The Danger of Correcting Errors

I was given an entertaining book recently about what used to be called ‘popular misconceptions’ - such as the notion that the term 'Scot free' refers to the Scots' knack of getting away with things; or that George Washington owned up to chopping down his father’s cherry tree.

The danger in writing a book - however light-hearted - that aims to ‘put people right’ about things is that you need to be 100 per cent right yourself. Alas, the book I was given had many errors in it. I think the most blatant was the attempt to explain the 'X' in 'Xmas'. It correctly refers to the 'Chi-Rho' symbol (a blending of two letters of the Greek alphabet), but states that the symbol represents ‘the first two syllables of 'Christ'. But the word Christ has only one syllable. What the author meant was the first two letters of the Greek 'christos': letters named chi (ch) and rho (r) in Greek.

Our teacher also happens to refer to a seventeenth century book that aimed to correct 'popular misconceptions'. The author was Dr Thomas Browne of Norwich, and as a scholar he titled his book Pseudodoxia Epidemica - a Latinised version of Greek terms. The word epidemica means 'among the people', and pseudodoxia refers to 'false beliefs'. Our modern 'putter-right' has left out a syllable of this second word, writing it 'pseudoxia', which is nonsense in Latin or Greek. Such are the perils of explaining things you don’t fully understand in unfamiliar languages.

PS. In the unlikely event of the author happening to spot this complaint, I might discover that he/she is in fact a world-famous Professor of Classical Languages, and that the errors are due to bad typesetting. Well, the errors should have been spotted at the proof stage, then.

The danger of correcting errors