Several years ago I wrote a piece for my students to remind them that they should not blindly trust spell check.

A publishing house in Australia is learning that lesson the hard way.

Hot water over spell check

PENGUIN Group Australia turns over $120 million a year from printing words but a one-word misprint has cost it dearly.

The publishing company was forced to pulp and reprint 7000 copies of Pasta Bible last week after a recipe called for “salt and freshly ground black people” — instead of pepper — to be added to the spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto.

The exercise will cost Penguin $20,000, the head of publishing, Bob Sessions, said. At $3300 a letter, it’s a pricey typo.

Rest of story

And here is my little contribution…

Don’t Depend on Spell Check

When ewe right, ewe should remember two double Czech you’re spelling. Spell check will knot catch awl miss takes.

As eye sit hear in my office reeding articles, eye one dear how many thymes I have scene speeling errors that should have been avoided.

Spell check a loan does knot prevent mistakes.

Sum times using the grammar Czech helps too identify some miss takes.

Butt knot awl of them.

There is nothing like reeding a story out loud. When ewe reed sum thing and here it, ewe can often sea wear the mistakes are.

From a friend who has been there and done that…

Colleagues:

What a difference a character makes, and the AP is to blame (I just checked). My own daily newspaper, despite my tip-off yesterday, incorrectly spelled the name of the newly inaugurated Chilean president as Sebastian “Pinera.” It is “Piñera.” So newspapers all over the English-speaking will be getting it wrong because the AP international desk in New York won’t take the time to figure out how to use a tilde. I’m sure the AP burerau chief in Santiago knows how to spell it.

So what? So, the “n” and the “ñ” are two separate characters in the Spanish alphabet. I taught my daily newspaper, Baton Rouge’s The Advocate, a few years back how to write the tilde on a Mac so its headlines and text would correctly say El Niño instead of El Nino.

Recipe stories should say jalapeño, not jalapeno.

Failure to use the correct character can have disastrous consequences. A few years back, the staff of the San Francisco Examiner, I believe it was, decided to be cute with the New Year’s Day edition and impress people with their Spanish. So its headline said, “Feliz Ano Nuevo” instead of “Feliz Año Nuevo.”

So what? So, “Feliz Ano Nuevo” means “Happy New Anus.”

That’s all for today, colleagues. Hasta manana. Oops! I mean, hasta mañana.

Anatomy of a Rumor: The Story Behind Chief Justice John Roberts’s ‘Retirement’

Clearly a student sent out an immediate tweet on what the law prof said. I would feel even worse if this happened in a journalism class but this is a good teaching experience for journalists.

This episode shows the down side of tweets and blogs. Going straight from source’s mouth to the world prevents those vital few minutes to mull over what was said and the necessary follow up questions. It also skips the vital editorial process.

Everyone of my stories was made better because of questions editors raised. I’m not a bad writer but my editors make me look a whole lot better. (One editor I once worked for, when interviewing new hires, would ask for not just the individual’s published clips but also the first drafts. She wanted to see how much of what was published was the result of the editor and the writer.)

As much as I hate quoting Ronald Reagan: “Trust but verify.”

And then there is the old newspaper chestnut: “If you mother says she loves you, check it out.“