What is it with the New York Times that it can't spell names correctly? The lead front-page news story in today's Times refers to "Benjamin L. Ginsberg, Mr. Bush's general counsel." A "reporter's notebook" column that appears inside the national section of today's Times refers to "Ben Ginsburg, a lawyer for Mr. Bush," and makes a second reference to "Mr. Ginsburg." The Bush campaign Web site goes with Ginsberg, with an "e," not a "u."
Readers of yesterday's Smartertimes.com will recall that the Times made a similar error yesterday, referring to a lawyer for Vice President Gore once as "Stephen Zack" and elsewhere as "Steve Zach."
This is the sort of carelessness that would annoy readers of a small-town weekly or a high-school newspaper. But the Times, which fancies itself the world's greatest newspaper and which employs scads of highly paid copy editors, seems unable to root out these errors, even after the newspaper's executive editor made a speech at a staff retreat emphasizing the need to fix the name-spelling problem. No one is expecting the editors at the New York Times to know off the top of their heads how to spell these lawyers' names; all they have to be able to do is notice that the names are spelled two different ways in the same day's newspaper. That's a task that even a machine could handle.
"Ladles" Who Lunch: The "Writers on Writing" column in the arts section of today's New York Times says that William Faulkner "famously claimed that if he had to rob his mother, he would not hesitate, and that 'the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladles.'"
The Times column goes on to say, "We might wonder today if it is worth any number of young men, but let's not."
"Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" renders the Faulkner quote as referring to "old ladies," not, as the Times has it, old "ladles." Which makes the next line about young men make more sense. As Smartertimes.com reader Bill Schweber pointed out in an email this morning, with "ladles," it's incomprehensible.