The very importance of a single letter is seen by the following: A printer putting to press a form of the Book of Common Prayer, the c in the annexed passage dropped out unperceived by him—"We shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye;" when the book appeared, to the horror of the devout worshippers, the passage read, "we shall all be hanged in the twinkling of an eye." In the directions for conducting Catholic service, a shocking blunder once occurred in printing "calotte" (a priest's cap) "culotte;" now a culotte means what would be known in drawing-room English as a gentleman's small-clothes. The sentence read, "Here the priest will take off his culotte."
In one of the now venerable Lord Brougham's speeches, when the noble lord said "the masses" the printer actually believed him to say "them asses." It is curious how queer some things will be. In a review of a historical work the other day, it was a little ambiguous in the critic to say, "It was well understood what were to be the plans of the Opposition after the Queen's chemise." It would have been less scandalous in the proof-reader to have got that word as it ought to have been—"demise." An eminent writer, intending to allude to Cato and Brutus, was lately made to speak of cats and brutes.
A long list of blunders of this kind might be enumerated, and not a few of them have become stock jokes, or material for jokes, in the printing-office. Some of these are "full-blown noses," instead of "full-blown roses;" "he arose and shook off his ears," instead of "shook off his fears;" "horse literature," in- stead of "Norse literature;" "syllabub," instead of "syllabus;" "omelet," instead of "amulet," and not a few which, current in the printing-office, need not circulate beyond it. Many of the verbal errors are of a kind which will escape the ken of the most watchful reader; because, though they weaken or pervert the sense of the author, they do not destroy it.
One fruitful source of errors is proper names. There are certain names which seem obstinately determined not to get themselves properly spelled. Many of these will readily occur to the reader. The most notable of all names in this respect, however, is Brobdingnag, which all printers have seemingly conspired to rob of the n in the second syllable; there is no getting them to relent in this particular, do what you will. Spite of Swift "and all his works," they will have it Brobdignag, and Brobdignag it seems destined to be to the end of the chapter. Among other instances of words in which a letter is almost invariably dropped, are ophtalmic for ophthalmic, Melancthon for Melanchthon, and Ralegh for Raleigh.
Some idea may be had of the way in which foreign names are mangled between the telegraph and the printer, by a chain of blunders in one of our daily papers in a dispatch from Berlin, received during the late war between Austria and Prussia. Instead of "the fortresses of Glatz, Casel, Neissef Forgan, Wittemburg, Spandan and Madgeburg are to be armed," one should have read Cosel, Neisse, Torgau, Wittemberg, Spandau, and Madgeburg. The same paper once described the journey of the Tunisian embassy from Leghorn to Paris by the unheard-of route of Mount Sinai! Mont Cenis was, of course, intended. An explicable, if not excusable, blunder, was that in which the entire press of this country participated some time ago, when the Czar (Alexander III.) was said to have declared that Lithuania was worse governed now than it had been under Nicholas. The Czas, a Polish newspaper of Cracow, was the author of a statement otherwise so unfilial on the one hand, and so self-damaging on the other. A telegram one day anounced that "the state of Italy was pregnant with a lamb," instead of "pregnant with alarm."
