National Post: Post-Mortem

Well, the deadline is now over for the National Post 'Inheritance' contest. ( http://www.nationalpost.com/features/inheritance/ )

At first, I had fun with the contest. Then, I got annoyed. Still, I stuck with it and managed to get all the answers they wanted. So I'm happy. Now here's hoping that not too many other people also got it...

Anyway, as I said, it started with great promise. A story told by some person who claims to have 'an abiding respect for accuracy'. Searching around for picky errors: sounds like my kind of fun. But, after a few days of the contest, I get reminded over and over that it's run by the National Post. A newspaper filled to the brim with poor editing and dumb mistakes.

But, enough negativity. From reading this newsgroup, it seems that many people found many extra errors in each part of the puzzle. I'd like to collect all of them. And, interestingly enough, I've found 12 errors in the rest of the web site. I wonder if I can get a prize for that?

Here's what I have so far. I'm not listing all the different possible ways of fixing each error, because for all of them (except one) I think they chose the 'best' way of fixing it. Let me know if you think otherwise, or have anything to add...

Terry

<PROBABLE SPOILERS AHEAD>

Day 2: - the complement of orange is either blue or cyan depending on the type of complement (mixing or visual). Since mixing complements are only used for paint mixing, most people should be answering 'cyan'. http://www.danielsmith.com/inksmith-complements-page- three.html - minor points: - a billion has 12 zeros in british english - odd calling Verne a great _fantasy_ writer after calling him a science-fiction writer earlier

Day 3: - Worst error in this whole thing. In the southern hemisphere, the Coriolis effect causes things to swirl clockwise. Furthermore, it is not observable in the small scale. Tornados yes, drains no. This is one of those easily verifiable falsehoods that for some reason keeps getting spread around. - How does Evie know she's in the past?

Day 4: - logic error: why isn't she time-travelling when getting these problems wrong?

Day 5: - 'skeptical' is an american spelling

Day 6: - 'brainteasers' should be two words

Day 10: - Polonius said 'To thine ownself be true' (not 'own self' - Modern physics did not start with Newton. That's classical (or Newtonian) physics. Modern physics started at the end of the 19th century. - 'He picked it up, examined it briefly, then peered up at the tree.' ('and' before 'then' - 'at the turn of millennium to come' (missing 'the' - orginal: 'Paris before Tokyo' they wanted: 'Tokyo before Paris' (as two separate errors) but, the rules state: 'Each error can be corrected with the replacement of a single English word or number.' why not 'Paris after Tokyo'?

Day 12: - third paragraph ends in a comma - 'give you my precious diamond bracelet' (it's actually Evie's) - 'Faithfully yours, this 22nd Day of June, 2001.' He died before the 9th.

Web site: - 'left what must surely rank as the most remarkable last will and testament in Canadian history.' Not by a long shot. That honour goes to Charles Vance Millar who willed his estate to whoever gave birth to the most babies in the next ten years (The Great Stork Derby.) http://www.snopes2.com/pregnant/babyrace.htm - 'The deadline to enter is Friday, June 22, at12 a.m. PT' Missing space, and also that's before the last day of the puzzle is published. - 'in each instalment' (american spelling) - 'If you paid attention in English, history and math classes, you have a genuine shot at finding all of them.' False statement. There's a whole bunch of non-general knowledge errors. - 'The winner of Inheritance: Who Wants to Be A Millionaire's Heir' Missing '?' in the title - 'will receive A 14-karat'

- Silly things: - 'If you think you have found a punctuation or grammatical irregularity, ignore it.' What if I _know_ I've found one?

Official Contest Rules: - 'he or she has the collected' - 'except as Sponsor's sole discretion' - 'the winner consent to use' - 'Sponsors reserve the right at its sole discretion' - 'conditions or use' (or->of) - 'of any Sponsors property' (Sponsors'

- Silly things: - 'Sponsors will not be responsible for entries which are incomplete, illegible, mutilated, misdirected, delayed, late, lost or not received due to any other factor.' - 'Entries are subject to verification and will be declared invalid if they are illegible, incomplete, mechanically reproduced, mutilated, forged, falsified, altered or tampered with in any way.' - 'SPONSORS RESERVE THE RIGHT TO IMMEDIATELY TERMINATE THE USER'S ACCOUNT'

Not usually any more, and British English is irrelevant anyway.

Also commonly used here. I don't have a copy of the reference dictionary, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it listed first.

I've never heard of 'ownself' as a word in any version of English. I checked a Project Gutenberg text of the play, which happened to be in Elizabethan spelling; it gives the line as 'to thine owne selfe be true.'

Under Day 5, by the way, the PG text I checked give Juliet as saying 'that which we call a Rose, by any other word would smell as sweete'; but apparently 'word' was changed to 'name' in a later edition, so this was not an error.

That depends upon those with whom you usually converse. Most English people I know use the word correctly. In fact, the *only* people who seem regularly to get this wrong are those who work in politics, big business, and the media. Unfortunately, these are the very people who have most influence on vocabulary. Therefore, I suspect and regret that your statement will become truer over time.

Ah, I think I read this out of context. It may be irrelevant to the National Post (whose National Post, btw?) but it's not irrelevant to the British!

This might well be age-sensitive, however.

And thus, ipso facto, if they agree on something it becomes correct.

Canada. Of course, it's a self-proclaimed title.

Mark Brader wrote

I've heard that it wasn't so much that first it was 'word' and then 'name', but rather that it appears differently in various folios, leading some people to think he may have changed it more than once, or from time to time.

Oops - by 'differently' I mean 'as one or the other'

A chain owned, somewhat ironically, by a guy who recently renounced his Canadian citizenship.

I found this tricky. I haven't used a hardcover dictionary in years, ever since I discovered m-w.com, and yet they chose a Canadian dictionary that hardly anyone owns as the official reference. I was sure they were going to try to trip us up with an American spelling somewhere. (I don't think they actually did anywhere, but when I got desparate, I started spell-checking everything in sight. I even translated the whole story to French using Babelfish, just to see if there were any words it didn't recognize.)

I tried going to the Oxford English Dictionary website, but they wanted an annual (get this) 450 pound subscription fee to use their service. I'm guessing there must be something on there more sophisticated than a mere dictionary.

Not 'more sophisticated', just 'bigger'.

Have you ever seen a paper copy of the OED? It's about three trillion volumes each a gazillion pages long, give or take a hundred thousand or so.

As you can probably tell, I'm exaggerating. But it is quite staggeringly large. I vaguely recall that you can get the whole thing on CD-ROM(s) for about the same price as you mention above (but I may be

I doubt it. I think it's just that the Oxford University Press is clueless when it has to deal with computers.

I once bought a multi-lingual dictionary on CD published by them. It was so limited in vocabulary, it did not know the word 'toadstool'. I don't think they'd realised that a CD has a higher capacity than a floppy.

ObPuzzle: What is the most frequently occurring definition in the Oxford English Dictionary?