Bad Typo Dept.

No typo is a good typo. I’ve had more than my share. In a long-ago article about Central Park, I referred to its bridal trail, which implies it is a place that brides, not horses, do their running.

Another memorable snafu wasn’t technically a typo, but it was still pretty terrible. For a profile of Catherine Abate, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Corrections, I took a brief tour of Rikers Island with Abate, hanging out while she chatted with guards, prisoners, etc. At one point, while describing how Abate greeted the prisoners and then listened to their various complaints, I wrote something like:

“Abate grasps their hands and cocks her ear …”

Shortly after the article was published, a reader pointed out how that sentence could be badly misread. (Talk about the Department of Corrections!)

And just the other day, I wrote a brief blog post about the American Economic Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans and the “virtual flood of press coverage” that came out of it. As a commenter named Brian soon wrote: “New Orleans and a ‘Flood’ of coverage? Groan…”

He was entirely right.

So I am as guilty, if not more so, as anyone of creating typos. But the following typo strikes me as worth pointing out, if only in the hopes that someone will fix it in a hurry. In my copy of today’s Times (yes, I still prefer the paper version, by a long shot), on the back page of the Business section is an “Information Directory” that helpfully offers the e-mail addresses and phone numbers for various Times departments, including:

Letters to the Editor
Op-Ed/Editorial
Public Editor

And also, if you really need to, you can contact the paper’s very top editors, whose e-mail addresses are listed under — and I quote:

The Editoprs.