Just because I haven’t been a professional copy editor for five months doesn’t mean I stopped seeing typos and errors … everywhere.
- The most galling one, since I saw it every week for months, is that the IowaWORKS pop-up screen at login misspells “reemployment” as “reemployement”.
- The lack of hyphen there is not officially an error. An Associated Press Stylebook update in 2019 removed hyphens from many common, longtime phrases and also after the prefixes “pre-” and “re-“ when the next letter is an e. It’s stupid and confusing, as are many AP style changes since 2017 (but God forbid we use a serial comma).
- My new health insurance card misspells “benefits” on the back.
- Before the Iowa State Fair, KWWL offered a “sneak peak” at the butter cow.
- During the fair, KCCI’s locator map showed Iowa Highway 46, which hasn’t existed since 1998, on East 30th Street.
- The Associated Press — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS!! — also committed the “sneak peak” error — IN THE HEADLINE!! Too much attention on deleting hyphens, I guess.
- KWWL misspelled “Old Threshers” as “Old Threshures”.
- KCRG misspelled “pricier” as “priceier”.
- KCRG misspelled “September” as “Septempter”.
- Politico wrote “Authorization for Use of Military Use” instead of “Force” for the AUMF acronym.
- Both KWWL and KCRG said in their broadcasts that a house fire in Cedar Rapids was on “East Avenue NW” instead of E Avenue NW.
- Politico wrote “stepped foot” instead of “set foot”.
- This sentence from the Athletic dropped at least one word: “His successor was Bob Bowlsby left Iowa in 2006.”
- KCRG’s football score ticker called Loras the Durhawks instead of Duhawks. (Du. Du Hawks. Du Hawks Mich. — Ed.)
- The Des Moines Register misspelled U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota’s last name as Emmert.
- KCRG covered a “Mustangs vs. Mustangs” game on Oct. 27, except that on the video board, it was the Mount Vernon “Mustans”.
- This happened in the Oct. 27 print edition of the Register:
- KCRG misspelled “antisemitic” as “antisemetic”. (Regarding the lack of a hyphen, see the note at top and an AP Stylebook tweet from April 2021.)
- KGAN misspelled Fairleigh Dickinson (Iowa WBB’s first opponent) as “Dickenson”.
- The envelope for Iowa PBS’s monthly newsletter put an apostrophe in “Iowans”.
- Pinseekers, “Iowa’s first year-round golf entertainment facility” used “sneak peak” in a TV commercial.
- WQAD wrote “Donaldson” instead of “Donnellson” in a story about top vehicle crash areas in southeast Iowa.
Anyone interested in a proofreader?
UPDATE 1/24/24: In a July story, the Council Bluffs Nonpareil had a sentence where the number of Iowa counties added up to 105 instead of 99 and misspelled Linn as Lynn.