god, this sentence is going to come back and bite me on the arse some day, but no matter for now.
I simply love corrections and clarifications. That’s the only point. Which is a good thing, because now I have to deal with them quite a lot. The thing about the internet, of course, is that you can correct your articles once they’re out there in the world, which you can’t do so easily with a piece of paper. On the interwebnet, you just go in and put right what once went wrong. It’s very like Quantum Leap in that way.
Sometimes, however, it’s better to leave the things that once went wrong just as wrong as they were, while admitting that they were wrong and that you know it. Because then you don’t lose any of the comedy.
No, I’m losing the point. Sorry, the point, pure and simple, was this:
In the Observer ten days ago, they printed an article about the relative levels of emotional and intellectual range in various animals.
A week later, they printed the following correction:
In ‘Sheep may be dumb … but they’re not stupid’ (last week, News), we said that studies in Oxford showed that a Caledonian heifer called Betty had managed to bend a piece of wire to construct a hook and retrieve food from a jar. Betty is, in fact, a New Caledonian crow, a creature perhaps better adapted to bending wire than a cow.
Now I’ve accused cows of many things in my time; violent urges, rabid stubborness, killing small children, acting as sponges, not being able to swim, trying to take over the world - but for none of these activities would I have expected them to acquire the skill of bending pieces of wire and using it to extracate food from jam jars.
No-one, I thought, could have made that mistake. Having no opposable thumbs handy, and a brain the size of a very tiny brain, not being famous for their picking-uppy skills, surely - I thought - no-one actually sat down and wrote an article in which they claimed that this was true. Clearly, I thought, it must have been a single sentence in which they’d just removed a seemingly unneccesary ‘r’, with hilarious consequences. This was a sub-editors slip in concentration, thought I.
Sadly not. A whole paragraph had been based around the miracle cow. Or Miracow, as they’re known in the trade.
‘Another creature similarly viewed by modern society as little more than a benign food source - the cow - is also shown to be an astute animal capable of solving riddles with an intellect more traditionally associated with an ape. Studies at Oxford University found that Betty, a Caledonian heifer, instinctively bent a piece of wire, using a gap in her food tray to create a hook that allowed her to scrape food from the bottom of a jar.’
[Whole article here]
Right. Let’s consider this practically. Here, dear journalist, is a cow, a jam jar, some wire, some other equipment that might come in handy, and here, for the sake of sticking to the text, is the plastic food tray that you don’t seem surprised that a cow uses. What would happen then, dear thing, do you think, if you presented a jam jar with a small piece of food in the bottom to that cow?
Yes, that’s right, it would stand on it. Or maybe poo on it. Or perhaps look at it. Then is would stand about on some grass, and look around slowly, and chew.
What then, I ask, if you gave that cow some wire?
It would poo on the wire. And then on the jar again, and then walk on them, and then lick its eye, do some sleeping standing up, and chew.
Testing your theory, let’s just toss that cow some pliers. Go to it, cow! Oh, looksee! The cow failed to catch the pliers, having no ability to grasp foriegn objects, and seems completely unaware of their possible usefulness. And now it seems to be eating the plastic food tray.
Ah, sadly, the cow, in defiance to Oxford University’s studies, is showing reluctance to perform its tricks.
I’d be interested to see this research, actually. I’d be intruiged to know whether, in the next paragraph, the researchers talked of Betty’s ability to navigate instinctively while flying over 40 metres above the earth on her tiny two foot wingspan.
Because I would have thought that that would have made it into the article. Two foot not being that much, you see.
For a heifer.
