This Week's Sneak Peek

A propos of nothing.... 

I've been reading Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving lately. My copy is one of those books you find in a dozen or more languages at the gift shop of any tourist attraction, bought by my parents when they went on a tour of Spain and Morocco several years ago.

Presumably, this edition uses Irving's original text, and was not translated back into the original English from Spanish. But the cut lines on the color plates are all in Spanish, and European-style 《quotation marks》 are used throughout.

It clearly was never proofread by an Anglophone. Every page is riddled with typographical errors, which Mom usually wrote corrections over. Most of the time, even when the typo results in a wrong word (e.g., "ripe" vs. "ride"), one can figure out what the word was supposed to be. In one instance, however, the context of a typo "theree" could have been either "there" or "three."

Mom didn't write a correction on top of that one.