INYT Editing Fail: "On puzzle of the world"?

Andy Warhol

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What's the word coming to? I mean the edited word! Here is the first sentence of Nicholas Kristof's recent column for the NYT, "What religion would Jesus belong to?" (September 5, 2016):

On puzzle of the world is that religions often don't resemble their founders.

What?! "On puzzle"? "ON puzzle"?! "ON"??!! Surely, this should be "One puzzle . . ." Such a typo as this one, so to speak - the first word in the column - should have been easily caught.

This error can be found in the hardcopy of the International New York Times that comes delivered with the JoongAng Daily in Korea, so your copy might have the correct word, "One." If so, you'll just have to trust me that my copy has "on.".

Any other readers have a copy with "on"?

Official Copy Editor: Trans-Humanities

The Journal

I received a nice request yesterday from Ewha's Trans-Humanities journal, along with some praise that reminded me of how long I've been teaching and editing here at Ewha. First, the praise:

You have helped us very well since 2008 - for so long you [have] made the English of our journal [better]. I want to say [out] loud, "Thank you."

Now comes the request:

[We] have a question, or I ask you for this: Could we print your name as Copy Editor in the journal Trans-Humanities? If you would accept our suggestion, we would be very thankful.

I said yes, of course. I'm flattered to learn that the journal wants my name as one of its editors. And yes, I know that the position isn't the grandest position on a journal board, but the copy editing job is what I do for this journal, and the position is a perfectly honorable one.

Moreover, I learn a lot about issues that I wouldn't ordinarily encounter in my current department, as is also the case with other journals for which I copy edit, such as the Journal of Peace and Unification, or the Feminist Studies in English Literature.

The need for good proofreaders...

36 Yalta Boulevard

C-F 26-1-12-20-1 2-15-21-12-5-22-1-18-4

(Image from olensteinhauer.com)

I'm still reading Olen Steinhauer's Cold War novel 36 Yalta Boulevard, whose 'hero', a character named Brano Sev, is a spy who has fallen from grace with his superiors, the apparatchiks of an unnamed Eastern European communist country aligned with the Soviet Union but pursuing a semi-autonomous path, and who is working to redeem himself with his superiors by faithfully following what he believes to be their intentions for his life in Viennese exile from the socialist paradise.

This could almost be a novel about religion.

Speaking of which, Brano Sev reads the Viennese newspaper Kurier every day, his eye ever alert for the revelation of a message. One day, sitting with his possibly apparatchick girlfriend Dijana Franković at breakfast in her apartment, he receives what he has been waiting for while reading the personal ads:

[H]e reopened the personals. As he did every day, he scanned them quickly, but this time one caught his eye.

Franz F, "Gedicht-1"

Franz F, "Poem-1":

Lieb + Ebenbild sterben in Kampfgas.
Warte ich auf Lawinen? Schlau . . . hab dich!
Acht Jahre! OO Leute, O Reich!

Love + image die in War-gas.
Do I wait for avalanches? Sly . . . gotcha!
Eight years! OO people, O empire.

He didn't understand the poem, and that made sense. This was written not for a surface meaning but for a hidden one, the small grammatical blunder of the first line -- the in instead of im -- helping draw his attention. And the code was simple. Brano looked at the date on the newspaper -- 11 April 1967. 11-4-1967. Poem, minus one. 11-4-1966, or 1-1-4-1-9-6-6.

"You are finding a lover?"

Brano could feel himself reddening. "No," he said. "Just reading poetry."

She smiled, rocking her head as she returned to the world's headlines. "So my Brani like poetry . . ."

Brano got up after a while and, on her bedside table, found a worn pencil. He took it, with the newspaper, to the toliet, closed the door, and began underlining letters based on the code 1-1-4-1-9-6-6 [marked here in bold italics].

Lieb + Ebenbild sterben in Kampfgas.
Warte ich auf Lawinen? Schlau . . . hab dich!
Acht Jahre! OO Leute, O Reich!

L-I-E-B-E-N-G-A-S-T-E-W-C-A-B-D-A-C-O-O

The first part made sense: a meeting place -- Liebengaste WC; the batroom of the Liebengaste, a restaurant north of Mariahilfer, on Neubaugasse. But the rest -- ABDACOO -- did not. Which meant they were numbers. He transformed the letters into numbers, based simply on their alphabetic order, and found 1241300. A date and time -- 12 April, 13:00. (Steinhauer, 36 Yalta Boulevard, 197-198)

At this point in my reading (after first noting that "empire" ought to be followed by an exclamation mark), I stopped, puzzled. Anyone who knows me well enough (and I hope that nobody does) will understand my perplexity whenever faced by puzzles of this sort. Simply put, I'm not very good at solving them, not even those that have been solved for me.

I tried to follow the simple code. I could see that "1-1" meant "Li," but shouldn't "4-1" mean "be" rather than "Eb"? Eventually, I realized that I probably ought to be counting the "+," and that worked -- once I learned to ignore punctuation -- until I reached the first "O," which was only the eighth rather than the ninth letter after the "c" of "Acht." Was I supposed to count the exclamation mark for the "O" to be the ninth letter? An exlamation mark is not a letter, however, and I hadn't been counting punctuation before. Even if I did count punctuation now to reach the "O" after "Jahre!" in nine places, the third "O," the one following "Leute," would be seven letters further instead of six. Finally, it clicked. There was a typo. In the "OO" before "Leute," the second "O" should have been underlined, for it was nine letters after the "c" of "Acht" and six letters before the third "O," i.e., the "O" after "Leute."

But I was still puzzled.

If the letters "ABDACOO" were supposed to be a code for numbers based simply on their alphabetic order, then "ABDAC" would be "12413," but "OO" should be "1515" instead of "00."

I resolved my puzzlement by assuming that Steinhauer, like Homer, sometimes "nodded" and that in a moment of inattention read his letters "OO" (oh oh) as the numbers "00" (zero zero). In other words, he forgot that these were supposed to be in code and read them directly.

Fortunately, Brano Sev made the same error and thus made his rendevous without mishap...

UPDATE: After discussion with Olen Steinhauer (see comments), I realize that I misread "ABDACOO" as a sequence of letters, for I now perceive that the final two items in the sequence were numbers and that the crucial sentence was meant to be read as "He transformed the letters [ABDAC] into numbers." Everything was doubtless clear for all but the slow-witted folks like myself...