Friday, June 19, 2009

Miss prints has a royal history. From Stalin and His Hangmen, 'misprints had been disingenuously used to annoy authority. Queen Victoria was reported to have "pissed" over Waterloo Bridge. Substituting one consonant made Stalin "pisser" or "shitter" (ssalin, sralin). Stalingrad coould be set to read "Stalin is a reptile" (Stalin gad). Under Stalin, misprints were declared "sorties by the class enemy." Writers or typesetters could die for one misplaced letter, as Andrei Tarkovsjy's film Mirror unforgettably suggests.' This came up in Obama 'confronting a delicate topic.'

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